Traveling is a fool’s paradise. . . . At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. . . . My giant goes with me wherever I go.

    Chacallit’s own Transcendentalist, Wilhelm Huber, my great-great-grandfather, a sharp-witted descendant of Inge who refused to be silenced, expressed his abhorrence of Chacallit’s name-changing in remarkably similar terms:
 

    This business of changing the name of our town is a foolish practice. . . . We imagine that if we call ourselves Naples, or Rome, we will become intoxicatingly beautiful, and the Naples Collar-Pin Company will come a-courting, or the Roman Sleeve Garter firm will affiance us, and we will then, at last, be laughingstocks no longer. We tear down our old signs, erect our new signs, and embark next morning on a new life as Naples, but in our mirrors we still see the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that we meant to flee from: our giant, ourselves.

    By the turn of the Twentieth Century, Chacallit was again Chacallit, and the town was supplying suspenders, cuff links, collar stays, belt buckles, tie tacks, and the like worldwide.
    With the arrival of the twentieth century came a slow decline in interest in men’s furnishings, and that, of course, meant economic decline for Chacallit.  For decades, this was a gradual slipping, but then in the period following the Second World War the bottom really fell out of the domestic men’s furnishings market.  There were many reasons.  Primary among them was the belief among younger men that everything had been changed by the war, that nothing was the same, that nothing prewar had much of a role in the postwar world, that the world had broken forever with its past, had left its sad old self behind.  Interest in suspenders, detachable collars, shirt studs, and cuff links disappeared among younger men as if overnight.  Though some interest in such haberdashery persisted among the older, more conservative, and wealthier, those men were increasingly attracted to the products of the rebuilding Europe, especially those of England and Germany, which were thought to be of a quality that the domestic products couldn’t match.  (How ironic that the people around Chacallit who lost so much to that competition should be mostly of English and German ancestry themselves, and proud of it.  Many people in Chacallit still distribute gifts on Boxing Day, and there’s still an annual wurst, kraut, and potato salad festival every summer.)
    For nearly three decades following World War II, Chacallit slept.  It was awakened at last by a local boy, Deke Schumacher, who, riding the crest of a wave of success as Vice President for Computer Furniture at IBM, walked away from it all in a huff one day and returned home, to the steep hills of Chacallit, beside the rushing waters of the Whatsit, to start his own computer furniture company.  Sales of the ChacalliTech Computer Scooter, a platform—actually a whole line of platforms of various sizes—that can be installed under computer components, allowing one to move them around at will, exceeded even the sunniest predictions of Deke himself.  What the ChacalliTech ads say about the Scooter (borrowing, probably unconsciously, from a nineteenth-century advertisement for Studebaker wagons) is true: “The Brightest Star in the Computer Furniture Firmament Is the ChacalliTech Computer Scooter™.”
    Chacallit today is, in outward appearance, remarkably like the town in which Lorna grew up, and that similarity is the result of a pattern of economic decline and renewal that first isolated Chacallit from architectural modernization and then rescued it from physical decay.  Had the town prospered throughout this century, modernization and overdevelopment would certainly have obliterated its past.  Instead, Chacallit dozed until the ChacalliTech prosperity brought new hope for the future and an urge to restore and preserve the past, with the result that, when I visited, I found that I could easily imagine life in Chacallit as it must have been in the early part of this century, when Lorna was a girl.
    When Lorna was born, the century had just turned, and the mills hummed, turning out suspenders, collars, collar stays, cuff links, money clips, and the like.  Money seemed to flow into the town as swiftly as the swollen waters of the Whatsit in a January thaw.  Today, the gentlemen’s furnishings that one finds in the bright shops along River Road are likely to come from Japan, but prosperity has returned.  The old brick mills along the Whatsit have been painstakingly restored, and some of the stern, handsome buildings now house the humming facilities of ChacalliTech.
    All along River Road a visitor will find, in other resurrected mills and warehouses, charming shops—among them the Tie-Tack Tack Shop and Hot-Cha-Tchotchkes (a treasure trove of a place that specializes in gewgaws of the 1920s)—and intriguing boites and restaurants—including Chez Mom (a homey eatery where one can get Tarte aux Pommes Façon de Mom, and the day’s special is always listed as Les Restes), Eau Boy (an all-water bar with more than a hundred domestic and imported waters), 24-Karat Studs (a gay bar), and the Sleeve Garter Pub (where a Huber tends bar).
    The Whatsit Valley is a pretty but forbidding area.  The winters here are long and cold, as they were then; the autumn woods blaze with color, as they did then; the spring earth is fecund and odorous, as it was then; the summers are damp and languorous, as they were then; and all the year round the night wind howls in the valley as if it held a grudge, just as it did then.
    The houses in Chacallit are plain and staunch.  Only stubborn people could have built their houses here, notched the hillside for foundations, cut and fit the stone, created a level foothold for each house, for themselves, always working against the slope, always working against gravity.  It is as if the difficulty of building here was part of the attraction that Chacallit held for its early settlers.  Here was a place where they could test themselves, their resolve, and their aspirations against the slope, against the unrelenting downward tug.  The builders bequeathed to the generations that followed them a test no less difficult, for they, too, have always to battle the tug of gravity.  The young and well-to-do employees of ChacalliTech who now pay high prices for the staunch hillside houses, who paint them, furnish them sparely and brightly, and landscape their yards with plants that never grew in the valley before, find that the rain washes the grass seed down the slope, the garden cart wants to roll across the lawn into the drainage ditch that runs beside the road, and croquet is a nightmare.

HE PROBLEM was Lorna’s elusive beauty.  Clara and Bertha were envious of it from the moment they saw her, although they never quite realized that that was what they envied.  In fact, they hardly considered Lorna attractive.  Most of the time Lorna’s appearance seemed to them just on the pretty side of plain.  Her beauty really did seem to live in the mind, or the heart, of her beholder.  Bertha and Clara never saw it, but Lorna possessed, throughout her life, an elusive loveliness that showed from certain angles at certain moments, for certain people, a beauty that could enchant a person in the blink of an eye and then would disappear if she turned her head or touched her hair. That fleeting beauty might return a moment or an hour later, all the more tantalizing and desirable for having been away, for being so hard to see clearly, for being so like a twinkling star on a hazy summer night.  Bertha saw and understood the effect of this scintillating beauty, even if she couldn’t see the beauty itself, and it seemed to her bewitching and unfair, an advantage given to Lorna over her, for she was a homely, large-boned, gangling girl.
    That intriguing beauty never left Lorna, not even in the last years of her life, not even when she was ill, when she looked older than she was, when she was pale and weak, and her skin hung in loose folds.  Her beauty in age was not of the type that is a lingering reminder, the lingering remainder, of youthful beauty, the type that makes people say, “She must have been a beauty in her day.”  It was an unchanged, undiminished quality; perhaps it was really a manifestation of inner beauty, and only its representation, never its essence, changed as Lorna aged, so that it was always appropriate to her age and condition.

ACCORDING TO MAY CASTLE, Lorna’s friend and confidante for more than forty years, Lorna never forgot Bertha and Clara’s teasing.
 

    She told me that at an early age, and I mean quite an early age, while Lorna was still sleeping in her parents’ room, Clara and Bertha began to call her Cinderella.  Well, Cinderella!  Isn’t that rather a stupid thing for two sisters to do, call their younger sister Cinderella?  If Lorna was Cinderella, Clara and Bertha would have to be the ugly stepsisters, wouldn’t they?  Well.  I met those sisters on a couple of occasions, when they were grown women, and I would say that they might have been passably good-looking girls once, perhaps when they were very young, but they had become—well—dowdy and positively homely.  I really think they brought it on themselves.  Do you think that can’t be done?  Believe me, it can.  And those husbands of theirs!  At any rate, Clara and Bertha began calling her Cinderella, out of envy you see, and anger, and because Lorna had this absolutely haunting beauty.  Well, my dear!  It was haunting, you would have to call it haunting.  It would positively light her up at unpredictable times, and the sisters must have been—well!—just depressed as hell by the sense that everything would work out for Lorna the way everything worked out for Cinderella, in a way that things would never work out for them, because of this odd beauty she had, you see.  Well, they kept it up as she grew, and then when the sisters began to have suitors, the fellows loved to bounce Lorna on their knee, and so on.  And when Lorna began going to dances, the sisters were still unmarried and they were still going to the dancehall themselves, hunting.  Well, their men friends would bring little Lorna punch and ask to be put on her card, and they began calling her Cinderella too.  But when they said it, these young men, there was moonlight in it, you see.  Well, only then did it dawn on Clara and Bertha that they might be creating a sort of Frankenstein’s Cinderella.  Don’t you just love the idea?  Well, they decided that perhaps they had better knock it off.  But it was too late, you see, because Lorna had been hurt, terribly hurt, by her sisters’ taunting, so hurt that she had no love, no affection of any sort, left for them, and because she was determined now that this name she had endured, this Cinderella that she’d heard so often as a taunt would become a—badge—or a—title—that she could take to show that she had won in the end.  When she sent birthday or Christmas cards to her sisters she signed them Cinderella, and when she had a daughter of her own she named her Ella.

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

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

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

Bookbound at 1-800-959-7323 
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Libros en Español: Herb ’n’Lorna is also available in Spanish from Ediciones Destino. 

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

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

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

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