Love and Politics in 19th Century Orbit

TWO MOONS

A Novel

by Thomas Mallon

Pantheon

$24, 320 pages

*

Washington, D.C., has always found an open artery in the heart of the excellent critic and novelist Thomas Mallon. Mallon, in fact, has made a partial career out of writing a historical fiction that shines a candle of tallow, or a headlamp of Studebaker, on the secondary characters of political history. These are the heroes whose names never figured on the ballot, the men and women whose statues stand unfootnoted in the secondary parks of the too-busy cities of America.

Like their predecessors, Mallon’s latest novel, “Two Moons,” is full of well-researched period detail. It is 1877 and post-bellum Washington, D.C., is a swamp--literally and politically. In the miasma of Foggy Bottom, the Naval Observatory is losing astronomers by the bucket to the little-understood malaria. Nevertheless, the job of human calculator to the stargazers pays a dollar per hour more than her previous job and Mrs. Cynthia May goes to work.

A 35-year-old war widow from the wintry climes of New Hampshire, Cynthia has a dexterity with numbers and a still girlish figure that refuses to retreat into the rooming-house plainness that is the lot of other handsome but used women of her generation. Assigned to perform trigonometric calculations on photographs of the recent Transit of Venus between the Earth and the sun, Cynthia quickly realizes that there are more dramatic goings-on beneath the dome. One takes the form of the dull and pious Asaph Hall, who is on the road to the discovery of the two moons of Mars. The other takes the form of the young and slender Southerner Hugh Allison, who is on the road to oblivion and Cynthia.

Meanwhile, up on the Hill, Roscoe Conkling, the senator and kingmaker from New York, is persecuting his protege, President Rutherford B. Hayes. Conkling is a superstitious, womanizing, unscrupulous political crook. Through a chance meeting in the parlor of an Irish astrologer, he gets a glimpse of Cynthia. The War God (as the newspapers call him) decides on the spot that he must bring this moon goddess within his orbit (and his rooms up at Wormley’s), and sets his eye on that elliptical goal.

With the two moons in orbit about her, Hugh quick and slender, Conkling robust and deliberative, Cynthia must decide how to make the most of her attraction. When Hugh comes down with a malaria that threatens to degenerate into something worse, and Mars himself discovers Cynthia’s duplicity, every passing orbit of the Earth urges Cynthia to calculate a rapid decision.

Sad to report, like some sodden newscaster at Cape Canaveral, the characters never achieve liftoff, much less escape velocity. Even the scientific eurekas of the book are missing. Search as one might, by the end there seems little justification for the astronomy except to provide metaphors for the emotional wanderings of Cynthia and young Hugh. “They were both incapable of reversing the eccentric courses they were on. They weren’t traveling around the sun at all. They were unperiodic comets, on their way to nowhere and never to return.”

Writers like John Barth and T.C. Boyle have succeeded in sharpening some of the duller periods of American history into hilarious satire. Sen. Conkling and President Hayes, of course, are echt historical figures, along with several of the senior astronomers at the observatory and are limited, to a certain extent, by historical fact. Cynthia and Hugh, on the other hand, are pure fiction and ought to be free of the more pedestrian forces of narrative physics.

But Mallon ties them down through much of the book with the kind of exposition that should have died with 19th century melodrama:

“ ‘Oh, yes,’ said Mrs. Hall, checking the sky. ‘The weather’s not good, but I make sure he doesn’t get discouraged. . . .’

“ ‘Indeed,’ said Hugh, who like every other man at the Observatory knew the story of how Mrs. Hall had years ago taken it upon herself to write the letter that persuaded Captain Gilliss to give Asaph his due by promoting him to professor.

“ ‘Mr. Allison, you went to Harvard, didn’t you?’

“ ‘I did,’ Hugh answered. ‘They indulged me for four years. . . .” And so on and so forth.

Perhaps people really talked in expository filibusters like this in 19th century Washington. Perhaps they do still.