Seven Seats to the Moon

by Charlotte Armstrong

  “How much did she get out of her?” said Win to his sister.

  “A C-note,” said Amy, disentangling the pronouns with ease.

  “Ow!” said Win.

  “All right,” said J patiently to Marietta. “But what’s this got to do with your leaving your own room and moving into the Wimple? You are paid up, aren’t you, with Mrs. Dickson?”

  “Oh, J,” said Marietta in a low voice, “an evil force has entered that house.” Marietta, who never lived by bread alone, did not like to speak of some things, so she spoke softly as if she hoped Nothing would hear this blasphemy. “Oh, I have prayed, but it will not be overcome, just yet. My Own Good Angel advised me to go away from there until in good time …”

  “I see,” said J, who was used to her. “The evil force moves out in three weeks, eh? So you need the price of three weeks someplace else. How much does it come to at the Wimple?”

  Marietta’s expression, normally radiant with her insistence that all—all—was roses, changed to the blank look she put on at the mention of arithmetic. “I think Sophia understands all that, J dear. Doesn’t she?”

  Sophia, who had come in, said, “We won’t worry about it now, Mother. Come on to supper, everybody.”

  “But I never worry,” said Marietta in a scandalized tone as she wiggled herself out of the chair. “That is a sin, you know.”

  J, trailing with the rest into the dining room, thought to himself that Marietta might already be on a moon of her own. He wished he knew the trick of never worrying.

  The meal was much like all family meetings at table. Much the same things were served and eaten. J found himself not very hungry and disinclined to speak. He felt apart. He knew that Sophia’s eye was on him and suspected that signals flew over his head. He was assumed to be tired. And he was! He was!

  Here, in the middle of his web, where J had his tethers to the earth, he knew that those ties had been rudely strained. In the first place he might have been ripped untimely all the way away. Shock enough! In the second place strands from some foreign web had come tangling in. It would have been an enormous relief had J been able to tell them all about Barkis. But that relief he could not have.

  Eight seats at this table. (Seven seats to the moon!) And that wasn’t counting the Little kids.

  J glanced at Avery Gardner. (No seat for him.)

  Avery, as usual, made no remarks at all but devoted himself to his heaping plate of food, which he devoured as if he had not been fed for days. His table manners were deplorable. The family looked the other way. Avery was a young man too tall for his width, with eyeglassed eyes magnified to be too big for his face. If Avery had been painfully shy, one might have pitied him, but he was the exact opposite. He simply had no wish to converse with any of them since he assumed (and always had assumed) that none of them could possibly say anything of importance. He came here to eat, so far as J could determine. Or perhaps he ate so ravenously in default of anything here that seemed, to him, better to do. Whenever he came, he seemed to cast off even Amy and count her in with her kin.

  J knew very well that he had never liked Amy’s husband. He did not like him now. But J personally had never been in any kind of touch with Avery. How could he like him?

  Win’s wife, Marion, J liked well enough. But under her full armor of gracious manners, which made the surface so easy, J had no idea what might be there. Marion was a kind of straight woman; it was she who always squealed at a dirty word. It was she who always turned someone’s self-deprecating statement around and made a compliment to counter it. She was like a little machine! You pushed the button and out came the correct response. This could get dull, J admitted.

  Of all J’s in-laws Marietta was perhaps the least strange to him for all her ourageous pronouncements and her general attitude of outer fringes. She could at least be relied upon to say the wrong thing, socially speaking. But the family had practiced skills in the matter of sliding past Marietta’s contributions. She was the family eccentric, waddling recklessly along the earth with one foot in paradise. (She couldn’t go to the moon, of course.)

  J, picking at the food, which was excellent and perfectly to his taste, began to listen to the voices of his own.

  Nanjo spoke in a nasal whine. He had noticed this before, but never quite so sharply. She was wearing a shapeless garment that came about halfway down her thighs, but she managed to twist her healthy young body so that its outline played hide-and-seek with the eye of the beholder. Nanjo did not look like a woman in her face, but the body was womanly. Had he noticed this before? Certainly he had. J suppressed a sigh. He and Sophia had even discussed it. The modern parent bewares the unwisdom of wanting his child to remain a child. But J knew that he had wanted that, just the same. He couldn’t have it, but he wanted it. (Of course, not now.)

  Nanjo will need a mate, he thought.

  Amy, when she spoke, was abrupt but not forthright. The essence of Amy lay very low, at least when she was in this house. J did not understand her marriage. Of course, he and Sophia simply assumed that Amy was the nearest thing they had to a rebel. The middle child. Quite natural.

  But J, himself, had been a middle child, and he reflected now that he had never rebelled very much—at least not yet. He couldn’t help wishing that Amy had not married Avery. He wished the two of them did not live the way they lived. Of course, a parent, if he is wise, never says such things.

  But now, at least half torn and loosened to hang suspended as he was, J thought to himself, But that’s absurd. Why shouldn’t a parent, having lived, speak up about a way of life? Or about a marriage, the single most important choice one’s child can make? Why must he not speak? J remembered that there had seemed to have been a reason; he couldn’t remember, at the moment, what the reason was.

  Then there was Win, careening along, going the ways of his generation. Oh, Win was honest. To loan him money was not to give it away. J knew that the “fierce high” interest would be paid, but probably not in a regular pattern. Win would pay back the principal when he could; but none could say … Win could not say … when that would be. So J would lose his right of timing. And J preferred his income and his outgo to be in orderly relation to each other. It wasn’t risk he minded. It was disorder.

  By coffee time, as J was beginning to wonder if he had kept himself a secret from his children, the phone rang. Nanjo rushed to answer. Avery muttered something about a call for J. Nanjo came saying it was for Daddy. It was grandfather.

  So J went to take up the phone in the entrance area, which was not a room but divided from the living room by what was frankly called a room divider. J, who was so strangely out from under the spell of nomenclature, thought it was (in fact) quite silly.

  Grosvenor Winthrop Little III was calling his only surviving son from his lonely apartment in Santa Monica. At the sound of his dry voice the skin on J’s shoulders began to crawl. (No seat … no seat for him!)

  “Ah, back, I see, J?”

  “Yep. I finally got here. How are you, Father?”

  “Very well, thank you. J, Mr. Pudney was here yesterday morning.”

  “Oh, was he?”

  “It seems that they are very much interested in my manuscript. They foresee quite a demand. Libraries, he tells me, will almost certainly be compelled to keep it on their shelves, which gives it quite an advantage over a mere piece of fiction.”

  J rocked on his heels, silently groaning.

  “Now he has made,” his father went on, “a most interesting suggestion. In fact, I think it may be the solution. I would like very much to talk it over with you.”

  “I’ll try to come by so you can tell me about it.”

  “When may I expect you? I thought you were due home yesterday.” His father sounded as if he had been deceived.

  “There was a little delay.”

  “I see. I see.” (But he hadn’t waited, even to hear.) “I would appreciate your making a definite appointment,” his father said, “as soon as possible, although
I know, of course, how busy you young people think you are.”

  Grosvenor Winthrop Little III would have been welcome at the clan gathering, but J’s father came to the house no oftener than every Christmas. He could not, he said, abide confusion. He was a man of seventy-five, who did not live in the roaring world, and perhaps never had, but nested cozily within his own imagination, mated now to an obsession, his one continuing passion. What he could not abide was contact with other people who might be thinking about something else. This confused him.

  J said, “I’ll come as soon as I can.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Maybe so. I’ll try, Father. I’ll call you in the morning.”

  “And with that I must be content,” his father said and hung up.

  Now J heard the raucous bleating of an auto horn out in the street. Nanjo brushed by. She opened the front door and signaled with her arm. The horn desisted. Some swain bleating out there? J rather expected Nanjo to plead an urgency and vanish, since boyfriends came first, but tonight she turned back into the house. Oh, yes, he thought, that’s right. Nanjo wants something, too.

  He fled into the family room and into the bosom of his own now gathered there.

  J sat down in the middle. He, the spider, in the middle of his web. (Something wrong with the pronoun? Never mind. He—she, the hell with that. J fancied the image.) Spinning endlessly to support and supply (according to J’s notion of the function of a spider) and in the middle, in the middle.

  J felt very low, very low. How come I got elected, he thought, to be in the middle and hold up the whole shebang? I could have been stone-cold-dead in Chicago! And then what?

  But at the bottom of his depression was something he knew now and seemed to have known for quite a while. Barkis-Willing had given him a snow job, all right. But not in madness. Rather in contempt. So he, J Middleton Little, not only held up the whole damned thing but was despised for his pains. He did not even know what it was that he must not reveal; he had not been trusted to know.

  So the smart ones thought he was stupid. No doubt the stupid ones thought he thought he was pretty smart. But J was neither smart nor stupid. He was good and goddamned tired! That’s what he was!

  CHAPTER 6

  Sunday Night

  The dishes had been stacked pending Mrs. Arriola’s Monday and also the repair of the dishwasher. The children had been disposed of; the baby was sound asleep in Marietta’s ample lap, and the other two drooped in the den over still more television. Amy and Avery were sitting on the floor side by side, their long thin legs stretched out before them as if they were rag dolls that some giant child had propped in the angle of the floor and wall.

  Nanjo was fluttering at J’s shoulder. “Daddy, there’s a book I want to show you. I want you to see the cover. It’s the neatest thing!”

  “Not now, Nanjo,” said Sophia quietly. Nanjo sighed and sat down.

  J could feel himself the focus of attention. (Spin, old spider!) A notion struck him. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to give these few everything he had. He was tired. But tired of trying to figure out what he could afford. Didn’t he always manage? So why didn’t he just do it, now. Settle all their problems right away. Would anything be lost? On the contrary something might be saved. Time, for instance. An exhilaration took him. Fast, free, and easy while the world lasted; that was the way!

  “Marietta,” he said, “why don’t you stay at the Wimple until your next check comes and send me the bill? You like it there.”

  “Why, J …” Marietta beamed on him moistly.

  “Three weeks there comes to almost her whole monthly check,” said Sophia calmly, “not even counting food.”

  “I know,” said J recklessly. “It doesn’t matter. Now, Win, the best thing for me to do is take the five thousand dollars out of the Savings and Loan. How do you want it? And will that cover?”

  “Can I meet you there, Dad?” said Win quickly.

  “Fine. Ten, tomorrow? May as well take care of it first thing.”

  Sophia had become very still.

  “Now Amy, how much will Avery’s glasses cost, do you think? And the examination, of course.”

  Amy said, “I don’t know, Pops. Last time it was nearly a hundred and fifty dollars before he got through.”

  “All right,” said J cheerfully. “A hundred and fifty dollars. And Nanjo?”

  “Daddy, I already put down fifty dollars that Uncle Tobias gave me for Christmas and my birthday, and maybe you could take the rest out of my allowance? The thing is, the dress just happens to be exactly the very same dress that’s on the book, and …”

  “Why don’t you charge it to our account?” said J.

  “Oh, Dad-deee!” Nanjo flew to him. Her bare arms went around his head. Her smacking kiss was loud in his eardrum. J guessed this was worth three hundred dollars. He wondered wryly if the dress was suitable for traveling.

  “Just a minute,” said Sophia. “Nanjo, be quiet. J, are you planning to pay that Vanity Press to publish your father’s book?”

  “I think so,” said J easily. “Let him have that pleasure.”

  There should be pleasure. If J had the power to give it, why shouldn’t he enjoy his power?

  “How much?” his wife was demanding.

  “To publish Father’s book? Last I heard it was a thousand dollars. They may have come down.”

  “Why wasn’t I consulted about all this, may I ask?”

  Silence fell with a bang. The two black rag dolls on the floor simply stared. Win and Marion tilted their heads politely, but they didn’t like this. Nanjo held down her own rejoicing. Marietta mooned over the sleeping child, choosing (as usual) not to notice strife.

  Sophia had a temper, as J well knew. She was not permitting herself to blast him, yet. She had always struggled for control. Sophia’s mother was irresponsible enough for one family, but her father, although responsible, had been a Welshman, and in Sophia there were banked fires. J knew that he had let himself be carried away, and he ought to have known better.

  “It won’t break us,” he said. “I’m still earning.” (Spinning!) “So if they need it …” Even his voice was tired now.

  “If you had asked me,” said Sophia coldly, “I would have said that I don’t fancy sending them our bills when we are old.”

  “Ah, why not, Ma?” said Win lightly. “That’s fair enough.”

  “Could be,” said J, rousing himself. He wasn’t a man who liked to sound dreary. J had a quaint notion that this was discourteous. “You’re bucking to be the most important man in this society, Win, just like me.”

  “What’s all this?” said Win genially.

  “Well, now, this was called to my attention.” (Sure it was, thought J. By the brilliant brain of Barkis, who was just trying to butter me up, but, by golly, he didn’t mention the half of it!) “By my conscientious industry,” he announced, “day in and day out, I hold up the economy. Not only do I consume, like everybody else, I pay my bills, thus holding up agriculture and so forth, and all the repairmen, besides. I also pay the taxes. So who bears the costs of government and the military and all their gadgets? Who pays for any mistake that anybody makes? Board and room for criminals, cops to catch them, courts to let them go? Who pays for schools, roads, parks, charity, and buys the soup and the vino for all the bums on skid row? Takes care of the unemployed, the insane, the aged, and the orphan? Listen, I’m even buying for the elite, the great brains—their time to think. I’m picking up the check for going to the moon, you know. Why, I pay the damages for the acts of God even, fire and flood. And I also provide the hay and the peanuts for all the animals in the zoo.”

  If he was clowning, his act wasn’t getting off the ground. J realized they were waiting for the punch line. He didn’t have one! “This is known as quiet desperation,” he said in desperation, “but that’s absurd. It’s power, see? Power! Of course, I ought to be organized. Dream me up a catchy slogan, Win.”

  His son did not answer.r />
  His wife said dryly, “How about ‘Things are tough all over’?” Everyone seemed stunned.

  “Don’t you think, J,” she went on, “you have enough expense without buying your sixteen-year-old daughter a dress that costs three hundred and fifty dollars to be worn once? What part of the economy does that hold up? I say it’s out of scale, and Nanjo needs no such thing.”

  “Mo-ther!” wailed Nanjo.

  “And it is a fact that Marietta can’t afford to live at the Wimple. She happens to have a perfectly comfortable room, already paid for, and her board besides. I say she can either go back to it, or move in here and sleep in Nanjo’s other bed for the duration.”

  J felt shocked. Marietta’s Own Good Angel, once having spoken, was the law and the prophets. She wouldn’t go back to her room. Also, Sophia did not enjoy having her mother as a houseguest. Sophia would be sorry. “Well, she’s welcome,” he said weakly, seeing Nanjo’s face dismayed.

  Marietta said tearfully, “Such dear good hearts—”

  But Sophia was developing a theme now. She shut her mother up with one look. “I’ll grant you that Avery, of all people, had better take care of his eyes. If neither he nor his wife” (Amy was looking alert and listening intently) “can afford the price, then we’ll have to do it. I, however, can very easily buy the glasses out of the seven hundred and fifty dollars you gave me to fritter away.” (She was glaring at J. He was guilty for his gift?) “Your father is your business,” Sophia went on, “but if he didn’t have some nonsensical scruples, he could buy his own book. Win’s loan may be necessary, but he ought to retract—”

  “Wait a minute,” said Win. “Whoa, Ma. Dad, I’m not going to let you take that money out of your Savings and Loan account. I wish I’d realized how you were feeling with everything on your neck. I see what you mean. In my business there are risks you never took, and why should you take them now? It’s a different world. You should do things your way. Ma’s right. You should hang onto your security.”