My sweetheart's the Man in the Moon

Not everyone will think of the first moon-flight as the first glorious step on the road to space. There will always, for instance, be the fast-buck boys like Lubrano....

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Infinity, December 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Jeanne turned off the radio and went downstairs slowly, watching how the gold-shot curtains on the landing window caught the sunlight in a multitude of brilliant flecks. She shuddered slightly. Up there, the sun would scorch and sear.

When she entered the living room, Aunt Anna looked up from her magazine, and Pop puffed on his calabash pipe, occasionally grunting with satisfaction. Mom looked at Jeanne hopefully, but soon turned away in confusion. She could not tell whether Jeanne wanted her to laugh or cry.

"Well," said Jeanne, instantly hating the flippant way she tried to speak, "he got there." She never quite knew why, but whenever emotions threatened to choke her up she would slip on the mask, the carefree attitude, the what-do-I-care voice she was using now.

"All the way--_there_?" Aunt Anna fluttered her eyebrows, allowing herself a rare display of emotion.

Mom smiled, laughed briefly and nervously. She touched Jeanne's cheek tentatively with a trembling hand, hugged her daughter quickly and drew back. "I didn't know," she said. "None of us knew. We were afraid to listen. I mean, it's so far."

"Knew he'd make it," said Pop, tamping his pipe full with another load of tobacco from the humidor. "Tom's got good stuff in him. Smokes a pipe, you know."

"Not up there," said Jeanne practically. "It would waste oxygen."

"It says here in this magazine the moon is 240,000 miles away," Aunt Anna told them.

"Did the announcer say how Tom felt?" Mom wanted to know.

"Just imagine how it will be," Aunt Anna said, "when we get Tom back here and he speaks to the Women's League. We'll have to make arrangements--"

"Can't," Pop reminded her. "Government hasn't said anything about when Tom's coming back. Liable to keep him there a long time. Do the boy good. See what he's really made of, I always say. Andrea, your roast is burning."

Mom scurried off toward the kitchen. A moment after she disappeared, the phone rang and Aunt Anna took the receiver off its cradle. "Hello? Yes, this is the Peterson home. Yes, she is. In a moment. Jeanne, it's for you."

"Hmmmm," Jeanne chortled. "Some fellow trying to make time because Tom's too far away to protest." She hated herself for saying it, and administered the mental kick in the pants which never helped. She was missing Tom more acutely every minute. The distance was unthinkable, the moon almost too remote to consider, lost up there in infinite void, surrounded by parcels--parsecs?--of nothing.

Picking up the receiver, Jeanne turned her back to Aunt Anna, who appeared quite eager to listen to at least half of the conversation. "Hello? Yes, this is Jeanne Peterson. The Times-Democrat? I could see you today, I suppose. Why, here at home. I'm on vacation. But what--about Tom? Oh, I see. Oh, they told you down at White Sands. Well, all right. 'Bye."

"It was a man," said Aunt Anna.

"Who said my roast was burning?" Mom asked them all indignantly as she returned from the kitchen.

"Who was the young man, Jeanne?" Aunt Anna asked.

Jeanne grinned, brushed back a stray lock of her blonde hair. "Sorry to disappoint an old gossip like you, but--"

"Tom is a long way off!"

"That was just Mr. Lubrano, a reporter on the Times-Democrat. 'How does it feel to be the fiancee of the first man to reach the moon,' he said. Funny, I hadn't thought of it that way at all. How does it feel? Did he expect me to turn cartwheels? (But, I am proud of Tom, so why don't I admit it?) He'll be down to interview me this afternoon."

"After dinner, I hope," said Mom.

Awkwardly, Aunt Anna lit a cigarette--something she did only on rare, important occasions. "It never occurred to me," she said slowly, trying to remove tobacco grains from her tongue as delicately as possible with thumb and forefinger. "Not for a moment. But Jeanne, in her own right, is also a celebrity. The Women's League has watched her grow up, I know. But suddenly, all at once, Jeanne is different. Andrea, get May King on the phone!"

"May--the president?" Mom wanted to know, somewhat awed.

"Of course, Andrea. A little imagination, that's what you need."

Mom got up doubtfully, approached the telephone as if it might jump up and attack her.

"Forget it," Jeanne told them. Use big words. Use words which would have ridiculous double-entendres for them. Frighten them. "I won't prostitute my emotional relationship with Tom for all the Women's Leagues in the county. Forget it."

"Jeanne!" said Aunt Anna.

"Jeanne," Mom echoed her, more than a little shocked. "What all this has to do with--Jeanne! Oh...."

But Jeanne was on her way upstairs to put on something gay and bright for the arrival of Mr. Lubrano. Now that she thought of it, she liked the almost electric crackle in the reporter's voice over the phone.