TWO MOONS
By Thomas Mallon
Pantheon, 303 pages, $24
They’re hiring another computer to work with the stargazers.’ “
Those words, though they sound like they’re lifted from a “Dr. Who” episode, take us straight into the heart of the U.S. Naval Observatory in spring 1877, when scientists there were on the verge of some notable celestial discoveries. (This despite their dismal location in the aptly named Foggy Bottom area of Washington, D.C.)
As for the computer in question, it’s not a machine but a person, a math whiz whose speedy logarithmic calculations will assist the observatory’s astronomers in charting the planetary and stellar whirligig they spy through their telescopes. The other surprise is that this computer is a woman, a 35-year-old widow drawn to the “astral purpose” of the numbers she processes because she has so little else left in her life.
New England-born Cynthia May — the hero of Thomas Mallon’s playful, bittersweet, nearly perfect novel — has lost her husband, child, brother, parents and home to the Civil War and its aftermath. Indeed, her bereavement is so complete that it amounts to a virtual emancipation from meaningful human attachment. A creature of “stringy vigor” and minimal social niceties, she is at first glance not the likeliest candidate for romance — but that overlooks the allure her toughened, independent mind holds for the man who’s eager to conquer her and another who teasingly enchants her.
The enchanter is “the odd and beautiful” Hugh Allison, Cynthia’s lackadaisical Southerner colleague, seven years her junior, who wants not only to study the heavens but, strangely, to become himself an “astral body” detected by others far distant. The would-be conqueror is a “lawmaking satyr” and real-life U.S. senator from New York, Roscoe Conkling, advocate of a political patronage system that has come under attack from President Rutherford B. Hayes.
Allison and Conkling, the two moons of Mallon’s title (although not the novel’s only lunar pair), orbit around Cynthia, attempting in radically different ways to make an impression on her. They try just as hard to leave a mark on their respective worlds. But they live in jittery times, alas, and their sense of their era’s expanding scientific and technological horizons is accompanied by a discomfortingly shrinking sense of self.
It’s the mercurial charisma of Allison, more than the Capitol Hill clout of Conkling, that fascinates and seduces Cynthia (and the reader). Still, Conkling, whose political influence can help keep the observatory in funds, exerts a powerful presence in the book, as does the miasmic atmosphere of Foggy Bottom. A final wild card is astrologer Mary Costello, whom everyone consults but no one can trust–not from any malice on her part, but because she’s inherently incapable of keeping a secret.
Mallon (“Henry and Clara,” “Dewey Defeats Truman”) conjures the atmosphere of postwar Washington masterfully, giving equal due to the city’s physical character–its unpaved streets, undrained swamps and work-in-progress monuments–and its grimmer ghosts. For Cynthia those ghosts are particularly vivid, as she wonders what it would be like “to have missed the war . . . to be living today in the here and now, not walking through an eternal aftermath.” The seven years separating her and Hugh translate into a generational difference, making their liaison all the more unlikely.
Mallon’s minor characters are as deftly limned as his chief protagonists, whether they’re Cynthia’s poor colleague Harkness–a 40-year-old bachelor cloaked in “the dullness men put on once they’d become disappointed with themselves”–or the observatory’s professor Newcomb, a popinjay renowned for his self-promoting “ability to inspire public understanding of the arcane work performed by himself and his less glamorous colleagues.”
Even the villain of the piece, Conkling, elicits chuckles and grudging compassion, along with an urge to hiss him offstage, as his political victories turn to stalemate and his sex life simply turns stale.
But it’s Cynthia, intrepid in her own willful way, forthright in her love of Hugh, and dangerously cavalier about her talents, who lights up the book. In marked dissent from her colleagues, she sees her brain as “an almost entirely emotional organ” and dismisses its extraordinary computational ability as, at best, an unimpressive fluke. (” `A bit like being double-jointed’ “). Her quintessential moment arrives when she turns down a job she doesn’t want from an ex-boss she never liked: ” `Thank you,’ ” she says, ” `but I can’t think of any more awful privilege.’ ” One worries for her, but one also–like Hugh, like Conkling–becomes completely smitten with her.
On a more sobering note, she has the truest estimate of how easily love, fame and achievement can be scourged and obliterated, whether in an instant of gunfire or over the course of a dozen presidential administrations. Mallon’s sly setting of his tale in the year when Hayes came into office (What average citizen these days can name the accomplishments of our 19th president?) simply underscores, with tasty irony, his focus on the futility of trying to leave a “cosmic imprint” on the world around you. Mallon orchestrates his variations on this theme in a multi-timbred symphony that mixes notes of folly and cruelty with passages that are comically, tenderly sublime.
The book’s blend of brainy repartee, soulful poignancy and literary game-playing (imagery of celestial bodies of various kinds throws a busy pattern over the book, ceaselessly linking disparate episodes and characters) calls to mind the work of Tom Stoppard. As for Mallon’s stateside Victorian prose, it’s a winning pastiche, swathed in a propriety it seems anxious to shed–which it does, at just the right moments.
If the novel has a flaw, it’s that some of its researched detail jumps a little too conspicuously from the flow of the narrative. When, for instance, Conkling and New York customs collector Chester Arthur (the future president) banter about time limits on dockside inspection of travelers’ luggage, the explanation of Arthur’s “reference to the latest Treasury regulation” jars you out of the story.
But such instances are few. “Two Moons”–droll, probing and heartbreaking–is mostly period-perfect. 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.
