The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy
 
Herb ’n’ Lorna (A Love Story) by Eric Kraft, as Peter Leroy
Chapter 19: 
In Which Herb and Lorna Retire to Florida

 

THEY EARNED THE MONEY, and they had a great time doing it.  More important than the money, and more satisfying, was the work they did during the intense months that they spent earning it, a time when the whole house seemed to sing, when, in fact, it did sing, with the record player in the living room going all the time, playing their old favorite songs over and over and over again, turned up high to play over the sound of their work.
    They cleared the living room, carrying all the furniture to the room behind the bookcase, the room that first Mrs. Stolz and later Ella and Bert had lived in.  There they piled it higgeldy-piggledy, facing any which way, chairs and tables and whatnots and lamps all in a huddle, done with, past use.  In the living room they left only the piano, the console radio and record player that Herb had bought for Lorna, and the rose-colored sofa, pulled away from the wall, to the center of the room, closer to the fire.  Herb brought his workbench and Lorna’s and all his tools and all of Lorna’s up from the cellar into the living room.  There they worked, all day, every day.  Herb hammered and welded, bent and cut and pounded on a tiny scale, fashioning the armatures and cams and gears and pulleys that made the couples move.  Lorna bent over her enormous magnifying glass, carving the couples themselves, poking the tip of her tongue out between her lips when she made the finest, most exacting passes with her miniature files, grinning when she achieved a satisfactory likeness of a friend or neighbor.
    For the first time, Herb could talk to the sculptor who would have to realize his designs, the woman who would have to create the little people who were going to have to perform as Herb had imagined they would.  And for the first time, Lorna could sketch an idea of her own, model it roughly with her hands in the air, try to describe it in words, and have Herb make it work.  Or, greatest pleasure of all, in the evenings, when they had finished their work and eaten dinner, they would sit side by side on the rose-colored sofa, in front of the fire, in the midst of their work, surrounded by their benches and tools and supplies and works in progress, and admire what they’d done.  Often, one or the other would suggest something new.
    “I’ve got a kind of complicated idea, Lorna,” Herb might say.
    Lorna might look up at Herb over the top of her glasses, run the tip of her tongue over her lips, and ask, “How complicated?”
    “Pretty complicated.”
    “Well, then, I think we’d better try it out in the lab.”

 
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.
WHEN THEY HAD BOUGHT all the Spotters’ stock, when every Spotter had been saved, they began working for themselves, first to make up what they had lost, then to make up what they had spent to buy the Spotters’ stock, and then to finance the circuit of the United States they had been looking forward to, and their retirement.
    A station wagon would have been the practical choice, but Herb was no longer in a mood to be practical, so he ordered a gold metal-flake Avanti for the grand tour.  The day the Avanti arrived, Herb hustled it into the service department, which he persisted in calling the repair shop.  Old Randolph was long gone, but his son, Randy, or, to Herb, Young Randolph, ran the service department now, and he was as fond of Herb and as indebted to him for technical advice as Old Randolph had been.  Herb had been discussing his plans with Young Randolph for some time, so he knew just what was needed.  He had already fabricated a heavy-duty trailer hitch, and he had heavy rear springs and shocks, enormous mirrors, fog lights, and other equipment on hand, all of it unusual gear for an Avanti.  When the Avanti arrived in the shop, Young Randolph put his hand on Herb’s shoulder, and said, “Herb, I’m going to build you the best trailer puller in these United States.”

Studebaker Avanti
Sketch of the original Avanti by Bob Andrews, chief designer of the Avanti at Studebaker

    Herb left the repair shop and walked directly to the office of the current president of Babbington Studebaker, Wilbur Haggerty.  The men had taken to calling him “Haggard Bill” because of the visible effects on him of Studebaker’s going to the brink so many times and scrabbling back, but just barely, leaving Haggard Bill Haggerty limp and sweaty, his heart pounding.  Herb gave notice of his intention to retire in two weeks.  The next day, at Hargrove Slide Rules, Lorna simply quit, to the surprise and great relief of Edwin Berwick, now president, who had been wondering how to tell Lorna that in a month the name of the company would change to Hargrove Computational Devices and that within a year they would begin producing electronic calculators.
    They spent the next two weeks stocking the trailer.  Herb had, of course, outfitted the trailer with gadgets of many sorts.  Some were practical, like the two refrigerators.  A larger one held their stores, and a smaller one held things needed every day, like cream for coffee, and food for the day, transferred from the larger.  With careful planning—and Lorna provided the careful planning—there would be no need to open the larger one more than once every other day.  Others were romantic, like the record player. Herb bought and restored a portable windup-record player, not just because it wouldn’t require electricity, but because he and Lorna could carry it away from the trailer, to have “Lake Serenity Serenade” with them if they walked off into a grove of trees to find a pretty spot to eat lunch and field-test any animation ideas that might come to them on the road.
    Toward the end of the two weeks, late enough so that people wouldn’t be able to make a fuss over them, they said their good-byes.  That was that.  They put their furniture and furnishings in storage in the Hapgood Brothers’ warehouse, left the selling of their house to Bert and Ella and told them to keep whatever money it brought them, and left.  They got out of Babbington with shocking speed; at least, it shocked me.  It seemed as if, once they had decided to go, none of what they would have to leave behind mattered to them any longer.  I couldn’t understand how they could sell that house; it was so full of Herb’s gadgets—disappearing bookshelves, clattering dumbwaiters, the cooling system that pumped groundwater through salvaged Studebaker radiators, the weather station on the garage roof, the mailbox on a rope and pulley so that Herb could reel the mail in from the breakfast table.  How could they let all of that go, how could they leave their friends, leave Ella, leave me?  They did, and they made it look easy.  Now, I think that, subconsciously, they were in search of something that they knew they couldn’t get in Babbington.  They would never have put it this way—I doubt that they would ever have even thought to put it this way—but I think it was artistic freedom.
    They followed a zigzag route that took them through a number of small towns that Lorna chose for their names: Candor, New York; Freedom, Independence, and Paradise, Pennsylvania; Leroy and Huber Heights, Ohio; Pershing, Indiana; Piper City and Lovejoy, Illinois; Baring, Amoret, and Peculiar, Missouri; Hope and Paradise, Kansas; Ovid, Loveland, and Model, Colorado; Story and Paradise Valley, Wyoming; Epiphany and Eureka, South Dakota; Twin Bridges and Paradise, Montana; Bliss and Deary, Idaho; Opportunity and Paradise Inn, Washington; Zigzag, Carver, and Sisters, Oregon; Fortuna, Enterprise, Commerce, and Paradise, California; Inspiration and Paradise Valley, Arizona; Loving, New Mexico; Happy and Goodnight, Texas; Plain Dealing, Eros, and Darlington, Louisiana; Castleberry, Alabama; Climax, Georgia; and, finally, Punta Cachazuda, Florida.
    While they were traveling, they wrote little.  All I got was a postcard now and then:

    Breathtaking scenery. Weather VERY HOT. Yesterday caught in blizzard of tumbleweed. Scratches all over Avanti. 
    “Guppa” and “Gumma” 
    The trip was, they told everyone, meant to be a long vacation.  Their announced intention was to return and find a smaller house in Babbington, nearer the water, maybe even a little place at the beach, near May’s.  I was impatient for their return.  I wanted them to return so that things would be restored to their most stable state: the state at which I had perceived them to be when I was a child, the steady state.  (How upsetting it is when people demonstrate their independence of our steady-state notion of them: when people go away, when friends we’d thought of as a happy couple surprise us with a divorce, when our parents call one evening and tell us that they’ve put up for sale the house we think of as home, even if we haven’t visited it in a couple of years and haven’t slept in it in a decade.)  Shortly after Herb and Lorna reached Punta Cachazuda, the Hapgood Brothers’ warehouse burned to the ground, and nothing of theirs was saved.  When they heard the news, they felt that they’d been released by the fire from any obligation to return.  Said Lorna, in a postcard from Punta Cachazuda, “It may not be Paradise, but I think we’ll stay.”
PUNTA CACHAZUDA lies on the west coast of Florida, the Gulf Coast, where the beach sand is as white and fine as confectioner’s sugar, and the sunsets make a person pause and muse.  There would have been no Punta Cachazuda at all had it not been for the effect of one of those thought-provoking sunsets on Humboldt Bagnell.  One evening, years before Herb and Lorna arrived, Humboldt and his wife Bitsy, nearing the end of their trailer-tour of the United States, had found themselves between towns at the hour when they were accustomed to drink a couple of Manhattans and chat, and so they decided to stop, pull off the road, have their Manhattans, and spend the evening where they were.  They carried their second Manhattans to the water’s edge and watched the sun redden and slip into the Gulf.

Sunset from Punta Cachazuda. Photo by Mark T. Canning.

Sunset from Punta Cachazuda. Photo by Mark T. Canning.

    Humboldt found that the sunset inspired him to muse.  He looked around him and mused on what was left of his future.  He contemplated the prospect of living the rest of his life right where he was, and he found that he liked it.  He bought a tract of land and built a modest house.  Subsequently, in the evenings, when he sat on his patio and watched the sun go down, he began imagining a town around him, dreamed of wandering streets that didn’t exist, pictured himself greeting people who hadn’t even seen the place yet.  He began buying more land, and he began tinkering with it, improving it, sharpening the distinction between land and water by eliminating the ambiguous marshes, filling here and dredging there, until every bit of Punta Cachazuda was a well-formed island, peninsula, or waterway.  Then, house by house, Humboldt and Bitsy began building the town, extending the roads and sidewalks as they went along, all according to a plan pinned to the wall of their garage.
    The streets of Punta Cachazuda wandered through the town as if they’d been laid out whimsically, but in fact there was a purpose behind their intriguing sinuosity: they divagated to skirt boredom.  The canals and creeks and artificial peninsulas and islands, the twisting streets, the bridges, and the tiny parks made Punta Cachazuda look, especially from the air, like the sort of omnium-gatherum landscape that model railroaders build from papier-mâché.  Indeed, the town had the ragged edge of an unfinished work in papier-mâché: at the limit of development the road and sidewalk petered out, and the wind blew miniature dunes of sugary sand onto the lawn of the last-built house.
    Humboldt relied on word of mouth to sell his town to potential residents, and so he and Bitsy died before they saw much of it populated, but his children, who embraced his vision religiously, eventually saw Punta Cachazuda become what Humboldt and Bitsy had hoped it would be, a small town filled entirely with old people with time on their hands.  The houses were similar but not identical.  They were small cement-block houses, each with a tiny cement patio on its western side, where at sunset Punta Cachazudans sat and watched the maraschino sunsets.  Each house also had something that most Punta Cachazudans had never heard of before they arrived there—a “Florida room,” an incursion of the outdoors into the envelope of the house.  (Imagine that you were to sneak up behind a house with a conventional screened porch and yell, ”Boo!”  Startled, the house would draw a sudden breath and inhale its porch.  Now the porch would be inside the house.  It would be a Florida room.)
    The Bagnell-built house that Herb and Lorna chose was a significant one in the history of Punta Cachazuda.  It was the first one built beyond the limit of the plan that Humboldt Bagnell himself had drawn on a roll of shelf paper and pinned to the wall of his garage.  It was the first house in a new territory, a new beginning in a literal as well as a figurative sense, since the sons and daughters of Humboldt and Bitsy, unable to agree on a layout for the extension of the town, had resorted to tracing the original and taping it to the shelf paper at a point where they could effect an easy anastomosis of the streets, sidewalks, and canals of the old with the replica streets, sidewalks, and canals of the new.
    Because it was the first house of a new era and the first house on a new street, the Bagnells made an event of Herb and Lorna’s purchase, throwing in a set of patio furniture with the house, and (since they were also having a difficult time agreeing on street names) offering Lorna the chance to name the street on which the house stood.  She thought of dozens of possibilities, including Whatsit Way, Piper Pass, Lovers’ Lane, Animation Avenue, and Studebaker Street, but then she had an inspired thought.  “Mr. Bagnell,” she asked Bobo, the oldest of the offspring of Humboldt and Bitsy, “will there ever be a bridge at the end of this street?”
    “No,” said Bobo, with inherited authority.  “Oh, no.  Definitely not.  We Bagnells have everything planned out.  We have drawn the plans for the new section of Punta Cachazuda in the same spirit as our father drew the plans for the original section, and I guarantee you that we’re not going to change them, not a bit.  There will be no bridge at the end of this street.”
    “Well, then,” she said, “I have a name for it.”
    And so, once again, Herb and Lorna were at home on No Bridge Road.  Their house was like the others.  In truth, since it was the first house in the replication of the original section of town, it was exactly like the house that Humboldt Bagnell had built for himself and Bitsy.  From their patio, Herb and Lorna could see, for several days out of most months, through gaps between the other houses, the notable sunsets.
    In Punta Cachazuda, Herb and Lorna wore shorts most of the time.  All of their exposed skin browned.  Lorna began a shell collection.  Herb began buying tools again and built a folding workbench in the garage.  They allowed themselves, gladly, to be drawn into the social life of Punta Cachazuda, and soon their calendar was full of potluck suppers, card parties, shuffleboard and croquet tournaments, surprise birthday celebrations, and galas for each of the traditional holidays of the United States, Canada, Mexico, and most of the European countries.  They fit right in.  You would scarcely have found a reason to distinguish them from the average Punta Cachazudan unless, some night, you had peeked through a gap between the curtains that hung inside the window of their garage, while the average Punta Cachazudan was watching the eleven o’clock news, and had seen them at work on animated erotic sculpture. 
    They never sold any of their work.  They never even showed it to anyone.  It was their secret hobby.  Lorna found shell an intriguing and demanding medium, and she enjoyed combining bits of many types of shell to produce subtle shadings and textures.  Herb found that, freed from the confinements of jewelry, his mechanical imagination was positively rejuvenated, and he whistled while he worked.
    The primary pursuit of most Punta Cachazudans was to discover and employ new methods of killing time.  They passed the hours with games of cards and shuffleboard, shell gathering and fishing, gossiping and arguing, but the most popular way to keep busy was to learn something new.  Punta Cachazudans loved to attend classes and workshops.  A few were taught by instructors from local schools and colleges, but most were taught by other Punta Cachazudans.  Some of the instructors were retired practitioners of the arts they taught.  Others were lifelong amateurs.  A few were just eager, well-meaning frauds.  Because the classes reflected their instructors’ vocations and avocations, they ranged all over the vast savannah of human interest, from celestial navigation to astrology, from watercolor painting to plumbing.  Language classes, of the type geared to teaching foreign clichés and phrases useful for a traveler, were especially popular, and Punta Cachazudans who had taken these classes loved to season their speech with the exotic phrases they had learned, with the result that many a conversation in Punta Cachazuda had a Babelic flavor:
    “Hey, guten Tag, Ray. Comment ça va?”
    “Oh, not too bad.  Pas mal.  Can’t complain.  Es muy caliente, though, nein?”
    “Bozhe moy, you said it!  Sehr warm, sehr warm.”
    “Buon giorno, Ray, George.  Wie geht es Ihnen?”
    “Oh, pas mal, Harry.  Pas mal, gracias a Dios.”
    “Can’t complain, Harry.  How about you?  Kak vy pozhyvaete?”
    “Well—”
    “You keeping busy?  Fuyez-vous les dangers de loisir?”
    “Pretty much.  Thought I might do some fishing this afternoon.  Want to come along?”
    “I don’t know.  I’m kind of pooped.”
    “Oh-ho, out with the lustige Witwe again, Harry?”
    “Well, heh-heh.”
    “You know what they say—a buen bocado, buen grito.
    “Ha, ha, ha.”
    “Cela va sans dire, nein?”
    “Mais, oui. Das versteht sic von selbst all right.”
    Herb took Spanish and Predicting the Weather, and he joined the Green Thumbs and the Poker Hands.  He taught the Hands to play Piper Poker, but none of them cared for it much, and they only agreed to play a few hands of it whenever the club met at Herb’s because they thought he was a nice guy.  Lorna took Backyard Botany and Small-Boat Handling and joined the Shell Gatherers and the Never-a-Cross-Word Puzzlers and organized a group that assembled Comfort Kits for patients in nursing homes and hospitals and for children in foreign lands.
    After a while, Herb posted a notice on the recreation hall bulletin board for a class that he proposed to teach: “Repairing Things Around the Home.”  He had only a few students, most of them women, perhaps because the men felt that they didn’t need to be taught how to repair things around their homes, or perhaps because the men didn’t care to repair things around their homes.  Lorna offered a class on devising and solving logical puzzles.  At the first class quite a few people showed up just to be polite to Lorna, and even more people showed up to find out what the heck this was all about.  Attendance fell off considerably at the second class, many of the students pleading headaches that had set in after the first class.  At the third class, Lorna was left with just one student, Andrea Cogliano, who had developed a genuine passion for brain-racking puzzlers.  Herb tried offering a course in salesmanship, but no one showed up at all, since no one in Punta Cachazuda had anything to sell or any desire to sell anything.  He was more successful with a class called Making Useful Gadgets.  In the second year he deleted “Useful” from the title, and the course became one of the most popular among male Punta Cachazudans, who took to whistling while they worked and—later, of course—formed a number of whistling quartets on the barbershop model, organized concerts, staged whistle-offs, and so on.
    Lorna offered to teach soap-carving and at first attracted only a small number of students, since so many were still wary of Lorna-induced headaches.  Attendance grew and grew, however, when the word got around about Lorna’s talent as a sculptor and teacher and because rumors began to circulate, whispered on the shuffleboard court or at the market, that if the students progressed acceptably Lorna might bring in live models.
    Life in Punta Cachazuda wasn’t bad.  May visited them each year for a couple of weeks, and even she agreed that it was not bad.

    It really wasn’t bad, you know.  I had been going to Florida in the winter for—oh I don’t know how long, but I had always gone to Miami Beach.  It was just where everyone went then.  It was where you had fun.  In the sun.  I never dreamed of going anywhere else, and I certainly didn’t like the sound of this Montezuma place when they first wrote to me about it.  It sounded just deadly.  Well, it was deadly in a way, of course.  There wasn’t anything like a nightclub, or even a bar.  There was a recreation hall.  Really.  But, on the other hand, there was all that gorgeous sand, and those transfixing sunsets.  I couldn’t have lived there, of course, but still it wasn’t bad.
   Life was pleasant, their time was filled, and they were doing some of the best work of their lives, but sometimes, watching the sun set into the Gulf, they had the thought that something was missing.  They had no audience.
 
[TO CHAPTER 20]
[TO THE HERB 'N' LORNA CONTENTS LIST]

I'll bet you wish you could do something to keep the Personal History going and growing!
Well, here’s a swell idea from Eric Kraft's plucky publicist, Candi Lee Manning:
Support our underwriters.
Where, oh where would we be without the generous support of the good people at Babbington Studebaker, Leroy Lager, the Babbington Clam Council, and Kap'n Klam? They keep us up and running! Won't you show your thanks by supporting them? Thinking of replacing that old V-12 Kramler? Why not "Drive Home in a Dream"™ from Babbington Studebaker! Thirsty? Quaff "The Acme of Fictional Beers"! Peckish? Scarf a KlamBurger®!
You'll find more swell ideas from Candi Lee here.


You Have to Love It
— Roberta J. Wahlers, The Milwaukee Journal

A Charmer
Library Journal

DO YOU HAVE YOUR COPY?

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)
You can order it on the Web from
AMAZON.COM BARNES&NOBLE.COM

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


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.


THE PERSONAL HISTORY

LITTLE FOLLIES
HERB ’N’ LORNA
RESERVATIONS RECOMMENDED
WHERE DO YOU STOP?
WHAT A PIECE OF WORK I AM
AT HOME WITH THE GLYNNS
LEAVING SMALL’S HOTEL
INFLATING A DOG
PASSIONATE SPECTATOR
MAKING MY SELF
A TOPICAL GUIDE

CLASSIFIEDS
SWELL IDEAS

COMPLETE SITE CONTENTS
WHAT’S NEW?

Personal History Home Page

HOME