Well, that folding-drawer gadget was an absolute scream.  Herb outfitted our entire kitchen with them!  Every time you opened a drawer, this handsome—and they were very handsome—wooden whatchamacallit would riiiise up—very gracefully—and tillllt forward—and dump everything on your feet.  But it was a beautiful thing to look at, just the same, and it worked like a charm.  It didn’t do anything that anyone in her right mind would want a gadget to do, but it did it remarkably well.

BECAUSE they were doing so well, they turned away from coarse goods, though their respective uncles tried nearly identical arguments to make them change their minds.

“HERB, HERB,” said Ben, “you’re making the biggest mistake of your life.  You are a mechanical genius, Herb.  Will you just listen to me for a minute, please?  You’ve been doing all right.  Fine.  But not long ago you weren’t doing so well, remember?  Whenever you were a little short or you wanted something for Lorna, or you needed something for Ella, where did you turn?  To me!  You turned to me, Herb.  And I was happy to see you.  Now you’re selling cars, and that’s fine, just fine.  You’re making some money.  Everybody’s making some money.  Now is our big chance.  While everybody’s got some money, it’s our chance to expand!  This is your chance to build a nest egg, Herb—put some money away for little Ella.”
    “I’m sorry, Uncle Ben,” said Herb.  “I know there’s sense in what you say, but—you have to understand—I look at it the opposite way.  This is my big chance.  It’s my big chance to get out, get out of coarse goods forever.  I’m making money now, and I’ve got a good future.  I don’t want to jeopardize that.  I don’t want anyone, especially Lorna, to find out what I’ve been doing, and the longer you keep at something like this, the harder it is to hide.  This is the end, Uncle Ben.  The end.”

“LORNA,” said Luther, “forgive me for saying that I’ve heard this before.”
    “I know you have, Uncle Luther,” said Lorna.  “This will be the last time, though.  Herb’s doing fine now, and he’s going to—”
    “—just do better and better!”
    “Yes.  He is.  And you have no right to ridicule him for doing what he does.  He will do well.  I’m sure he’ll do well.  And he’ll do it without resorting to—what I’ve done.”
    “Lorna, you ought to be proud of what you’ve done.  You’re an artist!  Your work is admired by some of the most discriminating collectors in the world.”
    “Don’t treat me like a child, Uncle Luther.”
    “Do you think I’m lying to you?”
    “I—”
    “I assure you, I’m not.  You are—”
    “Never mind,” said Lorna.  “I don’t want to hear it.  It doesn’t matter anyway.  I’m finished.  Finished.”

LYING IN BED at night in those moments when even the closest lovers turn to private thoughts in the privileged solitude of those about to fall asleep, Herb and Lorna felt—this is the honest way to put it—purer for having renounced something that had always been a guilty secret; they felt (individually, privately, secretly) proud of having put this bit of the past behind them and secure in the idea that if things did get bad, or if Ella needed something that cost an awful lot of money, if there were an emergency, then (“A mechanical genius,” he said, thought Herb), but only then (“An artist,” he said, thought Lorna), coarse goods would pull them through.

THE YEARS that followed were difficult ones.  The Studebaker Motor Company began clawing its way back.  The Babbington dealership reopened, for three days a week, with a staff of two: Herb and Old Randolph.  Herb was working on straight commission.  Garth Castle did not come back.  He lived at the beach, avoiding the company of anyone who made him feel that he ought to shake off this setback, pick himself up, dust himself off, get a grip on himself, pull himself together, get back to work—especially May.  Whenever Garth looked at her, he saw in her face, in her eyes, the admiration she still had for him, and that look of trust and confidence made him feel like a fake and a failure.  In fact, he had been something of a fake, but May had never objected to that quality in him; she’d considered it part of his charm.

    The truth was that Garth was afraid to go back to work.  He was afraid of failing again.  The world, the nation, and Studebaker had pulled a dirty trick on him, letting him get his hopes up and then letting him fall, like some wiseacre who pulls a chair out from under a guy.  Garth wasn’t going to fall for the same nasty gag twice; he wasn’t even going to risk falling for it.
    At the beach, Garth hung around with the clammies.  He preferred the ones who were living “over south” because they weren’t comfortable on the mainland, especially the failures, and among the failures he preferred those who had managed to make failures of themselves despite innate ability, good fortune, helping hands, and powerful friends, the ones who had failed because they were too lazy to succeed, those of whom he could say to himself, “I may be next to nothing, but at least I’m here through no fault of my own.  This guy—why, this guy is nothing but a lazy bum.”  He acquired the manner of a failed clammy as quickly and thoroughly as he had the manner of a New York gentleman, with this difference: he’d had to invent his New York gentleman, since he hadn’t had the opportunity to observe any very closely, but he had opportunities galore to observe failed clammies, and so his emulation was in this case a far better one than before. He spent more and more time at Nosy’s; the drinking that in the past had made him seem charming and witty now only made him sullen and dismal.
    May tried again and again to win him back from the beach.  At first, she visited him often.  She brought Herb and Lorna and other friends, and she tried to re-create the happy times they’d enjoyed in the cottage.  Garth hid from these attempts to resuscitate the old gaiety.  Most often it was Herb who tracked him down, dragged, pushed, and tugged him out of Nosy’s, and delivered him to May.  As Garth grew worse, fewer of May’s friends were willing to make themselves available for these embarrassing excursions to the beach, and as the Depression grew worse, fewer could afford to maintain their cottages.  The places fell into disrepair.  They began to look like their former selves: the shacks they had grown from.  Garth got the isolation he had sought, and in Nosy’s he advanced a twisted Emersonianism: the notion that a bum was born to be a bum and would be a bum forever, “just like those shacks—those old shacks that we tried to fancy up!  Shacks again!  They were always shacks under the skin.”
    May was determined not to give up on Garth, but one frightening visit nearly drove her away from him.  She had tried romance as a lure before and failed, but she had run out of ideas and so tried again, hoping that something, anything—a difference in the weather or the phase of the moon—would change her luck.  She brought candles and wine and a good dinner to the cottage.  She brought her filmiest nightgown.  She managed to get Garth out of Nosy’s and into the cottage, and for a while she thought she was making real progress.  Garth picked up a shrimp, stared at it for a while, and then ate it, and May hoped that he might still have an appetite for food.  He looked May over and attempted a wolf whistle, and May hoped that he might still have an appetite for her.  But then he picked up the bottle of wine and a glass and dropped into a chair, and it was clear that he had an appetite only for failure.
    “May,” he said, “I’ve been thinking.”
    “Yes,” she said.  Her voice was lifeless and hollow.  She was looking out the window, at nothing in particular.
    “Let’s live here,” said Garth.  “Here at the beach.  I like it here, May.  You’d like it here, too.  They’re swell people here, not like those people we used to know.  Swell people—the guys who work the bay.”
    “You mean the guys who don’t work the bay,” said May.  She stubbed out her cigarette.
    Garth chuckled.  “Maybe I do,” he said.  “Maybe I do.  Maybe they’re the smart ones.  They have nothing to lose.  They had nothing to lose.  They’re no worse off than they were before.  Isn’t that smart?  Come on, May, come on and live here with me.  Forget about all—”  He stood, wobbled, and, with the hand that held his glass, indicated Babbington by flinging a stream of wine in its direction.  “—that! ” he said.

    Well, it was horrible, simply horrible.  You have to understand that he wasn’t inviting me to sail off to Tahiti to join him in living some idyllic island life, some carefree existence—coconut milk and mangoes and grass huts, that sort of thing.  No, nothing like that.  He was asking me to be a bum, like him, like those smelly, lumpy men.  A bum!  He wanted me to join him so that he’d know it was all right to be what he had become.  Well, not on your life!  I ran from there, ran.

    I cried all the way across the bay.  I was running away from him.  I was disgusted by him.  And I was furious with him.  The bastard was still so handsome. I can close my eyes now and see him slumped in that chair, asking me to live at the beach, and he looks like a damned movie star.  I think I ran because I was afraid I might stay.  Well.  Maybe.  Who knows?

“NOW, HERE’S THE WAY I SEE IT,” Herb said on the trip to Boston.  “Since the dealership’s open again, you ought to come back.  Start selling Studebakers again.”
    Garth drew back from him and looked at Herb with suspicion.
    “Sure,” said Herb.  “You’ve got to.  You’ve got to have something else to sell besides this stuff.  When I first started, it was books.  For you it might as well be Studebakers.”
    “Why?” asked Garth.
    “Well,” said Herb, “The Studebakers are your answer.”
    “Answer to what?” asked Garth.
    “To the question, ‘How’d you make all that money?’ ” said Herb.  They burst into invigorating laughter, hopeful laughter.

ON THE FIRST of July in 1933, Albert Erskine, who had been president of Studebaker when it went into bankruptcy, killed himself.  The news sent a shudder through Garth, who imagined, unrealistically, that he might have felt driven to such an act if Herb hadn’t halted his downward slide.  Herb and Garth heard the news about Erskine while they were in Boston, picking up a supply of coarse goods from Uncle Ben.
    From the start, Garth enjoyed the coarse goods trade in a way that Herb never had and never would.  He liked the backslapping and elbow nudging that went with it, and he loved the secretiveness it engendered.  He liked having things to hide from May, being out on false pretenses, meeting clients in dark corners of bars.  Herb sold a piece now and then, since Studebaker sales were still poor, but he never sold to a Babbingtonian, only to men passing through.  Studebakers were what Herb wanted to sell, and he turned to coarse goods only to make ends meet.  Garth put nearly all his effort into coarse goods and almost none into Studebakers.  He spent part of every day in the showroom, but Herb virtually ran the operation.
    May and Lorna believed what Herb and Garth told them: Herb had delivered such a moving account of the suffering his father had visited on his mother that Garth shook himself sober and pulled himself from the Slough of Despond.  They allowed themselves to believe the stories Herb and Garth told about successful sales (though most seemed to be to out-of-towners who were never seen driving their Studebakers around Babbington), but both May and Lorna were wary.  May was surprised to find herself wondering, now and then, what life would be like on her own, having to look out for herself, having only herself to look out for.  Lorna found herself planning and scheming, devising ways to make some money, to keep herself and Herb well away from the edge of the dark valley Garth had slid into.
    Now that Ella was in school, Lorna could work undisturbed and undetected for several hours every day.  She went back to work for Luther.  To disguise what she was doing, she also went back to work for Joseph the Jeweler, for whom she had done repairs when she and Herb were living at the Mikszaths’.  She sat Herb down one evening and confessed that she had worked for Mr. Joseph.
    “I knew,” said Herb.  He chuckled and tousled her hair.
    “You did?”
    “Sure.  I didn’t know who you worked for, but I knew you were working.”
    “You did?”
    “Sure I did.  You were careful, but you gave yourself away.”
    “How?”
    “You never went over your budget.  You always had enough.  You never had to ask for a little extra for the household, the way you used to.”
    “But you never said anything.”
    “I was going to,” said Herb.  “The day I figured it out, I was going to, but, you know, you were humming while you were cooking, and kind of bustling around, full of life, and I didn’t want to—I didn’t want to change that.”
    “Thank you, Herb.  So you won’t mind if I go back?  He doesn’t have a lot of work for me—I wouldn’t be putting in more than a couple of hours a day.  Say you won’t mind.”
    “I won’t mind.”
 Lorna spent a couple of hours every day working for Mr. Joseph, and many more hours working for Luther.  She enlisted May’s help in deceiving Herb about those extra hours.  She told May that she didn’t want Herb to know how hard she was working, so May concocted joint shopping trips, afternoons spent swimming and sailing, and hours idled away gossiping over coffee.
    Working on the sly and deceiving each other, Herb and Lorna got by. They didn’t prosper, but they got by.
 

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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:

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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.

The illustration at the top of the page is an adaptation of an illustration by Stewart Rouse that first appeared on the cover of the August 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions. The boy at the controls of the aerocycle doesn’t particularly resemble Peter Leroy—except, perhaps, for the smile.

Photo of the “Rigid Rockne” reprinted from The Studebaker Century, copyright © 1983 by Dragonwick Publishing Co., Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Asa E. Hall and Richard M. Langworth. Photo from the collection of Asa E. Hall.