number? The 348.”
“You add it to January 21st, when the Sun enters Aquarius. That’ll give you the moon’s position when you were born.”
“Three hundred and forty-eight days after January 21st is January 4th.”
Madam Costello crossed herself to ward off whatever spirit was serving up these instant calculations, and also because the moon in Capricorn was a celestial phenomenon she wished on no one. Stirring with awe and suspicion, she asked Cynthia: “You really done these numbers in your head? And you’re really an Aries?”
Cynthia nodded.
“Most Aries have a wound on the head or a birthmark on the foot.”
Cynthia invited her to come around to the back of her chair. She lifted the strands of hair that had fallen from her upsweep, and a tiny scar, a white half-moon at the base of her skull, became visible. “A falling icicle from the top of a pine tree. I was six.”
Mary Costello looked down at the slim neck and shoulders until a motherly affection for this peculiar overage girl washed out all other conflicting feelings. She patted Cynthia’s cheek and went back to her own seat. “You wouldn’t know the feller’s birthday, would you?”
“Christmas Eve, 1849.” Before Madam Costello could attribute this knowledge to further infernal gifts, Cynthia added: “The day I started work I saw Mr. Harrison, the clerk, flip past it in his file, when he was inserting my own card.”
“This young man needs you,” said Madam Costello, suddenly.
Cynthia gave her a hard look, doubting the older woman could know such a thing without doing her own laborious mathematics.
“But you’ll be needing him,” said Madam Costello, whose eyes were closed and who seemed to be operating on instinct.
“How can that be?” asked Cynthia, disappointed. As a prediction, this mutual need sounded rather vague.
But Madam Costello was quite definite in her elaboration. “I meanyou’ll be needing him ,” she said, pointing to Roscoe Conkling’s glass-covered picture. “October 30th, 1829. The moon still in Aquarius.”
Three pillows on the bed—giant puffed worlds of purple, red, and saffron—supported Hugh Allison’s head and feet. The great lampshades and ottomans among which he slept, like a sultan with no seraglio, came as a slight shock whenever he arrived home from the smooth brick and tubing of the dome. The pieces his mother had sent were so comically heavy that his bedroom looked ready to sink through the floor below—a dangerous prospect quite opposite from that imparted by the japonaiserie Mrs. Allison had shipped to Harvard Yard in 1867. That assemblage of items had been so light he sometimes thought his plastered room would detach itself from Grays Hall and float away. There his furnishings became the source of some teasing more witty than Simon Newcomb’s, but his Southernness had hardly set him apart. Simple chronology united him with his classmates, and set all of them apart from the recent Union dead, whose profuse, still-new ghosts turned each lecture hall and dining room into a grim basilica. Born on Christmas Eve 1849, Hugh had joined a civilian regiment of younger brothers, all of them born too late to go. They felt themselves blessed, but derelict, too, as detached from any clear destiny as Mrs. Allison’s translucent Japanese birds.
He had stayed on for graduate study and spent several years after that at Harvard’s Observatory, arriving here last year as the centennial faded and the election campaign grew white-hot. Newly resident in the District of Columbia, he’d found himself once more a noncombatant, ineligible to vote and, thanks to the commodore, subject to a less military sort of discipline than that preferred by Professor Pickering in Cambridge. Even so, no amount of freedom seemed likely to afford him the opportunity to do the only real work he hoped to accomplish, out far beyond this last double star he’d been investigating.
Although the windows were open, he felt
“You add it to January 21st, when the Sun enters Aquarius. That’ll give you the moon’s position when you were born.”
“Three hundred and forty-eight days after January 21st is January 4th.”
Madam Costello crossed herself to ward off whatever spirit was serving up these instant calculations, and also because the moon in Capricorn was a celestial phenomenon she wished on no one. Stirring with awe and suspicion, she asked Cynthia: “You really done these numbers in your head? And you’re really an Aries?”
Cynthia nodded.
“Most Aries have a wound on the head or a birthmark on the foot.”
Cynthia invited her to come around to the back of her chair. She lifted the strands of hair that had fallen from her upsweep, and a tiny scar, a white half-moon at the base of her skull, became visible. “A falling icicle from the top of a pine tree. I was six.”
Mary Costello looked down at the slim neck and shoulders until a motherly affection for this peculiar overage girl washed out all other conflicting feelings. She patted Cynthia’s cheek and went back to her own seat. “You wouldn’t know the feller’s birthday, would you?”
“Christmas Eve, 1849.” Before Madam Costello could attribute this knowledge to further infernal gifts, Cynthia added: “The day I started work I saw Mr. Harrison, the clerk, flip past it in his file, when he was inserting my own card.”
“This young man needs you,” said Madam Costello, suddenly.
Cynthia gave her a hard look, doubting the older woman could know such a thing without doing her own laborious mathematics.
“But you’ll be needing him,” said Madam Costello, whose eyes were closed and who seemed to be operating on instinct.
“How can that be?” asked Cynthia, disappointed. As a prediction, this mutual need sounded rather vague.
But Madam Costello was quite definite in her elaboration. “I meanyou’ll be needing him ,” she said, pointing to Roscoe Conkling’s glass-covered picture. “October 30th, 1829. The moon still in Aquarius.”
Three pillows on the bed—giant puffed worlds of purple, red, and saffron—supported Hugh Allison’s head and feet. The great lampshades and ottomans among which he slept, like a sultan with no seraglio, came as a slight shock whenever he arrived home from the smooth brick and tubing of the dome. The pieces his mother had sent were so comically heavy that his bedroom looked ready to sink through the floor below—a dangerous prospect quite opposite from that imparted by the japonaiserie Mrs. Allison had shipped to Harvard Yard in 1867. That assemblage of items had been so light he sometimes thought his plastered room would detach itself from Grays Hall and float away. There his furnishings became the source of some teasing more witty than Simon Newcomb’s, but his Southernness had hardly set him apart. Simple chronology united him with his classmates, and set all of them apart from the recent Union dead, whose profuse, still-new ghosts turned each lecture hall and dining room into a grim basilica. Born on Christmas Eve 1849, Hugh had joined a civilian regiment of younger brothers, all of them born too late to go. They felt themselves blessed, but derelict, too, as detached from any clear destiny as Mrs. Allison’s translucent Japanese birds.
He had stayed on for graduate study and spent several years after that at Harvard’s Observatory, arriving here last year as the centennial faded and the election campaign grew white-hot. Newly resident in the District of Columbia, he’d found himself once more a noncombatant, ineligible to vote and, thanks to the commodore, subject to a less military sort of discipline than that preferred by Professor Pickering in Cambridge. Even so, no amount of freedom seemed likely to afford him the opportunity to do the only real work he hoped to accomplish, out far beyond this last double star he’d been investigating.
Although the windows were open, he felt
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