No player may drive the ball of another player in a downhill direction. [1856—just three years before Lieutenant Amédée Mannheim, of the French artillery, developed the form of slide rule that endured until the development of the electronic calculator]

No player may drive the ball of another player on a course so close to the contour of Ackerman Hill that the net effect will be the same as if the ball had been driven on a downward course. [1888]

No player may drive the ball of another player into the new drainage ditch along the upward border of the front lawn, since a ball so driven is certain to roll through the new culvert and continue on an accelerating downward path. [1901]

Driving the ball of a player who is injured or who does not have the full use of his fingers is not fair play. [1910]

Any player who causes any ball to roll downward and be lost, whether by direct or indirect means or by accident, must pay for it or replace it. [1930]

When the ball of another player is driven, it must be driven uphill only, and if an uphill ball starts rolling downhill it MUST be caught before it rolls off the property. [1952]

It would be more fun for everybody if no player drove the ball of another player in any direction whatsoever, because it’s really the pleasure of the game that we ought to be interested in and not the whole competitive thing. [1969]

All croquet balls and mallets used on this court shall be made exclusively of wood. The use of mallets made of carbon fibre compounds or of aluminum alloys is expressly forbidden.  In fact, those damned aluminum baseball bats that make a sound like “pwong” are not to be used within earshot of this court either. [1983]

      Lorna had a specific person in mind when she protested against driving the ball of a player “who does not have the full use of his fingers.”  It was her Uncle Luther.  Uncle Luther was tall and quiet and dark.  He had a pointed chin and deep-set eyes; those would have been his most prominent features if his right hand had not been so terrifying a curiosity.  The forefinger was normal, but the other three fingers ended at the first knuckle.  They had been sliced off by the machine that cut the clamps for suspenders from thin sheets of brass, while Luther was demonstrating the speed at which he wanted the machine run.  “As neat an amputation as any surgeon could have done,” Luther enjoyed saying.
      The chain of events that led to Luther’s losing his fingers began in 1902, when Luther bought a Studebaker Brothers Gentleman’s Road Cart.  In fact, he bought two.  In the spring he bought a standard cart, and he enjoyed driving it so much that in the fall he bought another and had it fitted with runners as a sleigh, for the winter.  The Gentleman’s Road Cart was a lean, handsome, jaunty, bachelor-uncle’s sort of vehicle.  Both of Luther’s were beautifully painted in red Chinese lacquer, with gold pinstriping.  He kept them polished and gleaming.  “I would never drive a dirty cart or sleigh,” said Luther, in the way that bachelor uncles make pronouncements about the principles that underlie the life they make for themselves.  Bachelor uncles tend to accumulate such words to live by and, as time goes by, tend increasingly to live by them.  I suppose that this happens to all of us, but there is something about bachelor uncles, perhaps the fear that if they fall there will be no one to catch them, that makes them behave like umpires over their own behavior, interpreters of an ever-lengthening rule book, like the Hubers’ rule book for croquet.
      The rules in Luther’s book became increasingly bizarre after he bought the cart and sleigh.  His rules about cleanliness became stricter and stricter: his mustache was always clipped, the lacquer on his cart and sleigh always gleamed, his shoes were always shined, and so on.  At the same time, however, his rules governing and defining acceptable behavior for a man of his age and station became laxer and laxer, especially those governing his conduct with young girls.  Before he bought the Gentleman’s Road Carts, Luther’s work at Cole & Lord’s Gent’s Accessories had been marked by a simple Huber conscientiousness and lack of imagination that had earned him a series of small promotions and an office that overlooked the rushing Whatsit.
      He drove, at that time, a sensible and unremarkable carriage, and he drove it in a brisk but sensible fashion.  He smiled at the young girls of Chacallit but kept his distance.
      The Gentleman’s Road Carts did something to him.  He drove the sleigh along outlying roads and through fields like a madman in the winter, and he was nearly as wild when he drove the cart through the streets.  His daredevil driving earned him the spoken condemnation and unspoken admiration of most of the other men in Chacallit, and it earned him the attention of young girls.  Increasingly often he took one of the mill girls riding with him, and increasingly often he brought the girls—flushed, giggling, exhilarated—home with him after their rides.
      He brought to his work the reckless daring that he had discovered in his driving.  This new daring led to the accident in which he lost his fingers, but it also led him, for the first time, to give his talent its head.  He produced some striking designs for cuff links and shirt studs, and eventually he created the profitable industry that lurked in the shadows and dark recesses of the gentlemen’s jewelry business, the branch that came to be known as “the coarse-goods trade,” not for the quality of materials and workmanship that went into the goods, for they far surpassed that found in most other jewelry produced in Chacallit, but for their erotic content.
      Luther created the coarse-goods trade almost by accident.  He was sitting at his desk one morning, day-dreaming about one of the girls in the workroom, a new one, who was working in sight of his office.  While he thought about the new girl, he sketched her, on a sheet of the drawing paper that he kept handy on his desk, at his right hand, for recording ideas for new jewelry whenever they came to him.  He recorded the girl not as he saw her in the workroom, but as he hoped soon to see her, in his bedroom.  When he studied the sketches he had made, he discovered a curious thing: his sketches of her aroused him, whetted his appetite for her, better than imagination alone had, and far better than actually observing the girl had.  In the sketches, he had given her a mix of coyness, shyness, fear, and lasciviousness that he sought in all the girls he pursued but that none ever quite provided.  There was a knock on the glass of his office door.  Luther looked up, waved his “typewriter” in, and slipped the page of sketches into the drawer in which he habitually put the sketches he made for new jewelry ideas.  You can guess the rest.  That page went, in a stack of other pages of sketches, to the man who conducted “outlet studies” for Cole & Lord’s, work that today would be called market research.  He was, it happened, another Huber, one so devoted to the family policy of unblinking dullness that he prepared a straightforward report on the marketing potential of jewelry based on Luther’s sexual fantasies and submitted it with his reports on all the other sketches Luther had sent him.  “I presume that these would be made into cuff links and shirt studs,” he wrote.  “They would be a specialty item and not likely ever to sell well to the broad middle.  They are, however, likely to sell well among men of a certain degree of sophistication, in larger cities, and abroad.  I predict few buyers in the towns, and none at all in the rural areas.  The likely buyer may consider these goods works of art and be, therefore, willing to pay considerably more for them than for similar goods that depict, to give the first example that comes to mind, dogs.  It might be best to buttress this perception of the goods by offering them only in the most expensive materials.  Finding outlets will be difficult.  None of the stores that currently sell our links and studs, to extrapolate from the inquiries I have made, will carry them.  This need not be an insuperable difficulty, however.  Might not drummers sell them directly to the customer?”
      Luther was no fool.  He had unwittingly created a new product with great potential, and he had been handed an innovative marketing strategy.  In Albany, he found an organization that could put that strategy into effect: “Professor” Alonzo Clapp’s bookselling business.  Clapp already had an army of door-to-door salesmen selling books.  Luther reasoned that there was likely to be a good overlap between the audience for books and the audience for erotic jewelry.  He struck a deal with Clapp, enlisted a few of the very best artisans at Cole & Lord’s, and the coarse-goods industry was launched.

YOU CAN READ IT HERE,
ONLINE, ONSCREEN,
OR
YOU CAN PRINT IT
AND
READ IT IN BED,
OR,
FOR MAXIMUM PORTABILITY
AND CONVENIENCE
WHEN READING
ON THE BEACH
OR
IN THE TUB,
YOU CAN BUY THE
PICADOR USA
PAPERBACK EDITION AT
AMAZON.COM
OR
BARNES&NOBLE.COM.

IT WAS LUTHER who occasioned the first manifestation of Lorna’s interest in, and talent for, sculpture.  For Lorna’s fourth birthday, Luther made her a papier-mâché duck.  He painted the duck in lurid colors, colors that have never been seen on a real duck, colors that Luther supposed would please a four-year-old girl.  It was a large duck, large for Lorna, who had to use both her chubby hands to hold it.  After dinner, while Lorna’s parents and her Uncle Luther were still sitting at the dinner table, Lorna sat in the parlor, on the davenport, holding the duck.
      “That’s an ugly duck,” said Bertha.  She had come into the parlor silently, and she stood in front of Lorna, looking down at her and her duck.  Bertha had in the past year or so begun to think of the affections of Uncle Luther as hers, rightfully hers, only hers, in part because Luther had begun to call her “Little Lady” or “My Little Lady,” but also because she had determined, secretly, that she would marry Luther when she grew up.  Now he had given Lorna a papier-mâché duck that he had made himself.  Bertha snatched the duck from Lorna to look at it more closely.
      “This is an extremely ugly duck,” she said.  She looked at Lorna to see what effect she was having on her, and Lorna, who had been looking into her lap, lifted her head and looked up at Bertha, and it was one of those moments when Lorna’s elusive beauty shone.  Bertha wanted to hurt her then, wanted to hurt Lorna immediately; the urge to hurt was so pressing that she couldn’t allow herself the time to design an injury, could only strike with the crudest sort of blow. 
      “Uncle Luther,” she said, slowly, leaning closer and closer as she spoke, “wouldn’t give you an ugly duck like this if he liked you.  He made this duck for you so you’d know that he doesn’t like you.”
      Lorna watched Bertha turn the duck over in her hands.  Lorna still thought the duck was beautiful.  What Bertha had said hadn’t changed that.  But what Bertha had said, and the way she had leaned toward Lorna when she said it, had changed the way Lorna thought about Bertha.  It had shown Lorna that Bertha hated her.
      “It’s mine!” Lorna cried.  She reached out and tore the duck from Bertha’s hands.  It seemed to hang in the air for a moment, that heartbreaking moment when we realize we’ve made a terrible error and imagine that if we act quickly enough we can reverse it, and then fell to the floor.  A crack opened along the neck, and the feathers in the tail were bent upward crazily.
      “And you’re welcome to it,” said Bertha.  She turned on her heel and walked out of the parlor, up the stairs, and into her room.
      Crying, Lorna carried the duck into the dining room and asked Luther to fix it for her.  She told him, when he asked, that she had dropped it.  She never told him how it had happened.  She watched while Luther made some papier-mâché and patched the broken parts.  When he had finished, Lorna asked him to teach her how to make a duck like it, and Luther agreed.  Over the next several weeks, he showed her how to make papier-mâché and how to work with it.  She made a series of ducks in imitation of the one that Luther had made for her, and her ability to work in the medium improved with each.  Luther was surprised and pleased.  She had a talent for imitation, and she had a good eye.  He provided more complex models, and he helped her refine her technique.  She continued to progress.
      Bertha watched with a jealous eye.  She felt that Lorna was taking from her something that was hers: the affections of her Uncle Luther, which she valued far more than the affections of her parents, whom she considered hopelessly enthralled by the magic beauty of the little interloper anyway.

LUTHER ALSO PROVIDED the occasion for Lorna’s introduction to the acrobatics of sex.  It happened a few years later, one winter, on the day of Luther’s first sleigh ride of the season.
      The first sleigh ride of the winter was an event that Luther began to anticipate in the fall.  He needed the infusion of daring that he got from that first ride of the winter, and his need increased throughout the fall.  He lived in two rooms, down in the valley, near the mills, but he kept his sleigh in his brother’s barn, behind his brother’s house, beside his brother’s boxy farm wagon, where it stood idle until the winter.  In the winter of the year in which Bertha turned sixteen, after the first good snowfall, when Uncle Luther arrived to take the sleigh out for the first run of the season, he found Bertha sitting in the sleigh, waiting for him, shivering.  She begged him to take her with him on the first ride, though she knew that he always made the first run alone.
      “You know that I always make the first run alone, Bertha,” said Luther.
      “I know you do,” said Bertha.  “But this year I want you to take me with you.”
      “I’m inclined to drive like a madman on the first run, Bertha.  I don’t want to put you in danger.  You’ll have to wait until tomorrow.”
      “I want to feel the danger,” said Bertha.  “I want you to take me with you, Uncle Luther.”
      He insisted that she get out.  She insisted that he take her with him.  He tried to lift her from the seat.  She threw her arms around his neck, and said, “Oh, please, Uncle Luther, I won’t be afraid.  I want to go with you so much.  I’ve always wanted to go with you on the first mad run of the winter.  Take me, please, just this once.”  He lifted her in his arms, lifting her out of the sleigh, with the intention of setting her on her feet and telling her firmly that she could not go, but she kissed him, awkwardly, eagerly.  Luther changed his mind.
      “Run to the house and see if your mother will let you go,” he said, slowly, looking into her eyes while he spoke.  “Tell her that I’m willing to have you come with me.”  He set Bertha on her feet.  She turned and ran at once for the house.  Lorna, who had been watching through the barn door, turned and ran around the corner of the barn before she was seen.
      When Luther and Bertha returned from the ride, Lorna was waiting in the hay loft.  May Castle was able to give me a good idea of what Lorna saw:
 

      Oh, she thought it was quite a hilarious scene.  Well, she was half frozen by the time they came back, and she was just terribly frightened too, because she could tell that something was up that shouldn’t be up.  Well, and she was just exhilarated too, of course, since she knew she was likely to see something worth seeing.
      So there she was, up above them, in this hay thing, terrified that she would be discovered, but she could hardly keep herself from laughing.  It seemed to her that they were doing the most outlandish things.  Of course, she hardly saw a thing in the flesh, so to speak.  It was winter, of course, and her uncle and sister were bundled up because of  the cold.  This was—well—around 1910, I would think.  People used to wear much more clothing then than they do now, at any time of year.  Well, her uncle Luther had all but disappeared under her sister’s skirts, and Lorna thought she would surely burst out laughing.  Then they were turned this way, and then that way, but the blankets and clothing kept her from seeing exactly what was going on.
      Lorna was not—well—innocent.  No, I didn’t mean to say that.  Snip that out.  Snip!  I meant to say that she was innocent, but she was not ignorant.  This was country living!  The Hubers had some chickens and goats and dogs and such.  Lorna had seen plenty of rutting, and she was quite sure—in a little girl’s way—that rutting was what her sister and uncle were up to, but she couldn’t tell exactly how they were going about it.  She put together an idea—a very complicated and rather kinky idea, from what she knew about the farm animals and what she knew about—well, about herself.  Oh, she told this story once so very well, when she got a little tipsy.  That was rare for Lorna, but whenever she and Herb and Garth and I got together, well, Garth would always do his best to get her a little looped.  And now and then he succeeded.  He always had a new drink for her to try, something exotic, with fruit juice and rum.  She never knew how much rum she was getting with all of that juice and—oh, I don’t know what else—an orange slice, and a cherry, and so on.  Well, she would get quite giddy after a while.  She always became giddy when she drank.  Herb became serious.  Garth became flirtatious.  Well, he was always flirtatious—more than flirtatious.  If he hadn’t been so charming, he would have gotten himself slapped many a time.  And punched many another.  As it was, well—oops, I’m straying.  Well, that’s when she told the story about Bertha and Luther.  Oh, but the best part of it was that she mimicked their expressions, and it was just the most lascivious performance.  She never behaved like that at any other time.  And don’t think that Garth didn’t try to get her to tell the story again and again.

      Lorna thought that Uncle Luther’s affections had been parceled out quite satisfactorily.  What Bertha had received Lorna didn’t want, and what Lorna had received Bertha must certainly, she supposed, be willing to let her have.  For the most part, Bertha was willing to let Lorna have what now seemed to her nothing more than an indulgent uncle’s fondness for a talented child.  She didn’t mind his praising Lorna’s talents; she had discovered talents of her own.  She did, however, mind the time that Luther spent with Lorna.  Time spent with Lorna was time that might have been spent with her.  It was hard enough for Bertha to find times and places to be alone with Luther without arousing her parents’ suspicions, though it was certainly easier now that Bertha was working in the mill and had developed friendships with young women who had no one but themselves to whom they had to account for the way they spent their time.  Bertha began demanding more and more of the time that Luther would have spent with Lorna.
      After a while, though, Lorna didn’t miss Luther’s teaching.  She had already surpassed him in modeling ability, and she could see that she was learning more from her own work than he could have taught her. She was working in other materials now—clay and plaster—and she had begun to make a little money doing jewelry work at home, doing piecework on links and studs, mounting glass in cheap settings of tin or pinchbeck, work that was far below her abilities.
      As soon as she persuaded her parents to let her work for an hour or two each day in the mill, she was able to work with much better stuff, mounting mother-of-pearl and garnet and onyx in silver and gold.  In a very short time, she had gone beyond mere mounting to fabrication, fabricating link swivels, the interlinked projecting wires that join the two parts of old-fashioned cuff links and shirt studs.  The ends of the wires are turned into loops and joined in the manner of the Chinese puzzles that so frustrated me when I was a boy, puzzles that I have taken care to avoid ever since I learned, as an adult, that there are some things I do not have to be able to do.  Making these link swivels was skilled work, work that lay on the border between the mechanical operations—setting the stones and other ornaments, cutting, stamping, and buffing—and the artisanship of those who actually made the gold and silver settings or those who carved figures in ivory.
      One could become good at making swivels in a way that one never could at gluing or buffing.  There was room for style and grace here.  The pliers could be manipulated in an individual manner.  The loops could vary slightly.  A swivel maker could vary the styles of loops from oval to round, could even introduce triangularity or, if very adept—and Lorna was—attempt squarish loops now and then.  Any variation had to be accomplished within formal constraints.  There was the constraint of time, indirectly applied through the piecework method of payment.  There was the constraint of length, since the managers of the link-and-stud works railed against the women who used too much of the wire that formed the swivels.
      When I examined the link-and-stud collection at the Chacallit Historical Society, my first reaction was that fabricating link swivels must have been boring work, but I’ve come to understand that there were elements of dance (in the movements of the fabricator’s hands), of sculpture (in the shaping of the swivels themselves), and of mathematics (in the geometry of the loops and in using just the right length of wire).  I can see how it led to Lorna’s exacting work in the slide-rule factory later on, to her affection for logic and for recreational mathematics, and, of course, to the making of erotic jewelry.

DID LUTHER PLAN Lorna’s entire career as soon as he saw that she had talent, or did he improvise as he saw her talent and interest grow?  No one can say with certainty, but I think he improvised.  I suspect that Luther was too cautious about his coarse-goods work and too concerned about his standing in the family to have permitted himself even to imagine his brother’s daughter as an apprentice in coarse-goods making when he first recognized her talent at the age of four.  On the other hand, he was too calculating a sort not to have considered from the start what an asset she could become, with the right training.  In any event, Luther saw that she got that training.  He moved her through every aspect of jewelry making at a quick pace, always in the direction of the more skilled, the more aesthetically demanding.
      By the time she was sixteen, Lorna had become one of the best ivory carvers in Chacallit, which made her one of the best in the men’s jewelry business.  The work required all the skills that Uncle Luther had taught her.  The carvers sat around a circular table at the center of which was the archetype of the product that was currently required—a rampant lion, say—constructed by Luther, in papier-mâché, several times larger than what the carvers would produce.  The ivory carvers would duplicate the archetype as precisely as they could in the form of, for example, insets for a set of shirt studs.
      One afternoon, Uncle Luther came to the carving room and stood behind Lorna while she worked.  He said nothing until the day’s work was done, and then he asked her to wait until the others had left.  When they had, he picked up one of the pieces she had carved, looked at it closely, and sighed.  “Lorna,” he said, “you are an astounding copyist.  Do you know that?”
      “I have a good eye,” she said.
      “A good eye, a good hand, a good imagination.  You seem to understand how to adjust the proportions in a miniature so that the apparent proportions of the original are preserved.”
      “Thank you,” she said.
      “Lorna,” he asked, looking into her eyes, “how would you like to carve human figures?”
      Luther was taking a great risk in leading Lorna into the shadowy underworld of the men’s furnishings industry, but Lorna’s talent led him to believe that the rewards would be worth the risk.  Events were to prove him correct.  Lorna became as good at copying the human figure in ivory as she had been at copying lions and horses and such.  Lorna’s work had more than precision; it had a warmth that came from the pleasure she found in the work itself.  This pleasure had had its origin in Lorna’s desire to please Luther, to win his approval, to do work that was worthy of his approval, and some of that impulse remained, but far stronger now was the desire to please herself, to do difficult work and do it better than she had done it before, to do work that was worthy of her approval.
      Luther had two reasons for thinking that Lorna was likely to be, and to remain, circumspect about the new work he gave her to do.  First, he recognized the pleasure she took in the work itself, and he knew that she wouldn’t want to lose the opportunity to work at this level of her craft, the most challenging.  Second, he knew that the Lorna who sat at home of an evening, in front of the fire, playing anagrams with her sisters and her mother, would be embarrassed by the subject of, the content of, the purpose of the work she did in the small room behind an unmarked door, where she and two other carvers sat at a circular table at the center of which was one of Luther’s oversized papier-mâché models of a naked woman and a naked man, intriguingly entangled.  Luther thought that he had a third reason for trusting Lorna to be circumspect, but in this one he was wrong.  He thought that he detected in Lorna signs of the awakening of a desire for him of the sort that Bertha felt.

HAD LUTHER HAD all his fingers, he would probably have been Lorna’s first lover.  It nearly happened one moonlit spring night, when Lorna was eighteen.  Luther took her for a ride in a rowboat, on Lake Serenity, not far from Chacallit, where there was a large ballroom that extended out over the lake.  The night was one of those warm, hazy ones in spring that anticipate summer and lift the spirit.
      When Luther helped Lorna into the boat and pushed off, Bertha and Clara were standing on the dock with several of the young men who hung around the Huber girls because they were enchanted by Lorna’s elusive beauty.  Each stroke Luther took, each set of circular ripples the blades left in the wake, made Bertha feel more furious, more horribly betrayed, more determined to get even, at least to show Luther that he wasn’t the only object of her desire.  She thrust her hip against the hip of the young man beside her, Richard Reuter.  Richard was surprised; Richard was pleased.  He was a frequenter of the Serenity Ballroom, a poor dancer, a young man too shy to approach young women alone.  He usually stayed in the company of other young men who were too shy to approach young women alone and so stood on the fringes of the flirting and dancing and gaiety, making remarks about the others and trying to appear, instead of shy, bored.  This evening, he had wandered outside with Bertha and Clara because many others had.  He didn’t consider Bertha one of the more attractive young women, but she was a young woman, and that was what he wanted.  He glanced at Bertha, and he almost put his arm around her.  He caught himself, however, and kept his hands to himself, remembering the startled reactions he’d occasioned in the past by that sort of impulsive grabbing.  When Bertha repeated the pressure of her hip, however, he was emboldened to return the pressure, tentatively.  He felt, unmistakably, an increase in pressure, and—there could be no doubt about it—he felt Bertha turn so that she rubbed herself against him, just enough so that the gesture could be understood as intentional before she pulled away.  By the time Bertha had grown angry enough to link her arm with Richard’s and lead him off into the shadows, Richard had decided that he was in love.
      Clara watched her sister walk off with Richard Reuter and felt much as she had felt when she had watched Bertha heaping her plate with potato salad so many years before.  She was frightened and impressed.  She intended to show Bertha that what Bertha could do, she could do.  And she did, with Harold Russell, a much better catch.
      Luther pulled at the oars with steady, sure strokes.  Lorna was careful not to look at the hand with the missing fingers, and she was careful not to praise Luther’s rowing ability because she was afraid that if she did, Luther would think that the unspoken qualification to whatever she said was “for a man who has only seven fingers.”  So careful was she not to praise his rowing ability that Luther had to do it himself.  He said, at a lull in Lorna’s talk about the stars twinkling through the haze, the mild weather, the breeze that drifted through the tiny, pale, spring-green leaves, the bright half-moon, the light and the shadows and the reflections, “I’m not doing bad for a fellow with only seventy percent of his fingers, am I?”
      Lorna laughed and turned away.
      “What do you say we just drift for a while?” asked Luther.
      “Oh, yes,” said Lorna at once, glad to relieve Uncle Luther of what she felt certain must be a difficult and painful labor.  “I’d like that—just to drift and look at the stars.”
      “Do you know the constellations?” asked Luther.
      “I know some,” said Lorna.  “Let’s see.  There’s Orion.”  She pointed, and Luther turned his head to look at the sky.
      “That’s right,” he said.  “Do you know Cassiopeia?”
      It all happened so quickly, was accomplished with such fluidity of movement, that the boat never rocked in the water and Lorna didn’t even have time to be surprised.  Truly before she knew it, Uncle Luther was by her side, they were reclining against the cushion in the stern of the boat, Uncle Luther was pointing to Cassiopeia with one hand, and the other lay idly, just resting on her dress, as if it had fallen there of its own accord and Luther had no idea where it had gone to, along the inside of her thigh.
      Lorna’s heart began to pound.  A number of emotions and sensations raced crazily through her, dashing this way and that, like clowns at a circus.  She was curious, certainly.  What Luther might be on the way toward doing did intrigue her, after what she had seen in the barn and had elaborated so often in her imagination, at night, lying awake in her bed.  The rosiness she saw in Bertha’s cheeks after she’d spent some time with Luther, and the smiles Luther put on the faces of his papier-mâché couples, suggested that what Uncle Luther seemed to be proposing was sure to be a pleasure.
      She let her hand drop onto Luther’s leg, and she allowed it to slip a couple of inches downward along the inside of his thigh.  Luther was surprised.  He looked at Lorna.  The color was high in her cheeks.  He kissed the blush along her cheekbone.  She couldn’t trust herself to say or do anything, so she just kept looking upward, at the stars.  Luther talked on, but his voice had become merely a low mumble, a part of the evening sounds on Lake Serenity: whispering breeze, lapping wavelets, chirping crickets, mumbling Luther.  Lorna was paying no attention to what he was saying.  All her attention was on her hand and his.  When his hand moved, her heart leaped, and she moved her hand.  When his hand stopped, she drew a breath and stopped hers.  When his hand flexed, her whole body stiffened, and she squeezed Luther’s leg, so slightly that he may not even have noticed it.
      Lorna was thrilled.  She felt the anticipatory thrill that she felt before anything that she expected to be pleasant, but more intensely than ever before.  There was the nervousness she knew, the burning tremulousness in the muscles of her hands and arms and face and belly.  The coldness in her chest.  The flutter in her heart.  There was the familiar sense of floating, intensified by the fact that she was floating.
      Luther was fussing with his trousers, she realized, and then quite suddenly he had taken her hand with his other and pushed it into his trousers and folded her fingers around his erect penis.  This was so surprising and welcome a development that Lorna smiled unthinkingly in her delight.  Her curiosity, always great, had become enormous since Luther had added couples to the cuff link line.  So tightly were the couples coupled that Lorna couldn’t see much of the man, though she examined the papier-mâché models thoroughly, and she carved faithful representations of what she saw, something like an inverted mushroom, its button top between the man’s legs, a bit of stem, and dark mystery where it disappeared in the woman.  Lorna seized the opportunity Luther had given her and began a thorough exploration, running her fingers along and around his penis, feeling for details with a sculptor’s touch.  She drifted into an abstracted exploration, an exercise in genital cartography.  It was as if the rest of Luther had disappeared, and she were alone with his penis and the lake and the night and the stars, and she hardly noticed that he had pulled her skirt up and brought his hand between her legs.
      Luther was ecstatic.  He hadn’t hoped for this eagerness.  He began poking and probing with his forefinger, and a rush of pleasure ran through Lorna, and she drew a sharp breath and raised her hips almost involuntarily, rubbing herself against Luther’s hand, Luther’s forefinger, and that’s when things began to go wrong.
      It was that hand. The one good finger was in her, the thumb was poking around, hunting for her clitoris, and the three stumps were tickling her.  A wave of revulsion ran through her, but the tickling made her want to giggle.  She seemed to see the whole thing, as fully and clearly as if she had to carve it, and she imagined carving the thumb, and the forefinger, and the stumps, and herself.  She turned toward Luther with terror in her eyes, her mouth in a twisted grin.  He misinterpreted her look.  “Now, Lorna,” he began, “don’t be frightened.  Don’t cry out.  I won’t hurt—”
      And then she was ashamed.  She shouldn’t be revolted by his hand, she told herself.  Even if she were, she shouldn’t have let him see it.  “Oh, Uncle Luther,” she said. “I’m so ashamed—”
      “There’s nothing for you to feel ashamed about, Lorna,” said Luther.  He began pulling his trousers down, and then he was on top of Lorna, pulling at her clothes.  “Just relax yourself,” he said.  “Look at the stars, and think lovely thoughts, and it won’t hurt. I promise—”
      But the feeling of abstraction, of detachment, had vanished, and Lorna was suddenly aware of everything and full of doubts and fears, like a person awakened by a thunderclap, frantic, sure that everything is about to fall apart.  Out of all the questions she was asking herself, one of the unlikeliest came through loudest: What about Bertha? 
      “What about Bertha?” she said. “Bertha loves you, Uncle Luther. I know she does.”  To her surprise, Lorna found that she felt horribly disloyal.  Poor Bertha, she thought.  She’s homely, and she’s in love with Uncle Luther.  She must have been afraid of me for years— 
      “Bertha!  Bertha is nothing.  She’s—Lorna?”
      Lorna was pushing him away, struggling to get free of him, reaching for the oars, calling out, “No, no.  Stop it!  Get away from me!”

BERTHA AND CLARA were married to Richard Reuter and Harold Russell in the summer, in a dual wedding.  Richard Huber grumbled publicly over the expense but savored a secret satisfaction, since the expense of a dual wedding had been much less than the expense of two would have been.  The following year Bertha and Clara each gave birth to a boy, conceived that warm spring night when Luther took Lorna for a row on Lake Serenity.
      Lorna built a wall between herself and Luther.  She spoke with him at the mill or in her parents’ house—he was a rare visitor now—but she had no more to say to him than what was necessary to keep people from suspecting that something was wrong.  He had spoiled everything she had felt for him.  Her memories of his kindnesses to her, of the way that he had taught her to model in papier-mâché and to carve ivory, were pleasant ones, but they were difficult to recall when he was present.  She knew all the gossip about him now; she heard it from other workers at the link-and-stud mill.  She knew that he took girls riding in his new automobile, a Studebaker Big Six, and she knew—or guessed—that many of the papier-mâché models that Luther made for the ivory carvers to copy in the room behind the unmarked door recorded his own amorous experiments.  Worst of all, she knew that what he had felt for Bertha—and for her—was nothing more than what the rooster felt for the chickens or the boar for the sows.

ON A COLD AND RAINY NIGHT the next September, Richard and Lena and Lorna were sitting in their living room, in front of a fire in the stone fireplace that was set into the north wall.  The air was still heavy with the aromas of dinner—fresh ham, sauerkraut, boiled potatoes, turnips, and rye bread.  Richard Huber was dozing in his chair; Lena was darning socks.  Lorna was playing anagrams alone.
      From outside came the sound of a car on the steep road beside the house.  The car stopped, and from its sound Lorna decided that it must have stopped at the bend, in front of the house.  It might be Uncle Luther.  Lorna decided that she would go up to her room if it was. 
      She went to the window.  There was a car outside, but it wasn’t Luther’s.  Footsteps on the porch.  A knock at the door.  Lena looked up.  Richard snorted.
      “I’ll go,” said Lorna.
      She pulled the curtain aside and looked out through the glass before she opened the door.  A young man was on the porch, collapsing his umbrella.  He was wearing a wool suit, and he seemed nervous.  It was Herb.
 

I should like to see the custom introduced of readers who are pleased with a book sending the author some small cash token: anything between half-a-crown and a hundred pounds.  Authors would then receive what their publishers give them as a flat rate and their “tips” from grateful readers in addition, in the same way that waiters receive a wage from their employers and also get what the customer leaves on the plate.  Not more than a few hundred pounds—that would be bad for my character—not less than half-a-crown—that would do no good to yours.

Herb ’n’Lorna is published in paperback by Picador, a division of St. Martin's Press, at $13.00.

You should be able to find Herb ’n’ Lornaat your local bookstore, but you can also order it by phone from:

Bookbound at 1-800-959-7323 
Book Call at 1-800-255-2665 (worldwide 1-203-966-5470)

Libros en Español: Herb ’n’Lorna is also available in Spanish from Ediciones Destino. 

Herb ’n’Lorna  is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, dialogues, settings, and businesses portrayed in it are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. 

First published by Crown Publishers, Inc., 201 East 50th Street, New York, New York 10022. Member of the Crown Publishing Group. 

Now available in paperback from Picador USA, a division of St. Martin's Press.