Seven Seats to the Moon

by Charlotte Armstrong

  “I’ll be glad to, Father,” J said gently. He called the number that was on the piece of paper.

  Tobias said that he was very glad to know that J kept some kind of watch over the old gentleman’s affairs. It was a scandal, in Tobias’ opinion, how vulnerable J’s father was to unscrupulous people. Naturally, Tobias himself had volunteered to take charge of those bonds. Did J think he was going to let them into Pudney’s hands? About the book, Pudney would be glad to be off the hook, since Tobias had persuaded him into a deal that was of very slight profit to Pudney. None to Tobias. A favor. He’d been glad to do it. Himself, Tobias, was off (he said not when or where), and how was his mother?

  J told him where his mother was, and Tobias bristled immediately. Well, he washed his hands! He had Done His Share! If Marietta was to be allowed to let some rackety, religious phonies get her funds into their clutches, that was Sophia’s or J’s responsibility. Tobias was no such fool!

  J agreed with this cheerfully, hung up, saw that his father was already at his desk making tiny marks on paper with a sharp pencil, his white head bent, his face quiet—gone away from present trouble, safe in the turmoils of the past.

  J phoned Sophia. Amy was there, was resting. Avery was doing as well as could be expected. (Sleeping was what Avery was doing.) Yes, Nanjo was all right, being helpful. Win and Marion were coming. All was as well within the fort as could be expected.

  So J said to tell Win he had news that was quite surprisingly mild, and he told Sophia that he thought he might stop by that Retreat on his way home. J thought he ought to check up on Marietta.

  Sophia said fondly, “You’re right, dear. We ought to. So you do it.”

  Thus it happened that as Sophia hung up, Annette, calling yet again, got Sophia this time.

  “Mrs. Little, could I please speak to Mr. Little? Is he there?”

  “No, he isn’t,” said Sophia without rancor. “He’s had things to do today.”

  “If you know where he is, don’t tell me on the telephone!”

  “I have no intention of telling you on the telephone or otherwise,” said Sophia calmly. “We have enough on our minds.…”

  “Did he think it was wise to—go away by himself?”

  “I am afraid,” said Sophia, “that neither of us has had any time …”

  “Mrs. Little,” said Annette in a loud clear voice, “I know you have no idea what this is all about. But will you give him this message? The danger is over. He is perfectly free to tell anyone anything he likes. There is nothing to worry about now.”

  “How nice of you to call and say so,” said Sophia acidly and broke the connection. She was furious! Nothing to worry about? Nothing, eh? Just life, that’s all. Just life!

  Tony had come into the motel room to stand behind Annette. “Smart, aren’t you?” he said.

  “Elementary,” she said. “You think they may have his phone bugged. Okay, then, that was the quickest way to let them know they’ve lost the war.”

  Tony sighed and sat down. “I’m going to get you fired. You’re no good at this kind of work.”

  “We don’t know where Mr. Little is. We don’t know where they are, either. How else can we tell them they’ve lost? You want to put it in tomorrow morning’s paper?”

  “Not me,” said Tony. “But it now seems that ‘people in responsible places’ have decided that Mr. Jones has got to go. But where is he? Not at the Biltmore. Well, he has got to go just the same, and his toy with him, and it would be very handy to smoke him out and also catch him in an illegal act, such as a kidnapping. Right away.”

  Annette turned on him. “You want to make my Mr. Little bait?” she howled at him. “Then, you’re damn right I’m no good at this kind of work!”

  Tony said, “You’ve got to see it in proportion.”

  “I do not!” she howled. “I’ll see it the way I see it. Let the Army and the Navy and the Air Force do their stuff, damn them! Mr. Little isn’t going to be kidnapped. They don’t want him anymore. I just told them so.”

  “Still and all,” said Tony, “maybe the line isn’t bugged, you see? Too bad, if you’re so upset about him, you weren’t smart enough to find out where he went.”

  She threw the motel’s Bible at him. Tony ducked it and got the phone. He dialed J’s number.

  “Mrs. Little?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is Mr. Little there, please?” Tony’s voice was pleasant.

  “No, I’m sorry. He isn’t.”

  “This is Simon Gottschalk from his office. Can he be reached anywhere?”

  “I doubt it, Mr. Gottschalk.”

  “Then when do you expect him, please?”

  “Why, I expect him for supper,” said Sophia.

  “Then will you tell him I may ring him later? Thank you very much.”

  Sophia hung up, wondering about that name. She had never heard it. Still, she did know that Tom Pollack had been fired. He may have been replaced.

  Annette said with a glittering eye, “When is supper? Didn’t think to ask, eh?”

  “You are the poorest damn sport I ever met in my life,” said Tony. “Shut up and let me think.”

  “I think,” she said, “I’ll drop in for supper.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “I resign!” she howled. “Listen, they can’t make him say a word, a place-name, that they don’t know, by using the machine. They can’t ask him a hundred million names of places to find out when they guess right. Don’t you see? You weren’t there. You don’t know Mr. Jones like I know him.”

  “Cool it, why don’t you, sweetheart?” said Tony. “Watch those guilt feelings. If they’ve got him, she doesn’t know it.”

  Annette made a mighty effort and became very calm indeed. She sat down and said, “Think, then.”

  “You know where the machine is. You think they rented. Maybe Goodrick gave an address. Suppose we could find them? If they have got our Little man, voilà!”

  “And if we find them, and they haven’t got him,” she said, agreeing on their course with perfect antagonism as to their goal, “then they’ll never!”

  CHAPTER 29

  Saturday Evening

  The woman who ran the Retreat received J in her very businesslike office, of which he found himself approving. She was a middle-aged person, very respectably gotten-up. Her name was Mrs. Langdon.

  She told J that Mrs. Thomas was just getting acquainted. No judgment could be made now in the matter of Marietta’s residence becoming permanent. “We are not a cult,” she explained. “We have a chapel and services every day. Visiting speakers from many sources, religious, yes. But if we are fanatics about anything, it is cleanliness. Our people do their daily chores. They are supervised and so protected. The living here is very plain. What we accomplish is a tremendous simplification. People who can cope,” she added, “wouldn’t like it here, at all.”

  “How did you get into this work?” he asked her, interested.

  She didn’t quite know. But here she was, and the work was needed by people who were, to her mind, cripples of a sort.

  “You do the coping?”

  She smiled at him. (She liked him very much.) “Perhaps I do. It isn’t always easy. I have to hold down the ecstasies and keep a firm grasp on the earth or we might all vanish in a cloud of incense.” She had a nice laugh. “But you must see, Mr. Little, that I can’t take everyone. Some people, when there are no longer any worldly excitements to resist, discover that they have fed on that resistance; they can’t do without it. You might be surprised to know in what petty ways some ‘religious’ people can find ‘evil.’”

  This sounded darned shrewd to J. He said he guessed he wasn’t very religious himself. He’d got as far as to think that Something had put him here, all right. But he never had gotten his mind all the way around it.

  She smiled and said that she had come to believe that, by definition, no creature could. “Well, sir, we shall see how your mother-in-law fits in here. Shall I tell
you where to find Mrs. Thomas? She would like, I imagine, to show you around.”

  J thanked her. He liked her very much, darned if he didn’t.

  The building had a kind of inner garden court. There he came upon Marietta, seated on a wooden bench in the waning sunshine. Her round pink face did not look ecstatic to him.

  J sat down and explained that he had just been talking to Mrs. Langdon and thought she was very nice. He and Sophia would be coming along later in the week to be sure that Marietta was happy.

  “Do you like it?” he asked.

  “I can’t bear it!” she said and began to weep.

  “Oh, now, come on,” said J. “Then I’ll take you home right now.”

  “No, no,” she sobbed. “I can’t bear to think of what I did. Oh, J, I was frightened and selfish. I ran away. I don’t understand too many things. Poor child. Poor child. It’s such a weight on my heart. It’s such oppression. Poor little Nanjo!”

  “What’s this about Nanjo?” said J sharply.

  “Oh, to come creeping in, so battered and so torn, and crying. I could hear her heart breaking and her terror. But I don’t know what evils there are in the dark. I don’t understand the world anymore, J. I don’t know where she had been, or what evil she met in the dark world, the nighttime.…”

  “Now, now,” J soothed. “Nanjo’s okay. Her boyfriend did get into a little trouble. He’s in jail. Was that what made her cry?”

  “Oh, was poor Nanjo running away?” wept Marietta. “Oh, did she fall, that her stockings were bloody and her skirt … her skirt all bloody and torn?”

  “I don’t know,” said J quietly. He got up.

  “J,” she said, reaching out and grasping his jacket, “you understand the world.”

  “Oh, no, no, I don’t,” he said. “But I’ll see to Nanjo. Don’t you worry.”

  “Oh, I never …” began Marietta mechanically and shut her mouth.

  “Well, I’m pretty good at it,” said J. “I’ll do the worrying.” But he found he could not simply walk away. “Don’t sell your Good Angel short, now,” he said kindly. “Get in touch, why don’t you, and see if he’ll put in a word for our side?”

  “J,” she said, “Avery is very, very ill. In dreadful pain. He should see a good doctor.”

  “I know,” said J. “He has. Ask for Avery to be included. Tell your angel he could use a song?” J bent and kissed her cheek and went off tasting salt.

  He was worrying, all right. He was scared!

  He had no idea, as he whipped his car into the garage, whether anybody noticed. It was getting on to be late in the day. J had had no lunch. But no thought of food was in his mind. Sophia said, hushing him, “Amy’s asleep. J, that Cousin Annie called and says it is all over. The danger. She says you’re free to tell.”

  “Oh?” said J indifferently. “Where is Nanjo?”

  “On the phone. She’s been taking calls all day, like a good child.” Sophia read his mood. “What?”

  “We’ll have to see,” said J.

  Nanjo was talking to Bobby James. Bobby’s admiration was soothing; his attention to her every word relaxed her. She looked around and saw her father’s face and his gesture that summoned her.

  “Oh, Bobby, Daddy wants me for something.”

  “Well, sure,” said Bobby. “But listen, I’ll see you then?”

  “Of course,” said Nanjo. “That’ll be fun. Thank you for asking me.”

  As her parents wordlessly directed, she walked into the family room. She knew this was ominous; her father had heard something. She sat down, but he did not. He said, “Nanjo, why were your stockings bloody and your skirt torn? And why were you crying in your bed?”

  “Who told you?” she said angrily in a last effort to be what she thought was strong.

  But J shook his head. “The only thing that counts, right now, is what hurt you. I have to know.”

  He wasn’t angry. He spoke the truth. He was her father. He had to know. Nanjo bent over and said without wailing, “He was dead, Daddy, and I never meant for him to be dead.”

  Sophia, controlling her knees with great care, sat down. J kept asking quiet questions; they both kept listening, without comment, to the answers.

  In the car Mr. Jones was saying to Goodrick, “Transparent! Don’t you understand human motivations? Why, if the meeting is over, should they care what happens to the man Little? The girl gave it away. They wish us to think that the meeting is over. And why so urgently? Ah, because the meeting is not over! I am encouraged,” he added. “We still have twenty-four hours.”

  Goodrick made a strange sound with lips and breath, “Shoop. Shoop.”

  “They were lying, I say,” shouted Mr. Jones. “I don’t need a machine to tell me that. And I’ll handle him my way.”

  “Better play it cool,” said Goodrick. “Noise in that neighborhood, and you won’t get him. Slow down. Let it get dark.”

  Dusk was brief in this latitude. Win and Marion and the children came in the last light.

  While the Little kids were being fed, Amy woke and stretched and rose and washed, and Nanjo, curled in her mother’s chair, kept silent, listening to her father tell her brother (first) what the old gentleman, her grandfather, thought was his moral dilemma. She saw Win blow out his breath, look sheepish, and shake his head.

  J dropped the subject. He went on to tell Win—and Marion and Amy, now—Nanjo’s story. He told it more quickly than she had.

  A family session, a conference, simply developed.

  Sophia put the Little kids snug to the television in the den. Amy reclined on the sofa in the family room. Win and Marion sat side by side. Sophia was in her own chair, beside Nanjo, who now curled on the floor, red-eyed and silent, although her heart was surging along in rhythm, already comforted.

  As for J, who by some instinct had drawn the draperies against the evening—he sat in the middle of his web. (He had heard Sophia tell him that the danger was over. He didn’t understand how the danger could be over. He didn’t know what it had ever been. But he put it out of his mind.) There was something, here, to be decided. He asked his family, How should Nanjo be advised?

  Win thought it was a bad risk for Nanjo to keep silent. Cal’s body must have been found; questions must have been asked on that block. Best she were not found out by detective work on the part of the police. Best she volunteered. She was wrong to have kept silent all day.

  Marion said that to tell the truth was right, of course, but she hated to think of the consequences. Couldn’t they protect Nanjo?

  Sophia said, “I know what you mean, Marion. She’s in for bad punishment. Not many will say she exactly caused Cal’s death. But most will want to know what she was doing in that part of town, at all—suspecting the worst while they’re at it. And the fact remains, if he was drunk enough to fall—” Sophia shook her head and was silent.

  Amy finished for her. “He might have fallen anyhow? Sure, and if Nanjo gets into it, her peers are going to call her a bit of a jackass, so she’d sooner be dead, herself. And her elders are going to wonder if she asked for it. Of course …” She paused.

  J said, “Go on, Amy.”

  Amy said, “What I wonder is, did he really have rape in mind?”

  “That’s what I wonder, too,” Nanjo said without whimpering. “I don’t know. I don’t know now.”

  J said, with a brooding air, as if he thought out loud, “I’m thinking about Cal’s people. Say we put forth to the public Nanjo’s panic and Cal’s behavior. I don’t know as I care to imagine his children insisting for the rest of their lives that he wasn’t that kind of man, that he must have simply seen a young girl (whose family he knew) alone and in distress, and he was only going to see her safely home.”

  Amy looked stricken. Nanjo began to cry again.

  Win said, “We don’t know that.”

  Sophia said, “We don’t know otherwise. Nanjo had Cal down as a menace in her mind. Her judgment was impaired, remember. And that’s a part o
f the truth, too.”

  Amy said, “We’re not ever going to know, remember?”

  “So what’s the answer?” said Win. “Nanjo’s got to get clear, somehow. I mean, clear.”

  “What shall we do, Dad?” said Marion.

  “It’s a tough one,” said Amy promptly. “Pops, you say.”

  J said, “It comes to me there could be a middle way. I’d suggest that Nanjo and I (and her mother, naturally) might go to see Judge Carroll. He knows us. He’s an elder with experience in this kind of thing. We really don’t know much about it. We’d ask him what authority we could go to and tell the truth we know, and our doubts besides, but first—in private. I don’t believe sane people want the young punished all the rest of their lives. Anybody’s young. Punishment isn’t the point at all. I think he would certainly be able to advise us where to go and warn us what’s probably going to happen when we do.”

  “Yes,” said Sophia with a sigh.

  “On the other hand,” J went right on, “I, having been Cal’s employer for a long time, will naturally go to see his people, wherever I can find them. They’ll have to have the truth, all of it, including how Nanjo, if she was mistaken, came to make that mistake. And what they’ll do, they’ll do. But I should think we would have done the best we could.”

  Amy said, “See?”

  Win said, “It’s risky, but what isn’t? I agree, Dad.”

  “Yes,” said Marion.

  “What about Nanjo?” said Nanjo’s mother.

  “Do you agree, Nanjo?” said her father.

  “Yes, I do,” his youngest said. She had the funniest feeling that if Cal had people, they would be real people, and this made Cal real, and everything was different. Because, although it was going to be awful (what she had to do), it was going to be real, and it was the only way to undo the nightmare.

  Sophia said cheerfully, “J, you’ll call Judge Carroll, then? But for heaven’s sakes, let’s have some supper. Everybody must be starving.” Nanjo moved to let her mother rise. She looked as if she were about to crawl across the floor to where her father sat. Amy rolled slightly and came, with a spring, to her feet. “Stand up, Nanjo. The least you can do is set the table.”