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Two Moons: A novel - Softcover

Mallon, Thomas

 
9780375400254: Two Moons: A novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0375400257 ISBN 13: 9780375400254
Verlag: Pantheon, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

Astronomy, politics, and romance join forces in this novel from the writer John Updike has called "one of the most interesting American novelists at work."
        
It's the spring of 1877 in Washington, D.C., and at the U.S. Naval Observatory, Hugh Allison has conceived a secret ambition: to project an image through time and space. But his plan takes on urgent life only when the mathematically gifted Cynthia May enters his orbit as one of the observatory's human "computers." A Civil War widow whose beauty has been shadowed by worry and poverty, Cynthia reluctantly falls in love with the younger Hugh, who missed the war that has haunted her life. But the fate of their love affair -- and of Hugh's heavenly vision -- may be out of their hands, decided instead by an astrologer and by the actions of a dangerously magnetic politician who wields his power over a Senate convulsed by Reconstruction and a wildly disputed presidential election.

Masterfully combining historical detail and startling invention, Thomas Mallon gives us a galvanizing story of earthly heartbreak and otherworldly triumph.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Thomas Mallon's novels include Dewey Defeats Truman, Henry and Clara, and Aurora 7. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine and GQ, and is the author of books about plagiarism (Stolen Words) and diaries (A Book of One's Own). In 1998, he received the National Book Critics Circle award for reviewing. He lives in Westport, Connecticut.

Aus dem Klappentext

olitics, and romance join forces in this novel from the writer John Updike has called "one of the most interesting American novelists at work."<br> <br>It's the spring of 1877 in Washington, D.C., and at the U.S. Naval Observatory, Hugh Allison has conceived a secret ambition: to project an image through time and space. But his plan takes on urgent life only when the mathematically gifted Cynthia May enters his orbit as one of the observatory's human "computers." A Civil War widow whose beauty has been shadowed by worry and poverty, Cynthia reluctantly falls in love with the younger Hugh, who missed the war that has haunted her life. But the fate of their love affair -- and of Hugh's heavenly vision -- may be out of their hands, decided instead by an astrologer and by the actions of a dangerously magnetic politician who wields his power over a Senate convulsed by Reconstruction and a wildly disputed presidential election.<br>&

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March 8, 1877

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 sit 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...

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Verlag
Pantheon
Erscheinungsdatum
2000
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375400257
ISBN 13 
9780375400254
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
320
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Verantwortliche Person
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