Reduce, Lorna thought.  I should reduce.

That will be fun.  It will be fun to go to the World’s Fair.  There were photographs of models of statues to be erected on the fair’s central mall.  Lorna admired the modeling of the musculature of a naked running man who symbolized Day, especially his calves and buttocks.  She didn’t think much of the work on his hair, but she liked the purposeful expression on his face, the economical modeling of his lips and chin.  She didn’t care at all for the woman meant to symbolize Night.  Her features were vague, and her arms and legs were generalized and unattractive, the result, Lorna felt sure, of careless observation.  Her belly looked soft, almost misshapen.  Her breasts were flat and not especially feminine, redeemed only by her small, tight nipples.  I can do much better work than that, Lorna told herself, and she was pleased to find that she felt uplifted by pride in her talent.  She went on.  She read an article about Germany that concluded, “Nazi Germany faces her destiny with the greatest war machine in history.  And the inevitable destiny of the great war machines of the past has been to destroy the peace of the world . . . .”  She flipped past an article on basketball in Indiana, past an advertisement for Old Overholt, Old Taylor, and Old Grand-Dad whiskies, and stopped at:

    On this page is shown another phase of the mania for jingly, conspicuous jewelry.  Here are 109 charms, reproduced slightly larger than life-size.  Each is different.  Although charms are as old as mankind, the present vogue dates back to the Big Depression.  Customers of top-notch jewelers like Cartier, Marcus, or Udall & Ballou, found it a bit difficult to commemorate anniversaries with the usual precious stones.  Instead they bought diminutive charms.  The ladies liked them very much, clamored for more to string on bracelets and necklaces.  In no time at all, charms began to appear in gold, silver and gilt.  The charms on this page range in price from 10¢ to $330.  Most of them are of gold, cost from $4 to $28 and have moving parts.

HERB MADE some sketches, and together they made some prototypes—a tiny silver toaster from which two slices of burnt toast, slivers of walnut wood, emerged; a Studebaker President convertible with a folding top, a working steering wheel, and a hinged hood and doors; and a minuscule piano with four keys that actually struck notes (the first four notes of “Lake Serenity Serenade,” which had become a standard)—but then the project began to wither.  Their hearts weren’t in it.  They wanted to work together, and they wanted to work on jewelry, but they didn’t want to make toasters, convertibles, and pianos.  They seemed to find less and less time to work on the prototypes, and after a few months they found no time at all.  The toaster, convertible, and piano became the most-coveted charms worn by any of the girls at Babbington High, where Ella wore them, on her bracelet, every day, until the fad for charms faded and she put them into a box in a dresser drawer where she kept other outmoded jewelry.

ELLA AND BUSTER AND BERT were great chums throughout their last years in high school.  Ella was in love with both of the boys, and they were both in love with her, and they seemed quite content to have things stay just as they were.  Herb and Lorna even thought that there was probably some safety in this arrangement, since Ella wasn’t likely to go to bed with either of them as long as she loved both of them, and no one, not Herb or Lorna or Ella or Bert or Buster, even considered her going to bed with both of them.  After they graduated from high school, however, matters changed as if overnight.  Apparently both Bert and Buster had been waiting for graduation day to pop the question, and when it arrived they both did.  Ella faced a dilemma that would have delighted most of her girl friends—she couldn’t decide between them.  But they were both asking her to marry them, and it seemed as if she must decide.
    “Mother,” she said, “do you know what I wish?”
    “What?” asked Lorna.
    “I wish neither of them had asked me.”
    “Oh.  Oh, Ella—”
    “I wish we could have just—”
    “—gone on the way you were going.”
    “Yes.”
    “I’m sure you’re worried about hurting them—or one of them anyway—”
    “And me.  It’s going to hurt me too.  I’m going to lose one of them.  And I don’t want to.  I don’t want to lose either of them.”
    “Oh, Ella—”
    “Do I have to choose?  Do I have to?  I’ve been thinking.  Imagining is more like it.  I’ve been imagining what it might be like if we—if all three of us—”
    “Ella.  Ella.  You can’t do that.  You know you can’t do that.”
    “Ohhhh!”
    “I’m afraid you do have to choose.  You really do have to choose.”
    And so she chose.  She chose Buster.  Bert took it gracefully.  Buster was the obvious choice, and Bert had been losing to his quicker, brighter brother for so many years that he was almost used to it.  Buster and Ella had an engagement party, the first among their friends.  It was small and restrained; Buster and Ella didn’t want Bert to feel that they were celebrating his elimination.  They planned to be married the next spring.

BEFORE THE WAR, the best slide rules had come from Germany.  Now the need for slide rules—for calculating artillery trajectories, plotting courses, calculating wind drift, figuring time to target, and the like—was great and pressing.  The production of slide rules became a defense industry, and domestic slide rule manufacturers scrambled to meet the nation’s computational needs.  In Hargrove, the town to the east of Babbington, Hargrove Slide Rules faced a critical situation: to meet their quotas they had to double production.  Where would they find people with the skill and talent for the fine, exacting work that slide rules required?  They appealed for help and guidance to the mathematics department at Hargrove University, where the department secretary, Kitty Kern, suggested that they try recruiting among jewelers, and that’s how they found Lorna.
    One afternoon, after she had been with the Hargrove Slide Rule Company for three months, Lorna was sitting alone in the company cafeteria, bent over a slide rule, absorbed in calculating the interior volume of her home on No Bridge Road, when Edwin Berwick, a promising young fellow who had been put in charge of training new employees, approached her.  Beside her lay an egg-salad sandwich on a piece of waxed paper.  She had unwrapped the sandwich and eaten a couple of bites, but then she had set it aside and ignored it.  The bread had curled.  The egg salad had darkened.  Her coffee, barely touched, was cold.
    “Mrs. Piper?” said Berwick.
    “Oh!” said Lorna, startled from her concentration.
    “I’m sorry,” Berwick said at once.  “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
    “Oh, that’s all right,” said Lorna.  “I was just—well—I wasn’t doing anything important.”
    “Testing the product, I see,” said Berwick.
    “Oh, not really,” said Lorna.  “In fact, this is an old rule.  I was just—”
    “Yes?”
    “I was figuring the volume of my house,” admitted Lorna.  She smiled and shrugged.
    “Just for the fun of it?” asked Berwick.
    “Oh, no,” she said.  “Or, rather, yes—and no.  Herb—my husband—wants to build a gadget to filter the air in our house—when the war is over.  He has a good idea, I think: he’s going to bubble the air through barrels of water in the cellar, and all the impurities—even germs—will be left behind in the water.  When the house smells stale—you know how a house gets that stale odor when it’s been closed up for a long time during the winter—all we’ll have to do is squeeze a little lemon juice into the water or toss in some pine needles to make the whole house smell fresh again.”
    Mr. Berwick wore an unchanging smile throughout Lorna’s explanation.  To Lorna it looked a lot like the indulgent smile she wore so often when she was talking to Mrs. Stolz.  Lorna supposed that the object of Mr. Berwick’s indulgent smile was Herb, not her, and because she thought it was directed at him she felt worse than she would have if she’d thought it was directed at her.  She was embarrassed for Herb.     “I see that you’re skeptical,” she said, with ice in her voice.  “It may sound like a foolish idea, but Herb is very clever, and I think he can make it work.”
    “He’s an inventor?”
    “Just as a hobby.  He sells Studebakers.”
    “I see.”  That smile again.  It was beginning to annoy Lorna, but if she had known what it really meant, it wouldn’t have.  Berwick was pleased with what he was hearing from her.  He’d been asked to help in recruiting for an urgent project: calculating tables of artillery trajectories for the Army.  He hoped he’d be able to recommend someone.  It was the first time his country had asked anything specific of him, anything that he could do better than anyone else, and the army was, of course, an important client of Hargrove Slide Rules.  “Let me ask you something,” he said.  “Why did you say, ‘Yes and no,’ when I asked if you were making these calculations just for the fun of it?”
    “Oh,” said Lorna, “because I’m really doing it for the fun of doing it.”  Now she was feeling defensive.  She felt that Mr. Berwick was challenging her interests, Herb’s interests, her abilities, Herb’s abilities, even the way she and Herb worked together.  The more pleased he was, the more broadly he smiled, and the more condescending he appeared.  Lorna wanted to make him understand her; she felt that she must make him understand her if she was going to preserve her self-respect.  “You see,” she said,    “Herb needs to know the volume of air in the house, of course, but he doesn’t need the precision that I’m going to give him.  I could have come up with the figures he needed in a couple of hours, but instead I’m including every nook and cranny.  I’m even making allowances for the air displaced by furnishings—and by Herb and me, and our daughter, Ella, and Mrs. Stolz—she lives with us—and even the air displaced by the cat.  Here, let me show you.  Our cat spends, on the average, fourteen hours, twenty-three minutes, and seventeen seconds in the house every day.  Of course, I made the calculation last week, when the weather was good, so I’m going to have to gather data over a whole year to be really accurate.  Herb made a clever little timer that attaches to the cat’s door—he made the door, too, of course.  The timer switches on every time the door opens from the inside, so it clocks the time that Tom—the cat—is inside.  Tom displaces—let me see—456.19 cubic inches.  But, since he’s only in the house 59.95 percent of the time, he only represents, on the average, 273.49 cubic inches—”
    “About sixteen hundredths of a cubic foot,” said Edwin.
    “Yes,” said Lorna, just a little surprised to find that Edwin had been following her so carefully.     “Then there’s the air that Herb and I displace—”
    “You know,” Edwin interrupted, “a few months ago I built my daughter a sandbox.  I had to figure out how much sand to get for it.  Simple problem.  Nothing to it.  But a question popped into my head: how many grains of sand do I need?  I made myself a little cardboard cube a quarter inch on a side, filled it with sand, poured the sand out on a sheet of paper and—”
    “—counted the grains?”
    “—counted the grains.  When I finished, I did it again—”
    “—with a different sample of sand,” suggested Lorna.
    “—with a different sample of sand,” said Edwin, smiling the same smile, a smile that was, Lorna found, beginning to take on a different appearance from what she’d seen before.  “I kept at it until I had a reliable average figure for the number of grains in a cubic quarter-inch.  My family thought I was crazy, of course, but once I had begun work, the problem took on a life of its own.”
    “The problem became your purpose,” said Lorna.
    “Yes!” said Berwick. “Thank you.  I wouldn’t have thought to put it that way.”
    Lorna was ashamed of herself for having thought that Berwick was thinking what she had thought he was thinking.  She thought of apologizing, telling Berwick that she’d misjudged him, explaining why, warning him about the misleading impression his smile could give people, suggesting that he practice another smile, but he spoke too quickly for her.  “Are you good at these problems?” he asked.
    “Yes,” said Lorna, “I am.  I’m very accurate with a slide rule, and I’m fairly fast.  I—I want you to know that I only do calculations during lunch—never when I should be working.”
    “Oh, I didn’t mean to suggest anything like that,” Berwick said.  “No, not at all.”  He drew a breath.     “Mrs. Piper, I’d hate to see you leave here.  You’re the very best of the new employees. But—”
    “What is it, Mr. Berwick?”
    “I think someone from the army would like to speak to you about your skill as a calculator.”
    Lorna used the telephone in Berwick’s office to call Herb and tell him that she’d be late getting home.  When she finally arrived, it was nearly nine.  She was flushed with success, self-satisfaction, an appreciation of her competence and importance.  She sat in the living room without taking her coat off and told Herb and Ella everything in a disorganized rush.  When she finished, she was out of breath and glowing.
    In The Analytical Engine, Jeremy Bernstein outlines the project that Lorna described to Herb and Ella:

    In 1943, the Moore School and the Aberdeen Proving Ground, in Maryland, were conducting a joint project involving the computation of artillery firing tables for the Army.  The Moore School contingent . . . used a Bush analog computer and employed a hundred women to do hand computations as a necessary adjunct to the machine operations . . . .

IN MARYLAND, she allowed herself to acknowledge her secret talent.  At night, when the women who performed the calculations were at their leisure, they entertained themselves with cards and songs and talk.  One evening, not long after the group was assembled, one of the women said, “You know what we are, don’t you?  Doing what we do?  We’re a bunch of calculating women!” 
    They took the name. The talk in the evenings wandered, as the talk of people who’ve been thrown together and have time on their hands will, but it included lots of the anecdotes that we introduce into a conversation not because they illustrate a point, but because they give us a chance to talk about ourselves.  On many evenings the conversation became a string of such anecdotes, and these were the liveliest and most revealing evenings of all.  One evening, the topic turned to uncles who had a more than avuncular affection for their nieces.  Many of the women had interesting anecdotes to contribute on that topic, but none commanded such rapt attention as Lorna’s, and the attention of her audience, the avidity with which they followed her story, made her extend it.  The more she told, the more they wanted to hear.  After a while, she found it easy and pleasant to say to these women things she had thought she would never be able to say to anyone at all, and she wasn’t even terribly surprised when she found herself saying, “My uncle also taught me to make jewelry, carved jewelry, very special jewelry—”  As soon as she began, she was so thrilled to be telling someone at last that she told it all, everything.
    That very night, she began making soap carvings for the women.  She found that soap was a congenial medium, so easy to work that she could turn out a carving in an evening.  She had an eager audience from the start, and soon she began taking requests.  The earliest requests were the obvious ones: a woman would ask Lorna to make the soap woman resemble her and the soap man resemble her husband or boy friend.  Then they began to get more interesting and more complicated.  More and more of the women began to ask for men who resembled men they had never made love to, men they’d hardly spoken to, and in several cases, men who had appeared only in their day dreams, the wonderful men of their imagination.  Because soap was so much cheaper a commodity than ivory, Lorna found a new freedom and artistic daring in working with it.  She let her imagination range a bit more, and she also used the soap carvings to release some of her loneliness, some of her longing for Herb.  This had a result that Lorna found oddly titillating: many of the men wound up resembling, in one way or another that none of the other women would have detected, Herb.  Whenever a woman couldn’t describe her dream man adequately for Lorna to go on with her work, Lorna would supply the required bit of Herb.  Soap was in short supply, and it couldn’t be wasted, so Lorna’s carvings were used for washing, and the expectation that her work, the evidence of her secret occupation, would go down the drain gave Lorna a feeling of security that allowed her to enjoy the work as never before.  This was also the first time she had ever come to know her audience, and the first time she had ever counted women among her audience.  Under these unusual, irreplicable conditions, she did some of her best work.  It lacked animation, however, and Lorna felt the lack, an emptiness in the work, apparent only to her, as if the couples were hollow; it was a feeling that, if she had had a reason to describe it, she would have compared to the hollowness she felt in herself, missing Herb.
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Portion of the illustration in LIFE magazine, January 31, 1938, that inspired Lorna to create erotic charms with moving parts, photo by Martinus Anderson; courtesy of LIFE Picture Service.