Seven Seats to the Moon Page 11

  He said suddenly, “All right. I’ll do it.”

  But his father put on a thin smile and rose. “I think not, thank you,” he said serenely. (J wondered if he felt relief that his work would not go to the test yet.) “I hadn’t realized it would seem so large a sum to you. You must think no more about it,” he went on in a kindly fashion. “Thanks very much, J, for coming down.”

  J got up. His father’s mouth began to writhe, presaging humor. “Do you know, J, I wonder why you have never asked me the inevitable question? What difference does it make who wrote Shakespeare?” Evidently his father considered the question to be entertainingly stupid.

  “All right,” said J, “I’ll admit I have wondered. What’s the answer?”

  His father lifted a bony finger. “Ha,” he pounced, “what difference will it make when we get to the moon? How can we know the difference until we get there? Can you answer that question?”

  He seemed to think he had triumphed. J had been, indeed, hit. He felt crushed. He slunk away.

  J usually thought of himself as “all his father had.” But as he drove off, he let himself notice, for comfort, that his father could have “had” J’s entire family, the children and the children’s children, the whole tribe. But the only one he tolerated at all was his namesake, Grosvenor Winthrop Little, V, who was sometimes his errand boy, fetching papers from the bank for the old gentleman to sign and delivering them whither they should go.

  J’s father, perhaps with some uncanny knowledge of who he was, had always chosen his associates without regard for the feelings of anyone he chose not to choose.

  Yet he had given his children attention. In fact, his second son had had all the attention he had either needed or desired, and mercifully no more. This had suited J very well, as he could remember. He wondered why it is that moderns carry on so about fathers paying attention to sons when, as he recalled, the day dawns quite early in a boy’s life when he only and devoutly hopes that by good luck (and some clever management on the part of the boy) father (and mother, too) will just stay out of the boy’s own fascinating business and let him lead his private life without the nuisance of having to cope with antiquated notions not pertinent to the scene.

  A wall dissolved between two compartments of J’s mind. Ah, yes, Nanjo. Win. Amy. Yes, he could see the generations marching and the whole world shifting under their feet. No use to teach his children to fear and avoid what had used to frighten J. What they ought to fear and avoid, J had probably never heard of. They had no time to bring him up-to-date.

  And so much for attention.

  But when had his father left off brooding to see the moon ahead of man? J, not having expected surprise, was twice surprised.

  Goodrick said into the telephone, “You were right. Tony Thees is definitely around.”

  “Ah,” purred Mr. Jones. “Very encouraging. Find out why.”

  Tony Thees said into the long distance telephone, “Goodrick is hanging around, all right. Must mean he hasn’t got what he’s after. Yet.”

  “Get sure of that,” said Mr. Smith, “and make it fast. I don’t like what I hear about his boss.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Monday Afternoon Continued

  When J drove into the garage, Sophia’s smart little car was out, and he was just as glad. The serviceable old Chevvy that Nanjo used for transportation whenever she wasn’t the guest of some boy stood under the grapefruit tree. This did not necessarily mean that Nanjo was at home.

  J let himself in through the kitchen, feeling deeply depressed and confused. The house was shining from the ministrations of Mrs. Arriola (who had departed). J stood within its orderly comfort, breathing the scent of his own place, deciding that he ought to sit down and think quietly, when the phone rang.

  J went to answer.

  “Is Nancy Jo there, please?”

  “Afraid I don’t know. I just came in. I’ll see.”

  “Mr. Little, sir? This is Bobby James.”

  “Oh, yes, Bobby. Hang on, and I’ll look around.”

  “Thanks a lot, sir.”

  J crossed the living room to the bedroom wing, where all the doors stood open and nobody was to be seen. By habit he thought, Poor Bobby. Young James was, from Nanjo’s point of view, an old man. He was just out of college, starting at the bottom in a bank, a sober and industrious young fellow with what is called a good background, who had fallen helplessly in love with Nanjo, aged sixteen. She treated him with great cruelty.

  For one thing they had not met in a manner approved by Nanjo’s peers. Bobby James was the son of a woman with whom Sophia had gone to school, who had one day descended en famille to visit her old acquaintance. One look, and poor Bobby had been a goner. Nanjo, however, thought of him as a joke and treated him as if he were an ancient sugar daddy, sometimes permitting him to take her to expensive places. Poor Bobby did not know that he had no chance. No chance.

  J prowled through to the family room to look out into the yard. Nanjo might be out there somewhere. Cal, the gardener, was out there. He had a small wire rake in his powerful hands, and he was briskly brushing the soil under the azaleas, as Sophia had begged him never to do.

  J slid back the door and then the screen and said to him, “Cal, would you mind not raking there? Mrs. Little says the plants won’t like it.”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Little. I’s only cleaning up. Excuse me.” The big man sounded aflutter.

  I wonder what he does on the Mondays that I’m not around? thought J with a flash of natural suspicion.

  Then he saw, to his right, near the bricked barbecue platform, well behind the garage, his daughter, lying on the grass, bent over a book, her bright hair pouring down over her cheeks, and her flesh, gleaming with oil in the lowering western sun, looking as if it were made of dark gold.

  When he called her, she started, tossed back the hair, pulled the big beach towel up as she rose, and, wearing it like a serape, she ran on her pretty bare feet into the house, wafting under J’s nose the slightly oily perfume that rose from her baked skin.

  J stepped out into the yard. “What’s this about the elm?” he asked the gardener.

  Cal had a speech impediment of some sort, a touch of stutter, a touch of lisp. He was difficult to understand. J stood gazing at the elm and absorbing the news that it must be very drastically pruned and that Cal would do it, but it would take him time, and if Mr. Little didn’t want the mowing and clipping let go for a week, then Cal would have to do it on an extra half day, which he happened to have free on Wednesday. (And which will cost me extra money, J concluded. It figures.)

  He kept receiving the impression that Cal was speaking faster and even less intelligibly than usual, that he was for some reason nervous. Well, of course, it was Sophia who usually gave him his instructions. Perhaps he came of a class habitually awed by the man of the house. (If such a class existed in the U.S.A.)

  J didn’t know much about the fellow except that he was a big brute, with a crop of bushy blond hair and thick lips that mumbled over bad teeth. He had powerful legs and enormous feet in heavy boots that would have been serviceable in a jungle but which seemed unnecessary among the garden flowers and on the grass.

  J didn’t want to think about the Chinese elm, so he said that he would think about it. Susie Neeby hailed him over the fence. The Neebys’ house was next door on the corner, and the husband and wife were best friends to the Littles—in that whenever it was more fun to be four instead of two, they played games or went places together.

  “Hey, hey, J!” cried Susie. “How come you’re playing hookey?”

  “Well,” said J, “I said to myself, ‘Why not?’ How you been?”

  “Sophia says you had a wild time in Chicago. What happened? She wouldn’t tell me.”

  “It’s a long, sad story,” said J. “When are we picking up the rain check?”

  “Friday.”

  “Okay,” said J. “I’ll tell you the whole thing, words and music, when Glad’s around to hea
r my rendition.”

  “The suspense will be terrible,” said Susie, “but don’t forget, we’re going to clobber them. Right, partner?”

  J brushed off this exchange from where it had lit, with butterfly feet, on the very skin of his mind, and went indoors, where he simply sat down in “his” chair, because he felt so discouraged and so sad.

  Very soon Nanjo, with her hair pulled tightly away from her face and a blue muumuu concealing her bathing suit, sunsuit, bikini (or whatever the two scraps of cloth were being called this season), came gliding on her bare feet and curled herself on the floor. She had a book in her hands. “You’re in the doghouse, Daddy,” she told him with a twinkling partisanship. “Mom’s gone to get Marietta.”

  “I suppose I could have picked her up at the Wimple,” said J feebly. “I forgot all about her.”

  But Nanjo chattily explained that he was not to be reproached for this. His sin was to have left his office for parts unknown when Sophia wanted to ask him how he felt. She had called all over town, Nanjo said, and had finally reached his father and received news of him.

  J wasn’t paying much attention to her words but was reflecting that Nanjo didn’t often stay beside him and simply chat. Oh, she would chat at table, rather impatiently, and then be off about her fascinating private life, he supposed. He watched her face and her head as it bobbed and turned, and he knew, in his detachment, that here was a female setting about to manipulate a male. When Nanjo pushed the wide neckline of the muumuu off one shoulder and said she’d been trying to get rid of strap marks, J admired her technical skill at leading into the subject she wished to discuss.

  “Daddy, you never did let me tell you about that dress.”

  It seemed that there was to be a parade of the Prom Princesses in what Nanjo called formals when the kids would vote for the Queen. J supposed that Nanjo wanted to be the Queen. Well, he wanted her to be the Queen, too, he guessed.

  But now, with her knees tenting the garment she wore, her bare feet demurely side by side, Nanjo began to tell him about her ambition. It seemed there was a best-selling novel about a teen-ager. She put the book into his hand. The story was going to become a motion picture. The producers were reported to be looking for an unknown young girl to play the leading role. A scout was known to be coming to the parade of the princesses in Nanjo’s high school. So there was this exciting chance. And there was this fabulous dress!

  “Look, Daddy.” J looked. The book jacket seemed garish to him. It said to him, “Don’t be afraid to read this book. It is cheap and superficial and guaranteed to be no strain upon your mind. It will shock you without any effort on your part.”

  “That’s the very same identical dress,” cried Nanjo, “and I found it! And besides, do you see what I see and all the kids see, too? Don’t I look like her? Don’t I, Daddy?”

  J, troubled by the cartoonlike sketch of a very young girl whose breasts were bursting from a formal, looked at Nanjo and was shocked. Her face, so young and dear to him, did have the same exaggerated features. Her eyes were too big, her forehead too broad, her whole face pinched too quickly into a chin that was much too small. Her mouth was a weak, and yet somehow vicious, little doll’s mouth. J felt a terrible pang. Nanjo passed for a pretty girl this year; but styles change.

  He said distantly, “It takes more than a certain dress or a certain face, Nanjo.”

  He saw her eager eyes deaden, the patience seep in as Nanjo prepared to endure the same old stuff. Hard work. Yah. Yah.

  J said more sharply, “If I had known what this was all about, I never would have said you could buy the dress.” He looked at her steadily. “That’s a cheap nasty book, and the picture will be a cheap nasty exploitation picture, and that role would plague you for the rest of your life. You may not like my knowing that, but I do know it.”

  Nanjo didn’t blink. “I know it, too,” she said, “but I would make an awful lot of money on a one-shot deal and afterward who’d care?”

  Something had fallen and smashed as it fell. Somebody’s image?

  A car horn now honked twice in the driveway. It was the family signal. (Hey, I’m home!) J rose with relief to go deal with Marietta’s baggage.

  Nanjo had turned her head to a cringing angle. “Does grandmother have to be in my room?” she said nasally.

  “If you don’t want her there, tell her so,” said J.

  “I can’t do that,” said Nanjo in her whine. (You know we’ve got to wear these masks.)

  “And if you want that dress,” said J, “talk your mother into it. It doesn’t worry me. You’d be out of the picture the minute you opened your mouth and said something through your nose.”

  His daughter looked at him as if he had gone mad.

  Marietta and her disorderly possessions made a natural buffer between J and his wife, who inquired for his health, kindly, and did not reproach him for anything. While Marietta invaded Nanjo’s room, whither Nanjo had gone to defend her fortress in what small measure she could, Sophia said to her husband, “By the way, Win called. He got that loan.”

  “That’s good!” J said heavily.

  (It didn’t enter his mind that having called his office, Sophia must have heard that he was taking time off, must be wondering why, but was not asking.)

  “And Amy called to see how you were,” his wife went on, “and she’s got a job. A real one, it seems to be.”

  “Good, I guess,” said J.

  “And how was your father?”

  “All right,” said J. “I think he’s given up about his book for the time being.”

  “Good,” said Sophia, “and you have the first appointment tomorrow with Doctor Lodge.”

  “All right,” said J. He was pulling himself into a shell. He wanted to think, but nobody would let him think. J knotted himself around himself and went into the kitchen for some ice cubes.

  When he returned and went to the bar to mix a highball, Sophia said, with disapproval and alarm both battened down under an air of mild puzzlement, “Isn’t it a little early?”

  “It is neither early nor late,” he replied with pain and a ridiculous pomposity. He saw Sophia draw herself into herself warily.

  CHAPTER 12

  Monday Evening

  Sophia served an early dinner. Afterward Nanjo vanished to lie on the floor in the living room, waving first one leg and then the other up and down for the purpose of firming her thighs, while she talked to her cronies on the telephone.

  In the family room Sophia, all her feminine antennae aquiver, had gone underground. She was sitting there, playing the game of nothing’s-the-matter while her hands kept busy with a ribbon-knit costume she had been working on for weeks. J, who knew very well that she was watching him like a fox, was miserable.

  Marietta Thomas billowed in a third chair. She was beaming upon all and speaking with her insufferable ecstasy. “So lovely a home! Such precious warmth! I don’t mean the material comforts” (she never did) “but the generosity of spirit, the love in this house!” Her eyes were moistening. She was carrying herself away, as usual.

  But J looked at her and thought with a jolt, Old lady, are you crazy? Blind, deaf, crazy?

  Hadn’t she heard the resentment in Nanjo’s whining voice, in every word of Nanjo’s since Marietta had entered this house? Didn’t she know that her own daughter welcomed her, but with an exasperated combination of pity and obligation that could not quite be called a generosity of spirit? Hadn’t she noticed his own faintly insulting patience, for which J felt ashamed (although he couldn’t help it) because it, too, was something less than love or generosity?

  And didn’t Marietta sense the atmosphere right here in the room, where J sat helplessly suffering within and Sophia lay low, hiding anxiety in order to be “wise”? Where both of them were glad of Marietta’s presence only because it meant they couldn’t really talk to each other right now when it was “wiser” not to?

  “So relaxed. So restful,” Marietta proclaimed.

  Th
en J, in tension, received on his stretched nerves the information that Marietta was neither relaxed nor resting but pushing very hard (J began to mix metaphors in his mind)—plastering over any and all rifts in the lute, weaving an iron curtain of covering bliss, selecting heaven on earth, and denying with all her might any evidence to the contrary. It was the first time he had perceived his mother-in-law’s force.

  Nanjo must have left the telephone for at least one second, because it rang. J waited for her to snatch it up, but she did not, so he went.

  “Mr. Little?” said a male voice.

  “Speaking.”

  “This is Tony Thees. Haven’t seen you since Noah built the Ark! Remember?”

  “Oh. Yes. I guess that’s right.” J was completely flustered. He pressed the instrument to his ear so hard that it hurt.

  “I’m the friend of a friend that you expected. Call me Tony.”

  “Yes, I … uh … How are you, Tony?”

  “The point is, how are you, sir?”

  “Oh, I’m fine.”

  “Good. No problems?”

  “No, no.”

  “I’ve been trying to get you.”

  “Oh well, we’ve got a teen-ager in this house.”

  “I see. I tried at your office this afternoon.”

  “Well, I didn’t happen to go back after lunch,” said J, as if he had to apologize. “I had to go see my father. I … uh …”

  “Sorry I missed you,” said Tony. “Now, sir, no later than tomorrow someone will contact you. Not at your home if you don’t mind. And will bring, as our friend suggested …” the voice began to space out words, “the-little-antique-paperweight-you-found-in-the-funny-old-shop.”

  “Oh. Well. Fine. Listen, I wish you’d tell our mutual friend … uh … thank you. How is he?” J was seeing Barkis in his mind’s eye.

  The wire buzzed by itself for a few seconds. Then Tony said, “You haven’t heard? Well, since you’re bound to see the papers, and I doubt the names will confuse you …”