Seven Seats to the Moon

by Charlotte Armstrong

  He crept out of the parking lot and meshed into traffic.

  A green Chevrolet pulled away from the curb and fell in behind him. A blue Ford fell in behind the Chevvy. A few traffic lights farther, Tony Thees on J’s tail in the Chevvy began to try to shake off Barry Goodrick in the Ford. So while they did tricky lane shifts, fast turns and do-si-dos around some blocks, J, unaware, lost them both. He found an “on” ramp to the Harbor, changed over to the Santa Monica, and went his way.

  CHAPTER 9

  Monday Afternoon

  At about one o’clock Win Little phoned his mother. “Hi, Ma. How’s Dad?”

  “He seemed to have a good night,” said Sophia. “He slept late. I didn’t want him to go to the office at all, but nothing would do—off he went. How are you, dear?” She didn’t wait for him to answer. “Win, you know I didn’t mean to sound like such a miserly old witch last night. If your father wants to loan you the money, I shouldn’t—”

  “No, no,” said Win quickly. “You didn’t, Ma. I just thought I’d tell you that everything’s going to be all right. So forget it.”

  “Oh, good. How did you manage?”

  “Oh, I’m about to sweet-talk the bank. It’ll be okay. I certainly don’t want … Ma, is Dad all right? I couldn’t quite figure out what he was … well … you know, driving at.”

  “I don’t know, dear,” said Sophia, her heart swooping. “I wanted him to go to the doctor’s this morning.”

  “Oh, any particular reason?”

  “Well, I don’t know, dear.” Sophia wasn’t going to betray J’s half confidence of the morning. “I would just rather have Doctor Lodge’s opinion. I mean, for my own sake.”

  “He looked okay, I thought. It wasn’t that.”

  “No,” she said on a long note. “No.” Then she said briskly, “I imagine it was the shock. After all, to be fallen down in the street, and then the fuss they made afterward. That would be upsetting, too.”

  “It sure would,” said Win heartily to reassure her. “You should get him to the doctor, though, Ma. Shall we all gang up on him?”

  “No, no. I’ll get him there,” said Sophia grimly. “How’s Marion? And the Little kids?”

  Win hung up finally, feeling not quite sure what his mother was afraid of, but knowing that she was afraid. He had been calling from a downtown bank lobby. He walked out into the busy place, reaching for his keycase. He went up to the window for safe-deposit boxes and tapped lightly on the counter with his neat fingernails.

  Sophia, listening for the whereabouts of Mrs. Arriola, ducked into the kitchen. She spent her Mondays and Wednesdays avoiding her cleaning woman, who would rather talk than work, naturally. The dishwasher repairman had gone, so Sophia sat down lonesomely in the breakfast nook and looked out at her garden.

  All things had changed subtly. Some era was threatening to end. Sophia wondered whether J should retire. The prospect had often made them both shudder, and they had a thing against shuffleboard. No, it wasn’t time. Not yet. But if J had been shocked into searching backward for something lost along the way, what then? Sophia didn’t kid herself that things hadn’t been lost.

  What if he decided to quit his job, change his work, do something else? Sophia remembered the tale of the man who had taken off for the South Seas to paint, ruthlessly leaving his family behind. The Moon and Sixpence, wasn’t it? She couldn’t remember the man’s name. Sophia did not want to go to the South Seas. She couldn’t imagine anything that would suit her less. But she didn’t want to stay here if J went anywhere else.

  Oh, stop your nonsense, Sophia scolded herself. J had never shown the slightest sign of yearning to be any kind of artist.

  But maybe, she thought, we should take a long trip, somewhere different, to Europe, or around the world. It would be expensive and would cut into their security. But maybe not. Maybe just the opposite. She began to brood on far places. At the same time she could feel the house around her threatened. Abandoned without care, it would burn down or something. It would crumble, decay. Who would water the lawn? All her plants would die. Sophia was a caretaking kind of person. It was her pride to keep and take care.

  The fear returned. Maybe he was trying to give me a gentle sort of hint, she thought—all that about dead in Chicago. Maybe it’s true! J is going to die! Sophia clasped her hands. Her neck was stiff. She was furious with him! Damn it, she thought, am I such an old woman that I have to be spared?

  Amy came tearing up the stairs and burst into the apartment. “P.S. I got the job,” she cried. “Starts on Wednesday.”

  Her husband was cross-legged on the floor. He clapped his hands to his ears and groaned.

  “Oh, gosh,” she said. “Headache? I’m sorry. But listen.…” She knelt and began to stroke the back of his neck and speak softly. “The money is amazing! Just call me Philistina, why don’t you?”

  Avery kept holding his head.

  “How long since you took an aspirin?” Amy canceled out her own affairs. Avery only swayed.

  “What color is it?” she asked softly, in a moment.

  “The color of bruises,” he said, “the sound of tin pans.”

  Marion said into the phone, “Well, that’s wonderful! It was all right to do, was it?”

  “Of course it was all right to do,” said Win testily. “I called him up and asked him. He’ll never touch them. They were always going to be mine.”

  “Well, then,” she sagged, “I’m glad.”

  “How about squab for Sunday? With wild rice?”

  “That’s a dollar a grain,” said Marion, sounding more cheerful. “And a nuisance to fix.”

  “Yes, but you fix it so good,” said Win. “We can tell the Faulkners that we get it for free from an old Indian chief who’s a friend of the family.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Marion said. But what she thought was, Why does he want to have something very expensive and then pretend it cost nothing?

  Win thought he could read her mind. “But that,” he said, “would be dishonest, and we wouldn’t get to heaven, would we?”

  Marion said nothing. What was there to say?

  When he had hung up, Win thought, Oh, God, we have got to get straightened around. As soon as we’re all set. Got to get things in the clear. He didn’t know how they were going to do that, really.

  “Listen, you’ll prolly win,” said Cary Bruce. His longish hair whipped back and forth. He squinted against the sun and steered furiously. Somebody honked him off a lane straddle. The honker was an old-timer of twenty-nine. Cary, who was eighteen and who despised as the walking dead anybody over twenty-one, ripped diagonally across two and a half lanes, flipping the tail of his low car under the snub nose of a truck driven by an ancient of thirty-two with quick reflexes.

  Nanjo, who had just missed at least mutilation by eighteen inches, paid no attention to that. She was back on the subject that haunted her mind. “But it’s so weird. It just plain is the dress on the book cover. If Daddy hadn’t said that he would buy it … Til my Mom had to get chintzy.…”

  “What’s it to him?” said her escort. “Peanuts, I’ll bet.”

  “Of course, I never got to even talk to Daddy. He doesn’t know why it’s so important. Sandra said today that the talent scout is going to come for sure. Her father works in the studio. And I mean when you think of all the money people make in the movies, it does seem like peanuts. Three hundred mere dollars.”

  “Prolly the scout is going to pick you, anyway,” said Cary.

  “But if I had that perfect, perfect dress! Oh, well … Let’s not talk about it anymore.” Nanjo settled to a sad patience that forbade any other topic to raise its head.

  Cary Bruce, flying along the freeway at 70 miles per hour, hated people like Nanjo’s father, who had money all the time. Everything Cary could earn at odd jobs or wangle out of his parents or otherwise acquire was in his car. The car was bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. In it was all the power that he had. In a way he could understand,
all right, how Nanjo Little felt about this dress.

  “Yah, peanuts,” he said. “I might know where there’s peanuts like three hundred dollars.”

  Nanjo said, “Hey, I’ve got to be back for French Circle.”

  Cary immediately swooped for an “off” ramp, almost chasing some old crate up on the shoulder. Waiting to cross traffic below, he made the car snort and then took a fast swing-around under the freeway to roar up the ramp on the other side. “Hey,” he cried, delighted with himself, “how about that?”

  Nanjo was glad he had forgotten to tell her where the three hundred dollars might be. She both knew and refused to know where some of the money he put into his car had come from. A lot of kids … well … snitched stuff once in a while. In a way they had to. Nanjo could understand how Cary felt about his car.

  CHAPTER 10

  Monday Afternoon Continued

  “I have more or less given up on Edmund,” said Grosvenor Winthrop Little III. “I shall not, of course, fall back on the variations common to Elizabethan spelling or the prevalence of clerical error. I shall simply note some alternate possibility. All we know is that there died in London, in 1607, an Edmund Shakespeare, aged twenty-seven, a player. And someone paid for a toll of the great bell of Southwark Cathedral. Yet, might not an apprenticed boy have taken the name of his patron? Or, if I am right about the Poet, this Edmund might have been his son. Baseborn, perhaps.”

  J listened to his father’s light voice trip along familiar paths.

  “There is, and can be, no proof,” his father said. “I find it amusing to read ‘doubtless’ when there must be doubt, and ‘evidently’ when there is no evidence, and ‘certainly’ when the point is that we cannot be certain. I try to avoid such chicanery with the language.”

  J’s father sat at his narrow desk, thin old hands nimble among many papers. His narrow skull with its cap of white hair was backgrounded by shelves of books. The chair J sat in was small and uncomfortable. So were all the chairs in this small apartment. It was as if his father had no need of easy chairs. He was a lean old gentleman, immaculate; everything about him seemed very dry. J could not remember him otherwise.

  “The coat of arms,” his father continued, “is a far more complex problem. I have my theory, as you know, but even supposing that I am right, there remains the designation ‘Gent’ on the Brend leases.”

  “Is that so?” murmured J.

  “I must, in all fairness, raise that question, even though I am only an amateur theorist and no authority.”

  When does an amateur become an authority? J wondered. When he makes a buck? No, that marks the professional.

  “Why aren’t you an authority?” he dared to say. “You’ve been studying for—how many years?”

  The old gentleman looked frostily severe. “I have not had access to original documents.” He sighed, a dry whispery sound. “Winnie would have had access.”

  But J kept wondering why his father had not become a professor of literature, or of history, or of both. Supposing his father had not been born to wealth, would he then have turned at least pro? J’s older brother, Grosvenor Winthrop Little IV (whom the family called Winnie), had been, at an early age, a full professor. Poor Winnie. Before he came to his fortieth year, this brother had suicided. The rumor was that in view of his health, he had taken a tough-minded and courageous decision. J felt a bit of a pang. He wished now that he could have understood Winnie. If Winnie had not turned pro and gone into the soul-searing business of teaching the young, meantime resisting pressures of all kinds from the inevitable Old Guard, could he have survived? Winnie may have been not tough, but too tender.

  J could remember the days of his youth and life in a well-regulated New England household which, although never ostentatious, still had not lacked creature comforts. His mother had been, or had seemed to be, a placid woman. J remembered her as having moved always to some stately measure. She had spun out all her days without (as far as he knew) drama until the outrageous agony of her final suffering. She had been dead before Winnie’s death and before the death of William James Little, J’s younger brother, in the war. Willy, full of physical vitality, a hunter, a fisherman, a football player, a soldier, had gone off laughing. Yet Willy, so tough, had died in some vaguely ignoble manner. The details were blurred.

  J sighed for his lost brothers, neither of whom he had really known.

  His father, the other survivor, had successfully transferred himself to the West Coast, to this decent little apartment, in this equable climate, and had adjusted (if that was the right word) to the loss of a wife and two out of three sons and furthermore the bulk of the family fortune, very well. He lived according to his own taste, frugally but not in want. His one extravagance was to buy books now and again.

  “I must be prepared for controversy,” his father was saying. “Stratfordians will and must scoff. Other theorists will be piqued. The Baconians are, for the most part, lunatics. The Oxfordians, in the ascendancy, are not, in my opinion, much sounder. The Rutlandians are in possession of one or two points, such as Laelia, but the rest of what they say is rather silly. I can state, without any personal doubt, that it was not some great earl who wrote immortal literature with the back of his hand.”

  J marveled at his father’s passion, dry though it be.

  “The proponents of the Great Nobleman theories are forever pointing out,” said his father indignantly, “that Shakespeare knew so much about the life at court and the behavior of monarchs that he must (they say) have been a courtier. But what they forget is, we know almost nothing about the life at court in Tudor days or the behavior of monarchs, and, furthermore, what we think we know, we have gained from one source only. The imaginative works of William Shakespeare.”

  The old gentleman grinned like a wolf.

  “And now to business,” he said.

  J winced within. He had always been somewhat dubious about the prospect of paying to have the book printed. So far, in the course of his father’s interviews with this Mr. Pudney, J had listened and hedged and played wise, and his father had seemed well satisfied with the game of hesitation, the suspension of decision, with, in fact, the dreaming. He kept saying that he had not quite finished the work.

  Many times J had asked himself whether the old gentleman ought not to have so harmless a pleasure. But his doubts would resume. J feared there might be no distribution of the book and his father would receive only a sense of dreary failure. Even more important, would he not lose his only occupation?

  “As you know, J,” his father said, “I have yet to find the name, complete. The first syllable I know. The second continues to elude me. Now, Mr. Pudney and I discussed this on Friday last, and he suggests the following procedure. Let us bring out a book, using only the first dozen chapters, where I cover the entire analysis, the signatures, the dwelling places, the portraits, my thoughts about the Blackfriars Purchase, Ben Jonson, the will, the monument, and the First Folio. I shall make my points. But I shall withhold the later sections to do with the true name of the Poet, only suggesting that I have clues. Later on, we shall issue the chapters to do with the name in a slim little companion volume. Mr. Pudney thought it a very good solution, enabling me to go on with the research, of course, and providing … He had some term. Oh, yes, what he called a cliff-hanger?”

  J groaned to himself. Good old Pudney. So he had figured out how to leave the old gentleman with his occupation still, and also how he might just rook his victim twice.

  “What do you think?” his father was asking. “Of course, in view of the fact that he may expect to get two books, the terms have altered rather favorably. See here.”

  J barely glanced at the neatly typed proposal of an agreement. “I don’t think I ought to do this for you, Father,” he said.

  “You would not lose by it,” his father said patiently. “You would receive a fair share of the profits as a return on your investment.”

  J sighed. “What profits?”

 
“Do you mean to say the book will not succeed?”

  “I don’t mean that, exactly. There will be profit—for Mr. Pudney.”

  “Do you mean to imply that the man is dishonest?”

  “No, no, I suppose—not quite. Aren’t you a little inconsistent?” J suggested as gently as he could. “If there is to be this demand by libraries, then why not a regular publisher of reference books?”

  “I believe I have just stated that I am not an authority.” His father was stiff.

  “Then why must you be on the reference shelves?” said J not without pain. “You don’t expect it to be a popular best seller. You have told me you’ve made no concessions in your style.”

  “Certainly not,” his father said. His dry, pink wattles shook. “I fail to understand your position, J.”

  “I can’t afford to give Pudney that much money.”

  “That,” said his father crisply, “is unfortunate, isn’t it? Mr. Pudney cannot hold this offer open indefinitely.”

  “Oh, yes he can and will,” said J wearily, “as long as he sees his chance of profit.”

  “I have long been aware, J,” said his father, “that you have never had any particular sympathy for my work. If Winnie had lived, he could have discussed it knowledgeably. Even your brother Willy,” his father was not looking at him, “might have been loyal.…” The voice died out.

  J knew that this was only disappointment speaking and tried not to feel hurt. But, he thought, Winnie knew too much. He’d pick holes in your theories. Willy had no truck with books at all. But I, the middle one, being neither ignorant nor knowledgeable, have listened at least politely.

  He said, “Whatever they might have done, Father, I don’t quite see my way.”

  But J felt chilled and afloat. Now he was thinking that an old man with so little future, not even present in the present, deserved no seat to the moon. So should he perish? But to contemplate the past was not an evil occupation. Why should not some men keep in mind what man had once done in a golden age? Why did every living soul have to be all the time so damned modern? J was flooded with an old familiar affection for his father.