The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy
 
Herb ’n’ Lorna (A Love Story) by Eric Kraft, as Peter Leroy
Chapter 20: 
In Which Herb and Lorna’s Secret Is Revealed and They Are Enshrined

 

MARK AND MARGOT AND MARTHA were again the catalytic agents.  When Mark graduated from college, Herb and Lorna sent him a congratulatory card, inside which Lorna had written the following note:
Dear Mark, 
    “Congraduations” and all our best wishes.  It’s hard to believe that you’ve already graduated from college.  I guess you know that all our things burned in the Hapgood Brothers Warehouse fire and that we’re going to stay here.  Herb and I would love to have you and the “Grin Twins” come to visit us here in Punta Cachazuda.  All the oldsters will make a fuss over you, but I think you’d enjoy yourselves anyway.  What do you say? 
   Love, 
    Lorna and Herb
    The situation for the trio had not improved.  Separately, they had come to the conclusion that there was no future for them as a trio, that some kind of choice must be made, some choice that would leave a pair and a singleton.  They said yes to Herb and Lorna’s invitation, thinking that a vacation might help, might move them to a resolution.  They drove down to Punta Cachazuda and spent a wonderful week there.  They saw all of Herb and Lorna’s slides of their trip, played countless games of cards—canasta with the women for Margot and Martha, poker with the men for Mark—swam in the Gulf of Mexico, collected shells, sat in the sun, listened to stories about the trip, praised Herb’s watercolor portraits of Punta Cachazudans, and puzzled through some logic problems with Lorna.  On the night before they were to leave, Margot and Mark became engaged.
    It was a perfect night—a clear sky, a bright half-moon, brilliant white sand, a soft breeze.  M & M and Mark were walking along the beach, hand in hand in hand, carefree.  “Mark,” said Martha suddenly, with a playful tone in her voice that disarmed him, “you’ve been cheating on us.”  She looked straight into his eyes.  His heart began to pound, and his palms began to sweat.  He opened his mouth to protest, but she laughed and said, “Don’t say that you haven’t.  We know you have.  We know you’ve been cheating on us because we’ve been cheating on you.  We have to—the only way we can get laid is to go to bed with somebody else.”  There was a silence, and then they all burst out laughing.  It was real hysteria; they fell against each other and stood in a huddle, laughing at the ridiculousness of their Situation.  Finally Martha said, “Mark, ask Margot to marry you and end this.”  She was serious.
    “But—” Mark began.
    “She’s the older one,” said Martha.  She turned and walked away.  When Margot and Mark caught up to her, they had become an engaged couple, and Martha had become Mark’s fiancée’s twin sister.
    The next day, Lorna planned the full Sunday-dinner spread for their last meal together: carrot and celery sticks, olives, sweet gherkins, Waldorf salad, fricasseed chicken, dumplings, peas, chocolate cake.  Margot and Mark and Martha had decided to save the announcement until they were all at the table together, and they must have looked like impatient children while they waited for Herb to pour beer for all of them.
    “We have something to give to you,” said Herb when he had finished pouring.  He turned toward Lorna, and she lifted a napkin to unveil, on the table between them, a tiny box, wrapped in white paper and tied with a white ribbon.
    “And we have something exciting to tell you,” Mark said.  He looked in turn at Margot and Martha.  All three of them were grinning, pleased, excited.
    “Well,” said Herb, “since I’m the oldest—”
    Margot and Martha and Mark snickered.  Herb gave them a quizzical look.  “It’s nothing,” Mark said.  “It just has to do with our announcement.  I’ll explain in a minute.”
    “Well,” said Herb again, “since I’m the oldest, I’m going to go first.”
    “Oh, Herb,” said Lorna, “can’t you see they’re bursting to tell us?  The three of them look like the cat that swallowed the canary.  Let them tell us their announcement first, Herb.”
    “Oh, no, no,” said Martha.  “That’s all right.  Herb should go first.  Age does have its privileges.”  The three of them snickered again.  “You’ll find out why we’re laughing,” said Martha.
    “Well,” said Herb, “now you’ve got me so curious that I want to hear what you’ve got to say.”
    “Please, Herb,” Mark said, “you go first.”
    “Nope,” said Herb.  “I’ve made up my mind.  I’m the oldest—”  He paused, waiting for a laugh and getting one from Margot, who just couldn’t hold it in—  “and I say I want to hear the announcement.”
    “Good for you, Herb,” said Lorna.
    “All right,” said Margot.  “I’ll make it.”  She sat up straight, folded her hands in her lap, and said, “Mark and I are going to get married.”
    Silence.  Mark and Margot and Martha sat there smiling, saying nothing, and Herb and Lorna sat there with their mouths hanging open, saying nothing.  After what seemed like quite a while, Lorna looked at Herb and then looked at the little box on the table.  It seemed to startle her.  “Oh,” she said.  She reached out impulsively and covered the box with the napkin again.  “Oh, my,” she said.
    “Well,” said Herb.  “That’s a surprise.”
    “It’s wonderful,” said Lorna, as if she had just recalled that that was what one said in such a situation.
    “I’m very happy for them,” said Martha, beaming and nodding her head.  She seemed to want to convince them that she was.  “Really,” she said.  “Margot’s older; that’s why she got him.”
    “Oh, yes,” said Lorna, smiling, but smiling in an abstract, theoretical way, as if she were testing the theory that a smile might be the appropriate response.
    “You’re the first to know,” Mark said.
    “Well, it’s lucky that we have a present for you,” said Herb.  He seemed to have recovered his exuberance all at once.  “It’s something we’re really proud of, and there’s quite a story behind it.  Wait until you hear—”
    “Herb,” said Lorna.  She was shaking her head rapidly, her brow was wrinkled, and she was looking down at her plate.
    Herb went on, but he faltered.  “Wait until you hear how we worked it out.  See, I—um—it turns out that Lorna and I both, for years—that is, we never knew that we both were in—um—we got to thinking about what you said, Mark, after that night—”
    “Herb,” said Lorna again.
    “Well,” Herb went on, “it took a lot of thought, a lot of thought, but we came up with—and then Lorna carved it out of ivory, a very good piece of ivory, and just wait till you see the workmanship on this—”
    He reached for the box, but Lorna had her hand clamped firmly over the napkin that hid it.  “No, Herb,” she said.  “We can’t give it to them now.”
    Herb turned toward the trio, confused and, more than that, disappointed.  “But—,” he said.
    Lorna raised her glass and said, “To Mark and Margot: every happiness for now and evermore.  And to Martha: may you find someone just as nice as Mark.”
    They all drank, but the atmosphere in which they drank was certainly strange.  The next day, during the good-byes, Herb apologized for “all that gift business,” and Lorna said that they’d send Margot and Mark something “more appropriate.”  When they asked what the gift was, Herb was all set to get it and show it to them, but Lorna wouldn’t let him, and she said that the best thing would be “for all of us to just forget all about it.”  Then she looked at Mark and Margot and Martha for a moment and added, “At least for now.”
    All the way home Mark and Margot and Martha wondered what the heck was in that box.

THE NEXT EVENING was one of those when the sunset would be visible between the other houses, and Herb and Lorna were sitting on their patio, waiting for Frank and Andrea Cogliano to come over to watch the sun set and drink some old-fashioneds.  The Coglianos were late, and the sky began to redden without them.  Herb was reading the paper, but Lorna was admiring the gold-leaf effect on the rippling surface of the Gulf.  It reminded her of the flaming wavelets on the surface of Lake Serenity the night the ballroom burned, and, of course, it put her in a reflective mood.  “Herb,” she said after a while, “I wish we could tell somebody.  What do you suppose people here would say if we told them about—our work?”
    Herb didn’t say anything.
    “I mean—our work, Herb.  The jewelry.  Coarse goods.  The charms.  The moving parts.  The sculptures.  Everything.”
    Herb spoke from behind the paper.  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said.
    “Even more than that,” said Lorna, dreaming.  “Suppose we taught them.  Suppose we gave a class.”
    Herb let his paper fall.  He was wearing the look of a boy who has just been asked, “Do you suppose I can trust you to go into town and sell the cow on your own?”
    “I think everybody would love it,” he said.  “If you want to know the truth, I’ve wanted to tell people ever since we got here.  Every time I meet someone new, it’s always the same thing.  Everybody introduces himself by telling you what he used to do.  ‘I’m a postal clerk,’ he’ll say, ‘retired, of course.’  Or, ‘I’m a tugboat captain—retired, of course.’  And I say, ‘I’m a Studebaker salesman—retired, of course.’  Well, what the hell, I’ve got nothing against being a Studebaker salesman, but I was just itching to say, ‘I’m a coarse-goods designer and salesman—retired, of course.’ ”
    Lorna had been grinning.  She stopped.  “I didn’t mean to have them make things to sell,” she said.
    “Oh,” said Herb.  “Why not?”
    “Well, that would—” she caught herself.
    “Cheapen it?”
    “I—”
    “I’m surprised at you, Lorna.”
    “So am I.  I’m sorry, Herb.”
    “Is that what you’ve thought—all along?”
    “I’m—not sure.”
    “Damn.”
    “Oh, Herb.  It’s just that it seems to me—I suppose it always seemed to me—that the bad part of what I was doing—the ugly part—”
    “Was the part I was involved in.”
    “No.”
    “Yes.”
    “Not the mechanical part.”
    “But the selling part.”
    “You said yourself that you only got involved in it because you needed the money, your family needed the money.”
    “Yes. Yes. But—I liked it.  I loved it.  That was the best stuff I ever had to sell—better than the ’fifty-five Starliner.  Much better.”
    “But wouldn’t it be even better, wouldn’t it have been even better if you hadn’t had to sell them?”
    “That’s not what you mean.  I know what you mean.  You mean, ‘Wouldn’t they have been better if they hadn’t been made to sell?’ ”
    “I suppose I do.”
    “I don’t think so.  Would the Starliner have been better if it hadn’t been made to sell?  There’s no telling what kind of strange ideas Loewy would have come up with if he hadn’t had to make a car that somebody would buy.  You know, all you have to do to see what I mean is to look at the gadgets I started making back there when I was spending all that time in the cellar, worrying.  And the gadgets that the fellows in my class like to make.  They’re things to kill time.  They’re—”
    “Herb.”
    “Well, you know what I mean, Lorna.  They’re—silly.”
    “Many of the things you’ve made were very clever.”
    “Oh, they were all clever, but some of them were silly.”
    Lorna laughed and put her arms around Herb.  “I think I understand what you mean,” she said.
    “So you wouldn’t mind if we sold what they make—the best of what they make?”
    “No, I wouldn’t mind.”
    “Everybody could use the extra money.  Besides, if they’ve got something to sell, I can get them to show up for my salesmanship classes.”
    “Hello-wo-wo!”  It was Andrea Cogliano.  She was tapping at the front door.  Lorna went to let her and Frank in, and Herb folded the paper and put it aside.  Andrea came out to the patio in the middle of an explanation for their being late.  “—and would you believe we left the house twenty minutes ago?” she was saying.  She bent over to give Herb a kiss on the cheek and squeeze his knee.
    “Guten Abend, Herb,” said Frank.  “Das ist ein schön Sonnenuntergang, n’est-ce pas?”
    “Sun-in—?” asked Herb. 
    Frank pointed at the sanguine pellet dropping gulfward. 
    “Ah!” said Herb.  “La puesta de sol.”
    “Yeah.  ‘Sol’s pot,’ ” said Frank.
    “Heh-heh,” said Herb.
    Andrea told a complex and not uninteresting story of glasses forgotten, mislaid, discovered, dropped, stepped on, and broken beyond repair.  Herb served drinks, and Lorna put out an oval platter of celery and carrots and green olives stuffed with pimiento.  When Frank, at the end of Andrea’s story, pulled the twisted glasses from his jacket pocket and put them on, Herb and Lorna laughed heartily, but you and I would have been able to hear their nervousness, I think, if we’d been there.  Slowly, cautiously, tentatively, made apprehensive by the fact—which they both understood so clearly—that they were about to put at risk their continued residence in Punta Cachazuda, they turned the chat from glasses to classes.  Lorna expressed a desire for something new.  Herb concurred.  The Coglianos concurred too, and Herb got up to make another round of drinks.  Lorna hopped up to get some more carrot sticks.
    In the kitchen, she asked Herb, “Are they just being polite?”
    “Hard to tell,” he said.  “Go easy for a while.  See if they’ve got anything to say.”
    Herb passed the drinks around.  The sun dropped below the horizon; a plum glow remained.  No one said anything for a while.  Then Frank, as if from the depths of thought, offered the observation that, “It would be nice to have something new.”
    “Maybe Japanese,” said Andrea.
    “That’s a good idea,” said Lorna.
    “How about investing,” said Frank.  “Understanding the stock market and that sort of thing?  There are some smart cookies here, you know.”
    “Well, I—that’s a good idea,” said Herb.
    “Or—say!” said Frank.  “How about handicapping?”
    “What?” asked Lorna.
    “Betting on racehorses,” said Herb.  “Not a bad idea, Frank—”
    “You know, I’ve had an idea,” said Lorna.  She could feel her nervousness in her neck and across her shoulders, where the muscles tensed in an unfamiliar way.  “I—uh—”  They were all looking at her.  Under the table, she clenched her fists.  “Make us another old-fashioned, will you, Herb?” she said.
    “I just did.”
    “Oh.  So you did.  Well, drink up, everybody, and Herb will make another round.”  She drained her glass.
    “My goodness, Lorna,” said Andrea, “you don’t usually—”
    “Oh, I just feel frisky tonight.  Drink up.”  They did.  “Make another round, Herb.  Before the last of the light is gone.  I’ll tell everybody my idea when you get back.”
    Herb dashed into the house, whipped up more old-fashioneds haphazardly, slopping whiskey, spilling sugar, hacking chunks from an orange and tossing them in, and, as soon as the drinks were ready, dashed out to the garage.  From under the folding workbench, he dragged the footlocker in which he kept his tools.  He tossed the tools onto the floor, whistling while he worked.  From the very bottom he took a metal box with a skull and crossbones on it, one of the few things he had brought from the old stucco house in Babbington.  From the very bottom of this box he took a leather pouch, and from that he took one of the two Watchcase Wonders that he and Lorna had.  He dashed to the living room, where he pried Lorna’s papier-mâché duck apart and took from it the other Watchcase Wonder, the one that they had made for Mark and Margot and Martha.  It was still wrapped.  He thought better of unwrapping it, put it back in the duck, and reassembled the halves.  Then he ran back into the kitchen, grabbed the flour cannister, and, with both thumbs, popped the lid from it.  He poured the flour onto the counter and began poking through it to find a couple of the tiny sculptures he and Lorna had hidden there.  Shortly, he came back onto the patio, grinning like the cat that swallowed the canary, whistling happily, with flour all over his hands and forearms, carrying a tray with the drinks.
    Lorna held her drink in both hands and said, “Well. Here’s my idea.  I—”  She looked at Herb.  He was beaming.  He was impatient.  She winked at him.  She said, “You know Herb is a Studebaker salesman—retired, of course.”  The Coglianos nodded.  “I wondered if you knew that he also used to design, and sell, jewelry and—art objects?”  The Coglianos shook their heads.  “Well, he did,” said Lorna.  “He designed it, and I made it, and he sold it.”
    “C’est bien vrai?” asked Frank.
    Herb thrust his floured hands forward and spread them open.  In them he held a silver watchcase, which the Coglianos regarded with patient interest.  Herb pressed the stem, the lid opened, and the Coglianos leaned toward the center of the table for a closer look.  Herb began twisting the knob.  Lorna allowed herself to breathe when she saw the fascination on the Coglianos’ faces.
    “You made this?” asked Andrea, looking first at Lorna, who smiled discreetly, lips together, and then at Herb, who nodded vigorously and fairly shouted, “Mira esa hechura, will you!”


 
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THE CLASSES were a success from the start, though Herb and Lorna tried to keep them from growing too quickly by swearing the students to secrecy.  The secret was a hard one to keep, as hard as the original secret discovery of one’s own sexuality, that secret we’re immediately eager to spill, the biggest and best secret that we ever have held in common, the secret that joins us.  How rare it was and how delightful it must have been for the wrinkled citizens of Punta Cachazuda to get, late in life, a chance to wear again the self-satisfied smirks they had last worn when, as adolescents, they each had first discovered whatever bit of the great mystery of human sexual pleasure each had first discovered.  Rarer still, and quite possibly more delightful still, was the unexpected return of the opportunity to reveal the discovery to a friend, or, if one’s friends already knew (and how disappointingly often they did or pretended to), to an acquaintance, anyone who would admit ignorance and listen.  Many a student of Herb and Lorna’s rediscovered giggling.  Every one of them was bursting to tell someone else, and most of them had a specific someone in mind.  I wish I could say that they wanted to tell out of a spirit of generosity, an elevated desire to enlighten other Punta Cachazudans, but in most cases, it was a desire to show, even though it would be only for the brief moment of the telling of the secret, that they knew more than their fellows.  It’s a baser desire, but it may underlie more didactic efforts than the nobler one.
    Since every student wanted to enlist someone else, and neither Herb nor Lorna could resist for long the pleading of one student to bring in another, the classes grew and grew.  Not every student arrived in a state of ignorance.  A few brought with them treasured, and long-hidden, examples of coarse goods.  Two of these were products of Herb and Lorna’s unwitting collaboration.  One, they discovered to their great surprise, was an item they had sold to a lanky, dark-haired, gum-chewing gas-station attendant in Sundown, Texas, not very long before their arrival in Punta Cachazuda.
    The first classes, hardly classes at all, were held in Herb and Lorna’s garage.  When the enrollment exceeded the capacity of the garage, they expanded into the living room, and when the combined garage and living room became too crowded, they began meeting twice a week, then three times a week, and eventually they were meeting six days a week and still were unable to accommodate everyone.  Clearly, the thing to do was to crawl out from underground and move the classes to the recreation hall.  By this time, the secret was hardly secret within the town: nearly every Punta Cachazudan with any mechanical or modeling ability at all was enrolled in one of the classes and had set up a little clandestine workshop at home, usually in the garage, most of workshops built according to plans Herb furnished, so that the whole operation could be folded against a wall and concealed behind what appeared to be a handy swing-away ironing-and-mending center.  Those who couldn’t make erotic jewelry or sculpture sold it, and those who couldn’t sculpt or sell modeled. 
    To get the use of the recreation hall, the Punta Cachazudans were going to have to speak to the only people in town who weren’t yet in the know: the Bagnells.  It dawned on Herb and Lorna and their students, when they found themselves giggling and blushing while discussing the need to approach the Bagnells, that the timidity, the fear, and the embarrassment they felt were nearly identical to the feelings they would have felt, or had felt, in admitting—confessing—to their parents, however indirectly, that they had experienced some of the secret pleasures that separate adults from children.
    A delegation was chosen.  They marched, giggling in spite of themselves, to the home of Bobo Bagnell, and, biting their tongues to keep their faces straight, demanded that they be given permission to use the recreation hall for classes in the design and manufacture of erotic jewelry and objets d’art.  Bobo, baffled, consented, in the belief that the bizarre request was just part of a scheme to get him to come to the recreation hall the following evening, where, he supposed, the Punta Cachazudans intended to throw a surprise party to celebrate his eightieth birthday.  The next evening, he dressed in his white linen suit and walked to the recreation hall, which, he could see, was filled nearly to capacity.  When he entered, a moment passed before anyone noticed him, but when people did, they began to applaud him, and their applause made more notice him, and they began to applaud him.  When they began singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” Bobo’s eyes misted over.  The cupcakes and coffee they served him were not, he admitted to himself, a lavish spread for an eightieth birthday celebration, but it was the thought that counted, and he thought that the decorations on the cupcakes, little amorous couples intimately entwined, were clever, amusing, and flattering.
    In the years that followed, the Punta Cachazudans tried to confine their secret to the town, to protect their art and industry from an uncertain reception outside, but there was in them that urge to tell, and now and then one or another gave in to it, and the secret spread somewhat, underground, whispered or mumbled.  The farther it spread from Punta Cachazuda, the more preposterous it seemed, and so there were no southward swarms of the curious and salacious except for a small flock of young people inspired by a mention in the second edition of The Whole Earth Catalog:
    If you’re going to be in the area, you might want to check out a neo-Transcendentalist erotico-artistic community in west coastal Florida called Punta Cachazuda.  I didn’t have a lot of time to really get to  know the place, but I got a lot of good feelings about it when I was there.  These people are old, but a lot of them are into some interesting ideas in collaborative art and city planning, and I think there’s some kind of pan-linguistic movement going on here, too, like home-grown Esperanto or something.  Check it out. 
       —Allspice
That, however, was a passing curiosity, and the widespread recognition that Punta Cachazudans simultaneously feared and desired didn’t come until recently.  We’ll get to that in a moment, but to be faithful to chronology I have to tell you what happened next.
    Herb had never really been healthy after he and Lorna reached Punta Cachazuda.  He was bothered by a flurry of minor ailments, and they left him weakened and wary.  Then one evening, after he had finished teaching a class in the articulation of hip joints, he had a heart attack.  It struck him while he was sitting quietly in his easy chair, reading the latest issue of Amateur Mechanical Engineer.  The attack scared the hell out of Herb and made Lorna so solicitous of him that he couldn’t help laughing at the way she bustled about, doing for him.  Her own heart ached with concern for him.  She couldn’t stand being out of reach of him, and the possibility of losing him seemed to be dwelling in their little cement-block house like an unwelcome guest.  At night she often found herself awake, murmuring a plea to this presence, this possibility of death, to get out of her house, to go visit someone else for a while, to go, go away.  After a while, Herb’s fear began to wane, and he began to make light of the first attack, calling it, as many of his Punta Cachazudan cronies did, “his warning.”  Lorna began letting him out of her sight again, and she began to feel that the possibility of death had moved on, was visiting elsewhere for a while.  When she returned from a shopping trip one morning, Herb was dead in his easy chair.
    One glorious fall day, years later, I gained, accidentally, an understanding of how Lorna must have felt then.  I was driving alone along a country road, feeling an exhilaration that sometimes comes to me on a fine fall day and at no other time.  It is due, I think, partly to the vestigial rhythm of the academic calendar, which makes spring a time of anxiety and fall a time of rebirth, new opportunities, a clean slate; it is also due in part to the crisp weather, of course, and the autumn colors in the countryside.  In the road ahead of me was a dead male pheasant.  He was lying on his side, with his neck extended and one wing in the air.  At the side of the road was a female pheasant, his mate.  She approached him, calling, not keening, but calling out.  Then she turned away, began to walk away, turned back and called out again, turned away, turned back, and so on, as if confused and almost annoyed, as if she were saying, “Come on now, get up.  Quit fooling around.  We still have a long way to go, a lot to do.  Don’t lie down now—we have a long way to go together.”  I stopped the car and watched her in painful fascination.  I couldn’t have driven on anyway; my eyes were full of tears.
    Lorna stayed on in Punta Cachazuda for a couple of lonely years, but then the house where she and Herb had lived together in Babbington came back on the market, and Lorna bought it, for cash, and returned to Babbington.  Everything that she and Herb had had in the house had been lost in the warehouse fire, so Lorna lived with secondhand furniture that she and Ella picked up in a week of rapid shopping, which Ella enjoyed enormously but Lorna thought of as something she wanted to get through as quickly as she could.  Ella had been attracted to new Colonial-style things, but Lorna had wanted to duplicate as closely as she could the feeling the house had had when she and Herb had lived there, when it had been furnished with things that Herb had made and things they’d picked up here and there over the years, and so she avoided stores that sold new furniture and steered Ella toward secondhand shops.  The house was furnished, and looked cozily cluttered, but there was a hollow in it, a rarefied pocket where Herb should have been.
    Of Lorna then, May said:
 Well, after he died, I mean, after Herb died—  Well.  Oh, Lorna and I still had some grand times—  No.  No, we didn’t.  Not really.  I tried to play Lorna to her May—cheer her up, make her look forward to something—but she was just coasting after Herb died, you know.  Just coasting. 
    When her cancer was diagnosed, Lorna told no one, but something about her manner, a finality in the way she began to handle her affairs, in her visits to old friends, convinced Ella that something was fatally wrong, and because cancer was what Ella feared most, she guessed, correctly, that that was it.
    Mark and Margot and Martha visited Lorna.  Ella had told them what she feared and made them promise not to betray to Lorna in any way what she had told them.  They found themselves, against their wills, looking for and finding signs that Lorna was weakening.  Was she thinner?  Was she fragile?  Was she too tired?  Was she having trouble breathing?  Yes, she was.  She was eager to hear their news, but it seemed that they didn’t have enough news to fill the time they spent with her, certainly not enough to fill the hollow in the house.  The news they had brought was gone too soon, like firewood that’s too dry.  After an hour or so, Lorna began to drift into reminiscence.  The three M’s loved hearing her stories, and they would have listened contentedly for hours, would have asked for more, would have asked the questions they were curious about, if they hadn’t worried that the reminiscences were painful for her, that perhaps it hurt her to have Herb come to mind.  The truth was that Herb was always on her mind, and that reminiscing about him was more pleasant than painful.  Not having him with her was what hurt her; remembering him didn’t hurt her at all.
    Mark drove to the Gilded Peacock and brought back cartons of chicken chow mein.  While they ate, Lorna recalled their visit to Punta Cachazuda, and the fricasseed-chicken dinner at which Margot had announced their engagement.  When Lorna began talking about that dinner she sat up straighter, and her spirit seemed to return to her.  Soon she was even laughing.  This wasn’t just the feeble laughter she’d managed earlier in the evening, but real laughter, laughter that betrayed her illness when it made her breathless, but a joy to hear despite that.
    “Poor Herb,” she said.  “I remember the way he tried to go on with the speech he’d practiced and give you the gift we’d made.”  She laughed again, and ran out of breath again.  “You can’t imagine what we went through to make that.”
    Her expression became serious.  She put down her fork.  She put her elbows on the table and laced her fingers together.  “Tell me something,” she said.  “Tell me how it’s working out.  Are you happy?”
    “Are we happy?” Mark asked.
    “Are—all three of you happy?  Martha, you haven’t married.  I wonder—I wonder if I know why.  What—how—how do the three of you—get along?”
    “Oh, very well,” said Martha.  “We get along beautifully together.”
    “But—how?” asked Lorna.  “I want to hear all about it.”
    “Well—” said Mark, sheepishly, looking into his plate.
    “You remember the night when you told Herb and me that you three were in love, don’t you?”
    “Of course,” said Mark.
    “You told us everything then.”
    “I was a little drunk.”
    “You’re a little drunk now, aren’t you?”
    “Just a little.”
    “I’ll tell,” said Margot.
    “Me too,” said Martha.
    Together, the three of them managed to tell Lorna what sort of life had evolved for them.  Shyness, coupled with the youthful assumption that the experiences of the old have been too limited for them to understand young lust, kept them from telling her quite everything, but they told her most of it.

WITH THE MARRIAGE of Mark and Margot, the trio seemed to have found a solution to their Situation, a conventional, traditional solution.  Martha was maid of honor at the wedding, and after Margot and Mark left the reception, they didn’t see Martha for months. Naïvely, simplemindedly, all three imagined that their Situation had been left behind in their crazy past, part of a complicated courtship that they would recall with laughter in the years to come.  None of them knew how much more complicated their Situation would grow.
    Margot and Mark had been married for a little more than a year when Mark had to travel to Washington for a conference.  He didn’t have to go; going was supposed to be good for his career.  For several reasons, he didn’t want to go.  For one thing, he was afraid to fly.  For another, he was afraid of making a fool of himself at the conference.  In the end, he decided that he ought to go.  The night before he was to leave, while Margot and he were packing his things, he was nervous, as one might expect.  He would be the most junior person attending, and he knew that this was his big chance to improve his standing among his colleagues and, of course, his big chance to make an ass of himself.  He was also feeling sentimental; he and Margot would be apart for a week, and they hadn’t spent a single night apart since they had been married.  Margot seemed a little “on edge,” and Mark was touched by what he took to be a reaction to the thought of their being apart, concern for his safety, for his chances, for them, their chances.  When Margot got into bed, she turned onto her side, away from Mark.  He turned the light off, reached out for her and stroked her hip.
    She said, “I’m sorry.  I’m just too tense.”
    Mark told her that he understood, and he rolled onto his side, facing away from her, facing the wall in fact, for at that time they were sleeping on a ridiculous and uncomfortable bed that Mark had built from two-by-fours, a bed that was shoved into a corner of the bedroom, so that Mark slept nearly surrounded, with a wall at his head, a wall on one side, and Margot on the other.  The truth was that Mark didn’t understand at all; he was hurt and annoyed.  He felt that Margot owed him something, a demonstration of her love for him, her confidence in him, her pride in him, since he would be taking a real risk by getting into an airplane and flying to a distant city for the sake of improving his position among people whom he regarded as a bunch of pompous, egotistical, capable, urbane, and frightening bastards, all for the sake of making life better for him and Margot in the future, a little more luxurious, a little more exciting.  He had expected to get from her a token, something to carry with him through his ordeal: he had expected not just that they would make love on the night before he left—their marriage was only a year old, after all—but even more, that there would be in Margot’s lovemaking new heights of passion and abandon that he would remember with a smile during the days in Washington, drawing from the memory new strength and wit when he was doing verbal battle with some hoary luminary in one of the symposia.  Instead, he got nothing.
    In the morning, before Mark left for the airport, Margot was up early, and she made him an elaborate breakfast.  While he was eating his waffles and sausage and drinking his orange blossom, outwardly composed, inwardly contending with a clamorous mob of emotions, she sat across from him and simply watched him.  She was happy.  She was experiencing, Mark could see, genuine pleasure; it manifested itself in a Grin-Twin grin, a luxurious stretching, an unfamiliar way of savoring her coffee.  Mark finished eating.  He went to the bathroom and urinated and washed his hands and brushed his teeth.  When he came out, Margot was waiting in the hall with his coat, scarf, gloves, and suitcase.  When they kissed good-bye, she kissed him with a tenderness that made him feel absolutely wonderful.
    “Mark,” she said, pulling away, taking his hands in hers, and looking him in the eyes, “when you get back, I won’t be here.”
    “Oh, my God,” Mark said.  The effect her words had on him, dropping him in an instant from wonderful to miserable, was to return, an hour and a half later, when the plane to Washington hit an air pocket.
    “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said at once.  “I didn’t mean it that way.  I’m not leaving you.  I love you, Mark.”  This had the effect that the plane’s leveling off had later.  Mark was relieved, but his confidence had been shaken; he had been reminded how little holds us up.  “I just need a vacation from you,” Margot said.  And then it all came rushing out of her.  “You worry too much, Mark, and you try too hard to plan ways to be content and happy, and worst of all you worry about being happy or not being happy, and you’re always worrying about the future, about whether you’ll amount to anything, whether we’ll be comfortable, and your worrying’s wearing me out.  Besides—”  She turned away from him and looked out the door.  “—it isn’t fair.  It isn’t fair to Martha.  I think about her, alone, and I can’t—enjoy myself with you.  I need a vacation, and she needs a turn with you.  She’ll be here when you get back.  She’s going to take my place for a while.”
    Martha was waiting for Mark when he returned.  She met him at the door, looking impish.  She gave him a hug and the quickest of kisses.  She had a Scotch and soda ready for him, she made poached salmon for dinner, and after dinner she made love to him with the reckless passion he had expected from Margot a week earlier.  In time, a little more than six months’ time, Martha had had enough.  She came out of the bathroom after her shower one Saturday morning, still working at her hair with a towel, and stopped in her tracks when she saw Mark sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, smoking a cigarette, worrying, and making a list of topics that he thought required Martha’s worrying as well as his own.  Martha watched him add items to the list for a couple of moments and then went on into the bedroom and in a very short time came back out, dressed, striding toward the door.
    “Where are you going?” Mark asked.
    “Shopping!” she shouted.
    “With your hair wet?” he asked.  She slammed the door on his question.
    A couple of hours later Mark was sitting on the kitchen floor, painting a metal cabinet that he had picked up at a used-furniture store.  He heard the door open.  He heard footsteps.  He made a point of not turning from his work.  If Martha was not going to share his depression, well, then he had nothing else to share with her for the time being.  He heard the usual sounds of unpacking groceries, and then he heard an unaccustomed one: the pop of a champagne cork.  He couldn’t have hidden his surprise if he had tried.  He laid his brush across the paint can, stood, and said, before he even turned to look at her, “Welcome back, Margot.”
    A pattern was established that was, probably, beneficial for all of them during a difficult time.  They discovered, in a roundabout and difficult way, a means to two qualities that most marriages need to be successful: stability and change.  Because Margot and Martha have since childhood called each other “Mar,” a change from Margot to Martha or from Martha to Margot was known among the trio as a changing of the Mars.  Like a change in the weather, a change of Mars had its front, and the front brought confusion, unsettled emotional weather.  When the Mars changed, the returning one was refreshed, a little coy, and had a voracious sexual appetite and a conversational urge that filled the house with ardor and chatter for a week or more.  Then a new front would arrive, and all of them were buffeted again by shifting gusts.  They longed for gentler weather.

“WELL,” said Lorna when they had finished.  “Well, well, well.” 
    There was a twinkle in her eye, and she hopped up from the table with all of her old energy.  On the sideboard was her old papier-mâché duck.  She pried the duck apart, and from it she produced the very box that Mark and Margot and Martha had seen in Punta Cachazuda.  Clearly enjoying herself very much, she said, “I kept it for you because I had a hunch that the marriage idea wasn’t going to work out.  I don’t mean that I thought you would break up; I mean that I thought you’d get back together.  Here.”
    She handed the box to Mark. 
    “I hope you all—”  She paused and gave them a mischievous grin, and her cheeks colored.  “—enjoy it.”
    Mark started to untie the ribbon, but Lorna stopped him.  “Oh, no,” she said.  “I’d be much too embarrassed.  If Herb were here, it would be different, but I’d be much too embarrassed alone.  Open it when you get home, when you’re alone, just the three of you.”
    They were staying with Margot and Martha’s parents, as they usually did when they visited Babbington.  The house was dark when they returned.  They crept inside, fixed themselves drinks, and settled onto the living room sofa.  Mark put the little box on the coffee table in front of them.
    “All right,” said Martha.  “I claim the right to open it, since I’m the youngest, and the youngest usually gets the short end of things.”
    “Do you really feel that way?” Mark asked.
    “Maaark,” said Margot, “she’s only kidding.  Go ahead, Mar, I want to see it.”
    It looked like a pocket watch.  Martha opened the case.  Inside was a bed, no larger than a commemorative stamp, carved from ivory, with rumpled sheets and, on the rumpled sheets, entangled, three ivory figures, two women and a man.
    “Oh, my God,” said Margot.  Her mouth dropped open and she covered it with her hand.
    “I’m going to get Daddy’s magnifying glass,” said Martha.
    With the aid of the glass, they could see that the women were good likenesses of Margot and Martha, though not so good that they could decide which was which.
    “That’s deliberate,” said Martha with respect and admiration.
    The man was just as certainly Mark.  He said so.
    “I’m not sure, Mark,” said Martha, giggling.  “This guy is really, um, large.”
    On the side of the case was a tiny knurled knob.  Slowly, gently, Mark turned it.
    “Oh, that’s wonderful!” said Margot.
    “That’s me,” said Martha.  “I’m on top.”
    “Look at that!” said Margot.  “Mark’s actually—oops—now he’s out again.”
    “Ooooh!” squealed Martha.  “What a quick switch!”
    “Will you look at that!” said Margot.  “What workmanship!”
    “Back it up, Mark,” said Martha.  “Can you make it go backwards?  I want to see how we did that, or how we’re supposed to do that.”
    “No, let them keep going,” said Margot.  “Oh, look!  I knew it!  I knew we could work something like that.”
    “If I can just raise my hips that way—” said Martha.
    “Slide my left leg under—” said Margot.
    “Rhythm.  Rhythm is important,” Mark said.
    “Can your back take that, Mark?” asked Margot.
    “I can build up to it,” Mark said, hoping he was right.
    “If we miss a beat,” said Martha, “we’ll wind up permanently entangled.”
    It was a long and sweaty night.  They did not achieve the impossible, but they discovered a taste that they had been suppressing, one they have indulged ever since.

AND THEN, well, I’ll let May say it: 
    And then, well, Lorna died too.  At least neither of them had to go through that dreadful Alzheimer’s business.  I mean, what a damned injustice it is for someone who’s been an absolute delight to have to become all sort of baffled.  But—they didn’t, thank God.  They even became famous—quite famous.  They’re the only famous people I’ve known, really.  The only famous people I’ve had dinner with.  I wish they were around to enjoy it.  I’m sure they would enjoy it.  I know I would enjoy it.
    Today, in Punta Cachazuda, clusters of multi-story condominium buildings occupy most of the section nearest the Gulf, where Humboldt and Bitsy Bagnell built the first of the original cement-block houses.  Each of the apartments boasts a balcony that faces Gulfward, and on these balconies the residents sit at sunset and think.  The town has reproduced itself many times, spreading farther and farther inland.  Its plan of meandering roads, sidewalks, and canals has become the model for many other communities along the Florida coast.  The town’s population is many times what it was when Herb and Lorna lived there, and fully ninety-six percent of the residents are engaged in some aspect of erotic sculpture.
    Notoriety came, when it came, first through admiration, not condemnation.  The revival of interest in crafts and folk art led to the “discovery” of erotic jewelry and the other erotic crafts and arts, to the revelation of the “colony” in Punta Cachazuda, and to the Smithsonian’s mounting of the erotic-jewelry exhibit.  In the current cultural climate, the Punta Cachazudans prosper, and their art prospers, despite the occasional outraged yowl.  Since it is in the nature of humankind to diversify in matters of taste, it shouldn’t be surprising that today’s Punta Cachazudans work in a bewildering variety of media and styles.  There are traditionalists who work in shell, amber, and a plastic substitute for ivory, who make nothing larger than a Watchcase Wonder.  There are ultraminiaturists, some of whom “carve” with laser light and observe their work under electronic magnification with the aid of computer-enhanced imaging made possible in part by a grant from ChacalliTech.  There are “charmers,” who produce coy, vulgar, cheap cast-metal and plastic charms with elementary moving parts.  Apparently enough people consider these trinkets amusing “gag gifts” with which to mark birthdays, engagements, and wedding anniversaries to make manufacturing the things a profitable business.  The charmers are to be distinguished from the “charmists,” say the charmists, whose work is equally vulgar, but, because they work in precious metals, not cheap.  There are some who work life-size, in the pliable flesh-emulating plastics used for bouncing baby dolls.  Their work may be obscene; I haven’t made up my mind.  There are also, I hasten to say, many Punta Cachazudans who have no collective name for themselves, who make intricately animated, individualized, affectionate, delightfully lusty charms and men’s jewelry in the Lorna-and-Herb tradition.
    The Punta Cachazuda recreation center today is much more than the single cement-block building it was in Herb and Lorna’s time.  It is a cluster of buildings, situated in the empty place left between four replications of the original plan for the town, like one of the four-cusped bits of dough left after cutting cookies.  Its handsome buildings and broad lawns make it look much like a college campus.  The largest and most impressive of the buildings are the sculpture studio and the hangarlike mechanical shop, in either of which, at any time of day, you will find men and women whistling, and sometimes giggling, while they work on erotic sculpture and the mechanisms to make them move.
    At the center of this recreation campus is a huge wind-driven erotic mobile.  It is a smooth, idealized work.  It depicts a copulating couple, a dozen times life size.  When the wind passes over the arched and rounded surfaces of their bodies, they rise and fall, embrace and draw apart, tumble and turn, kiss, caress, and couple, in ways designed by the artist but powered, prompted, and provoked by nature.  In a zephyr, their movements are gentle and tender.  In hurricanes, their antics are the stuff of legends, of giants in the earth, whose couplings make the ground beneath us tremble.  The figures are intended, I’m sure, to represent Everyman and Everywoman, but in a certain gesture, a little eccentricity, a moment in which they pause and he brushes her cheek with his lips, from certain angles, in a certain slant of light, I seem to see my grandparents, Gumma and Guppa, Herb and Lorna.
 
[POST SCRIPT]
[TO THE HERB 'N' LORNA CONTENTS LIST]

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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. 

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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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