| Herb ’n’ Lorna (A Love Story) | by Eric Kraft, as Peter Leroy |
| Chapter 16: | |
| In Which Herb and Lorna Fan Ardor’s Still-Flickering Flame |
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THE NEXT FIVE YEARS, Bert and Ella and I lived with Herb and Lorna.
The automobile business entered a boom period right after the war.
Business was brisk at Babbington Studebaker, and Herb was able to get Bert
a job there, in the service department. He and Bert left for work
together every morning and came home together every night. My mother
and grandmother stayed at home, kept house, and took care of me.
Bert worked hard in the service department. He and Ella opened a savings account at the Babbington Five Cents Bank, and each week they put a little something away for The House, which is to say, the house that they hoped to have someday, when Ella and Bert and I could afford a place of our own. Because Bert insisted on paying rent for the rooms that we used and contributing three-fifths of the cost of food and heat and all the other expenses of running the ménage on No Bridge Road (despite Lorna’s calculations of the true, accurate, much-lower percentage of those expenses that the three of us represented), the savings account grew slowly, far more slowly than Ella’s yearning and disappointment. Bert took on a second job, working evenings and Saturdays at Speedy’s Reliable Service, the garage across from the police station, on Main Street, the spot where Herb and Lorna had stopped to ask directions on the rainy night when they first arrived in Babbington more than twenty years before. This garage is, in my memory, a trim, exciting, happy place. It was the place where my mother and father and I spent our Saturdays. Because Bert came home late at night during the week, neither of us saw much of him then. Saturdays and Sundays were our only chance. On Saturdays Speedy took the day off, and Bert was in charge of the station. My mother and I would spend the day at the station, watching him work. My mother would buy bottles of Coca-Cola from a machine that resembled a squat red refrigerator, and sometimes she would let me buy a scant handful of nuts or a gumball nearly too large for my mouth, from machines that stood side by side on steel poles. My mother called these machines Mr. Nuts and Miss Gumball, because they looked like a pair of busts, one male, one female. Mr. Nuts seemed strong, hard-working, and opinionated. He had a thick neck, a head of cubic stolidity, and a gaping rectangular mouth. He wore a cast-metal cap that resembled the ones workingmen wore in those days. Miss Gumball was smaller. She had a slender neck, a spherical head, and a mouth shaped in an O of surprise. Her head was filled with a riot of colored balls. If they’d been able to speak, he would have groused and grumbled, and she would have been light-hearted and witty. I remember well the sounds and smells of Saturdays in the garage, and, because the days I spent there were so uniformly pleasant, I developed a lifelong affection by association for the odors of gasoline, brake fluid, and motor oil and for the sounds of the bell that rang ching-chang when a car drove over the pressure hose, the quite different bell that rang ding at widening intervals from the air pumps when someone was filling a tire, and the bell that rang bing (pause) bing (pause) bing with measured regularity when Bert pumped gas. I realize now, recalling those days, that they couldn’t have been as pleasant for Bert, not only because he was at work, but because my mother’s favorite topic, about which she could chatter tirelessly for entire Saturdays, while Bert fixed flat tires, pumped gas, changed oil, and so on, was The House. HERB BUILT ME A MODEL of Speedy’s Reliable Service. It was wonderfully complete. There were wooden cars, gas pumps with little rubber hoses, an air pump with a thinner red hose, cans of oil and antifreeze on the shelves inside, a grease rack, tires, tools, a trash heap of engine parts and old tires in the back, and best of all, miniatures of Mr. Nuts and Miss Gumball. Tiny pebbles that Lorna had collected at the beach, each selected for its nutlike shape, filled Mr. Nuts’s head, and BB’s, painted in gumball colors, filled Miss Gumball’s. THE FIVE OF US ate, I calculate, two hundred fifty Sunday dinners at the dining room table, making allowances for Sundays when we were on vacation and Sunday dinners we ate as guests in other people’s houses. Of these, about eighty were pot roast with string beans and Lorna’s warm German potato salad, seventy were fricasseed chicken and dumplings, sixty were sauerbraten with red cabbage and potato dumplings (Kartoffelklösse), ten (Thanksgivings and Christmases) were turkey, and the remaining forty were a miscellany. SOMETIMES we went to May’s cottage, at the beach. I particularly enjoyed playing under the boardwalks, where the sun shone through in thin, brilliant lines that wrinkled on the wind-rippled surface of the sand. Often, on clear nights, we would all lie on our backs on the sand, listen to the surf, and look at the stars. THESE WERE wonderful years. They were the ones during which I
formed the notion of Herb and Lorna as cuddly and comforting, as Guppa
and Gumma. I didn’t notice anything that might have suggested to
me a life for them without reference to me. I certainly didn’t notice
anything to suggest that my grandparents lived secret lives, that they
were secretly burning with passion, that they were the geniuses behind
the art of American erotic jewelry.
Well, I can’t say that I recall that particular occasion, but I certainly did go through a period when I was quite a tragic figure. When Garth—took off—he left a note behind. Well, it was positively embarrassing. “I love you—you’re an extraordinary woman—you’re beautiful—but a man has yearnings—I’m not the husband type, I guess—” That sort of thing. My God! He actually wrote that—“I’m not the husband type, I guess.” Well, I mean really! He might have done the decent thing. He could have written, “Darling, I have cancer and I can’t bear the thought of being a burden to you so I’m going off to kill myself.” Yearnings! Not the husband type!I certainly couldn’t have understood all of that at the time, not even if anyone had wanted to try to explain it to me, but I knew that something awful had happened to May, and I could see that all the others were affected by it. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised to see, looking back, that my little self wanted nothing to do with it. Nor did I see that there was tension in the house. I was happy there. I supposed that everyone else was, and supposing it to be so, I saw it as so. I would never have imagined that, one night, Herb lay in bed, awake, imagining how Bert and Ella must feel, at night, lying in bed in the room down the hall, inhibited by the fact of their living in his house, forced to be so quiet, so contained, constrained to whisper, so tense and awkward. He realized that the feelings he ascribed to them were those he felt himself. “Lorna,” he whispered. “Lorna, are you awake?” “Mmm.” “It must be awful for them, Lorna.” “What?” “Living here with us.” “Oh. I know.” “You remember how you felt about living with your parents?” “Indeed I do.” “This is worse.” “I think you’re right.” “Back then, neither of us ever thought about what it might have been like for your parents if we had lived there. I mean, well, I never thought that they would feel—inhibited.” Lorna sat up. “I never thought about them at all. I suppose I thought they were too old to care. I suppose I thought that when they went to bed they just went to sleep and that was that.” “Now we’re finding out,” said Herb. “We have to whisper at night, just the way we would have if we had lived at your parents’ house.” “And we have to be careful about not having one drink too many.” “We have to talk in code.” “And we haven’t set fire to anything for quite a while.” “We’re hiding from them.” “And they’re hiding from us, too.” “They’re so quiet at night that sometimes I catch myself straining to try to hear something.” “I know what you mean. Sometimes I worry that their marriage is breaking up. I never hear any—crackling flames. If it weren’t for Peter, I would have wondered whether they ever—well—” “—struck a match.” “We’ve got to get them out of here, Herb.” “How much do you think they have saved?” “Oh, I don’t know, but it can’t be much.” “I think I could raise some money pretty quickly, Lorna.” “You could?” “I could—I’m sure I could. There are—a couple of people who are going to be coming due for new cars that I could kind of hurry along, I think, and the—I forgot to tell you this—the company is having a contest—it’s a contest for top salesman in the country—they haven’t announced it or anything yet—and the whole thing is going to be kept quiet—no ceremony or anything like that—no hoopla—just a cash award, and—” “I have an idea too!” said Lorna. “Mr. Berwick—” “—wants you back at the slide rule factory?” “No—better than that. He wants me to make some jewelry for Mrs. Berwick—very special. He’s been after me about it for some time. I don’t know why I never mentioned it. I guess I was a little afraid of it—it’s a bigger job than I’ve ever tried before. Well, I’m going to do it! He’s willing to pay very well.” They lay there in silence for a while, contented, scheming, each planning how to return to the coarse-goods trade, which they had long neglected. Herb planned some bogus business trips. Lorna planned to enlist May’s help. But then another thought came to them. How would they get Bert to accept the money? It was easy enough for them to imagine duping each other, but they didn’t immediately see how they could fool anyone else. “Lorna—” said Herb. “I know. How are we going to get Bert to accept the money?” “Yeah. He’s so damned stubborn about it.” “I’ll think of something,” said Lorna. “Let me worry about that part.” Herb kept a metal box on the shelf under his workbench in the cellar. It was painted green, with a white skull and crossbones painted on the top. Once, he opened this box for me, and explained, with firm seriousness, that I must never open it myself because the jars and tins and bottles in it held acids and other chemicals that could burn me, even kill me. In a tray on top, like the tray in a toolbox, there were containers of muriatic acid, soldering paste, lye, and so on. He didn’t lift the tray to show me what was in the space under the tray, but I supposed, as I now understand he intended me to suppose, that it held more of the same. It was here, I’m sure, that Herb kept his coarse goods, sketches for new ideas that came to him from time to time, and a few experimental prototypes. Lorna kept some of hers, I believe, in her kitchen canisters, under the flour, the sugar, the corn meal, the rice, and the oatmeal. I remember a moment that puzzled me when it occurred but now, in the light of what I’ve learned, makes sense at last. Once, not long before my parents and I moved into our own little house, I startled Lorna while she was fussing with those kitchen canisters. She was emptying them into paper bags. I called out to her, “What are you doing, Gumma?” She nearly dropped the cannister she was holding. “Oh!” she said. “You startled me, Peter. Close your eyes. Quickly! You mustn’t see what I’m doing.” “How come?” “Just close your eyes,” she said. “It’s a surprise. I’m—going to bake something—something special. I don’t want you to see it before I’m done.” “But why are you dumping everything out?” “I had to empty these canisters so that I could give them a good cleaning. When they’re nice and clean I’ll fill them back up again, and then I’ll make something special.” She sent me out of the room. I think, now, that she was retrieving pieces of erotic jewelry from the bottoms of the canisters, that these were her caches and that I had very nearly discovered her secret. That night, for dessert, we had pineapple upside-down cake, which was a favorite of mine at the time. Lorna returned to Chacallit and visited her Uncle Luther. She was able to sell him everything she had on hand, but Luther was seventy-three now, ill, and nearly blind. He hadn’t been active in the coarse-goods business for nearly thirteen years. He squinted through an enormous magnifying glass at the pieces Lorna had brought, and he told her that he didn’t consider these anywhere near the quality of her best work. The prices he offered Lorna were thirteen-year-old prices, but Lorna had no other outlet for her work, so she took what he offered her. He had made some inquiries before she arrived, so he had several prototypes for new couples to show her. Lorna examined them, closely and carefully, and as she studied them her stomach grew cold, her throat tightened, her eyes moistened, her fingers began to tremble. “These—” she said, and she was astonished to find that she was about to cry. She took her handkerchief out and coughed in it, dabbed quickly at her eyes. “These aren’t very good,” she said. She swallowed. “They’re not from the same person—the same man—are they? They’re not. I can tell they’re not.” “No,” said Luther. “There are quite a few people doing this stuff now. But, to tell you the truth, they’re not as good as they once were. None of this stuff is today. No one takes pains. No one—” “What—what became of the other one—the other man—the one who was so good?” “Became of him? I don’t know. How should I know? I certainly never knew who he was or ever wanted to know. If I did know, I wouldn’t tell you, Lorna. You know that. Discretion is the foundation of business. I have always made that my watchword. One of my watchwords. You can be thankful of it. I’m sure you wouldn’t have wanted me to go telling anyone who asked that you were the author of some of this work, would you?” “To tell you the truth, Uncle Luther, sometimes I almost wish you had. Sometimes I wish everyone knew about it.” “Don’t be foolish. You would be an absolute pariah. Your husband would abandon you. Your daughter would turn her back on you. You don’t know what you’re saying.” “I’m sure you’re right,” said Lorna. “Still, I wish I knew what had happened to him—the man who—” “I can tell you what probably happened to him. What probably happened to him is what will happen to all of us in God’s own time. He probably died.” Lorna was heartbroken. Herb sold what he had on hand, but he had no way at all to sell any new designs. His Uncle Ben had been dead for eleven years. Since Herb wasn’t about to risk trying to make a coarse-goods connection of his own in Chacallit, his new designs never went any further than sketches, and the sketches never went any farther than the bottom of the metal box that he kept under his workbench. It took a couple of months of coarse-goods work for Herb and Lorna to accumulate enough for a down payment on a small house for Bert and Ella. Lorna prepared the full Sunday-dinner spread for the occasion of their presenting the money: carrot and celery sticks, olives, sweet gherkins, Waldorf salad, fricasseed chicken, dumplings, peas, chocolate cake. Herb paced the kitchen floor while Lorna got things ready to go out to the table. “Come on, Lorna,” he said. “Tell me what you’re going to tell them.” “Don’t you have any confidence in me?” she asked. “Of course I do. I just—are you sure Bert will believe it?” “Well, no.” “No?” “No, I’m not sure, but I think so. Here take this chicken out to the table and have them come and sit down.” When Ella and Bert came to the table, Herb began pouring beer for everyone. There wasn’t quite enough left in the bottle to fill his own glass. He started for the kitchen. “Oh, Herrrrb,” said Lorna. “Forget about it, can’t you? I want them to see what we have for them.” “Now, be patient, Lorna,” said Herb. “They’ve been waiting for five years. They can wait a minute longer.” “But I can’t,” said Lorna. Herb went into the kitchen, got another quart bottle of beer from the refrigerator, opened it, brought it into the dining room, filled his glass, and started for the kitchen again. “Herrrb!” said Lorna. Herb chuckled. He set the bottle on the sideboard and sat down at the head of the table. “We have something to give to you,” said Herb. He turned toward Lorna, and she lifted a napkin to unveil, on the table between them, a small box, wrapped in white paper and tied with a white ribbon. “This is for you,” said Lorna. “Shall I open it?” asked Ella. “Sure,” said Herb. “Go ahead.” Ella untied the ribbon, tore the paper away, and opened the box. “I—I—oh—” was all she could say. She pushed the box toward Bert, who looked into it and frowned. He took a stack of bills from the box. “Now, Herb,” he said. “What’s this about? You know how I—” Herb just smiled. He had no idea what story Lorna had invented, but he said, with every confidence that what he said was true, “Lorna can tell you all about it.” “Herb’s too modest to tell you himself,” she said. Herb coughed and looked into his plate. “All these years, he’s been investing the rent money you’ve been paying us.” “You have?” said Bert. “I should say so,” said Herb. “He’s been investing it in the Studebaker company,” said Lorna. “And he’s done very well. This is the profit.” “Well, that’s nice,” said Bert, “but we can’t—” “You didn’t listen to what I said,” said Lorna. “This is the profit. It’s not the money you paid us, just the money Herb made from the money you gave us.” Bert shook his head. “I’m still not sure about—” Lorna looked hard into his eyes. “Of course, we kept out an amount equal to the interest we would have made if we had put the money in the bank,” she said. “Well,” said Bert, “in that case—” |
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 HEN
Bert and Ella and I were settled in a little house of our own, Herb and
Lorna were alone at last, truly private for the first time ever.
On their first night alone, Herb began bustling around as soon as he got
home from work, laying a fire in the fireplace, plumping the pillows on
the sofa, humming “Lake Serenity Serenade,” while he worked. As soon
as he and Lorna had finished dinner, Herb lit the fire and began fussing
at it with the bellows. When he had it going to his satisfaction,
he went into the kitchen and tugged Lorna away from the sink, tugged her,
against her coy objections, into the living room, to the sofa, where he
sat her down and sat himself beside her and put his arm around her.
“I’ve been waiting years for this,” he said. They kissed. “Mrs. Stolz,” called Herb, “can you hear me?” They listened to the silence. “Elllllla!” he called. “Are you listening? Your mother and I are spooning!” Lorna giggled. “I’m unbuttoning her dress!” called Herb. They brushed cheeks. “She’s squeezing my—” Lorna put her hand over his mouth. “Shhhh,” she said. “We do have—” A loud and urgent banging at the front door. “—neighbors.” “Oh, no,” said Herb. He hopped up and ran to the door. “Who is it?” he called. “It’s Dudley!” cried Dudley. “I was walking by and I heard shouting. Is there some trouble?” “No,” said Herb. “No trouble.” “You’re quite certain, Herb?” asked Dudley. “Dudley,” said Herb. “Go home. I’m making love to my wife.” Silence. A muffled laugh, from the sofa. Another muffled laugh, from outside, on the porch. “Good night, Herb,” said Dudley. Footsteps down the front steps. A pause. Footsteps back up the front steps. “Have fun.” Herb returned to the sofa, where he and Lorna allowed themselves to carry on like a couple of passionate youngsters, the passionate youngsters who had made love in that rowboat on Lake Serenity, whose sexual inventiveness had created the animated coarse-goods business. In a while, they moved to the floor, in front of the fire. The importance of that fire, what it meant to them, was another thing that I couldn’t have known then. Every fall, during those years when Bert and Ella and I had lived with Herb and Lorna, all five of us would drive upstate to buy firewood. Herb had constructed a small trailer just for hauling wood, and he and Bert, with the help and advice of Lorna and Ella, would get this hitched to the car the night before, so that we could leave before dawn the next day. We would get up and dress in the dark, and we would slip out of the house in silence, so that we wouldn’t disturb the neighbors, but also because all of us enjoyed the unusual nature of what we were doing, I think. We would eat our breakfast on the road, in the car, while Herb drove. There were always hard-boiled eggs, baking-powder biscuits, fruit, coffee, and milk. The coffee was kept in a tall Thermos bottle protected by a cylindrical sleeve of leather. The milk and cream were in mayonnaise or jelly jars. The butter was packed into a crockery bowl. Salt and pepper were folded into tiny envelopes of waxed paper. Lorna sat in the front, beside Herb, and she handed him his egg, his biscuits, and his coffee when he asked for them, so that he could keep driving. When he finished eating, he would say, “Would you ignite me—” He would pause, turn toward Lorna, and wink. She would smile—sometimes even giggle—and redden—sometimes even poke Herb—as if it were possible for us to understand his reference to the night the ballroom burned. “—a nicotine, please?” he would finish at last. Lorna would light him a cigarette, a Kool. Before noon, we would reach the place where we bought the wood. I remember it as a farm, with chickens in the yard outside the house. All of us would work to load the trailer. I carried the kindling. Herb and Bert would concern themselves for some time with making the load stable and tight and safe, and there were likely to be disagreements between them about the best way to accomplish this. Lorna and Ella were vigilant, concerned, compassionate peacekeepers, but I think that it may have been on these wood-buying trips, more than at any time during the routines of daily life in close quarters at home, that the strain of living together showed most clearly. At the time, I couldn’t have understood why. We would eat a picnic lunch, and then we would drive back to Babbington. “It will be dusk by the time we get back,” Lorna would say. “We’ll all have to work like the dickens to get the wood stacked under the porch before it’s too dark to see what we’re doing.” It would be dusk by the time we got back, and we would all work like the dickens to get the wood stacked under the porch before it was too dark to see, but we never quite made it. The last bit of stacking was always done by the light of a kerosene lantern, assisted by flashlights that grew dimmer by the minute. When at last the wood was all stacked, Herb and Bert would carry some in for the first fire of the new season, and we would all sit in the living room and drink cocoa and watch the flames. We would eat dinner in the living room that night, something that Lorna and Ella had made the day before and just had to heat up, like chowder or stew. After a while, Lorna would begin to yawn, elaborately. Soon, she would insist that Herb come to bed. “But I’m enjoying the fire, Lorna,” he might say. “Herb,” she would say, “let’s go to bed. Let Ella and Bert enjoy the fire by themselves. Come on, Peter, you come to bed, too. It’s time for you to get to bed.” Bert and Ella and I couldn’t have known that for all the years Herb and Lorna had lived in that house they had wanted to make love in front of the first fire of the season. |
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Dying to support this work, but at a loss
about how to do it?
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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: Bookbound at 1-800-959-7323You can order it on the Web from
Libros en Español: Herb ’n’Lorna is also available in Spanish from Ediciones Destino. |
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Herb ’n’Lorna copyright © 1988 by Eric Kraft 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.
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LITTLE
FOLLIES
COMPLETE
SITE CONTENTS
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