THE NEXT NIGHT, at Whitey’s, Lorna told May about her soap carvings, and then she went on to tell her all the rest, the whole story of her work in coarse goods.  They were facing each other, sitting in a wooden booth, one of several along the wall opposite the bar.  They became more and more animated as Lorna’s story progressed and May consumed Manhattans.  At last Lorna said, “I’ll bet you think I’m making this up.”  She leaned across the table and looked hard at May.  “Don’t you?” she asked.
    May wasn’t sure what she thought.  “Well,” she said, pausing with her glass raised, “I’m not sure what I think.  You might be making it up.  It’s a delicious idea, but it isn’t something I’d expect you to do.  You are—you have always seemed—to me—a little—well—prim.”  She giggled.  Lorna smiled at her but didn’t speak.  May couldn’t decide whether Lorna was pulling her leg or not.  “Oh, I don’t know.  It’s a wonderful thought,” she said.  “I know you have the talent—”  She mimicked Lorna’s tight-lipped smile.  She sat in silence for a while, but still Lorna spoke only with her twinkling eyes.  May shrugged.  “Oh, I guess I believe you,” she said.
    Lorna reached into her bag and brought from it a silver watchcase.  She held it in front of May, cupped in her hands so that the people near them wouldn’t see it.  She pressed the stem.  The lid popped open.  May’s eyes lit up.
    “Ohhhhh,” said May.  She set her glass down.  She leaned closer to get a better look at the little ivory couple inside the case.  Slowly, Lorna turned the stem.
    “Oh, my God!” said May.  The laugh she laughed was astonished, shocked, thrilled.  “That’s—”  She leaned across the table and said in a whisper, “—obscene.”  She laughed again.  “And wonderful,” she added.  “May I?”  Lorna handed her the watchcase, and May examined the ivory couple closely while she turned the stem.
    “I don’t want to brag,” said Lorna, “but I hope you’ll notice the workmanship.”
    “Oh, I am,” said May.  “I certainly am noticing the workmanship.”  More laughter.
    “My goodness,” said May, “where do you get your ideas?  I mean—well, this seems quite—ah—advanced.  Do you and Herb—do you—ah—do this sort of thing?”
    “Now and then,” said Lorna.  A thought struck her, and she voiced it without considering whether she ought to.  “Not for a while, though.”
    “You don’t mean that you have—ah—other models?”
    “Oh, no.  I just meant that we—don’t—”
    “Yes,” said May.  She sighed.  “Well, none of us drinks champagne as often as we’d like, either.”
    “Anyway,” said Lorna, “most of the ideas aren’t mine.  Most of the—um—movements, the routines—”
    “Oh, hardly routine!”
    “Well, I get models—”
    May raised her eyebrows.
    “Not that kind.  Little stick figures, made of wire, with all the gears and all of that, the works.  I get them from my Uncle Luther—”
    “My goodness!  That man’s an inspiration for us all.  How old is the randy geezer?”
    “He doesn’t make them up.  I don’t know who does, to tell you the truth.”
    “Well!  If it’s a man, it’s a man I’d like to meet,” said May.  They fell into such loud and raucous laughter that May had to hide the watchcase beneath the table, since they had attracted the attention of everyone around them.

LORNA WAS LESS SUCCESSFUL in cheering Ella up.  She had been able to lead May to what she needed, the pleasure of society, but Ella needed Buster, and that was something no one could supply.  Ella spent hours lying on her bed, her hands clasped behind her head, her eyes fixed on the ceiling.  When she was up, she walked through the house in silence.  She went about her business as if living had become merely a set of automatic responses.  When Lorna put food in front of her, she ate it.  When Lorna suggested a ride, she put a coat on, got into the car with Lorna, and rode.  If Lorna asked her to wash the dishes, she put an apron on, stood at the sink, and spent a silent hour working.

    Lorna was just, well, shaken by how depressed Ella was.  She had this idea that it was terribly important for Ella to stop this grieving, to get on with life.  Well, isn’t that just how she felt about me?  You know—I don’t mind saying this now, but I would never have admitted anything of the sort at the time, never—I was in despair myself.  Garth, well, Garth was being simply awful.  It was a terrible enough time, wasn’t it, without his being such a rat.  There was the damned war, and none of us was getting any younger, and everyone was depressed as hell.  And Lorna—oh, Lorna. Lorna was an angel, a dear.  She was determined that she was going to pull you out of your depression.  She was going to figure out what would cheer you up and see that you got it.  But I’ll tell you what I think.  I think that cheering us up was what cheered her up.  By trying to make the rest of us feel not-so-miserable, she was keeping herself from feeling miserable.  That’s what I think.

ONE AFTERNOON a couple of weeks later, while a team at the University of Pennsylvania was hard at work on the first electronic computer (the “electronic numerical integrator and calculator,” or ENIAC), thereby hastening the eventual obsolescence of the slide rule, Lorna was alone in the kitchen, whipping up a batch of potato salad and listening to The Loves of Ellen Burch on the radio.  Dudley appeared at the back door, tapping on the window, fogging the glass with his breath.  Lorna motioned to him to come in, and he did.  He closed the door behind him and stood on the mat.  “Lorna,” he asked, “is Ella home?”
    “No,” said Lorna.  “She’s at Emily’s.”
    “Good,” said Dudley.  He began pulling his galoshes off.  “You and I have to talk.”
    “Oh?” said Lorna.  “What about?”
    “About Ella,” said Dudley.  An organ crescendo came from the radio.  Ellen Burch, a young girl with dreams, had arrived at an important fork in her young life just as Dudley had arrived at the back door.  Lorna wondered whether she had decided to travel to Patagonia with the darkly intriguing Reynaldo or stay in Beaverton with Dave.  Two actors portraying the Bullard Brothers began an advertisement for Bullard Brothers’ Double-Roasted Coffee.  “It’s roasted,” said the first.  “And roasted again,” said the second.  “For twice the coffee flavor,” they said together.  “So your second cup is almost as good as your first.”
    “Do you want some coffee, Dudley?” asked Lorna.
    “Yes, thank you, that would be nice,” said Dudley.
    Lorna struck a match and lit the gas under what was left of the morning coffee.
    “Poor Ella,” said Lorna.  She stuck a fork into one of the potatoes and found it not quite done.  “I’ve felt so sorry for her.”  A male chorus sang the Bullard Brothers’ jingle.  “She just seemed to fall apart when Buster was killed.  She simply couldn’t imagine a future without him in it.  Do you know what I mean?”
    “Yes.  I do,” said Dudley.  He sat at the kitchen table, a square table with wooden legs and a metal, enamel-coated top, white with black edges.  With his fingernail, he traced zigzag routes through the network of scratches and knife cuts on the tabletop.  The organ played the Ellen Burch theme.  “It’s quite odd, the way people think of the future,” Dudley offered.  “Some of them seem to have the expectation—the hope, I should say—that they will turn a corner one day and find that everything is new, all is changed, yet others seem to hope for just the opposite, that things to come will somehow be just as they’ve been before, that life will stop in a way, freeze, like a snapshot.”  Lorna poured coffee for Dudley.
    “You’re missing a chance to see the world beyond Beaverton,” said Reynaldo.
    “I know, Reynaldo,” said Ellen, “but, well, you know what Emerson said about travel.”
    “People like that,” said Dudley, “want copies of the same snapshot, strung out from here to eternity.  They want to be able to think that they already know what they’ll be pasting on the blank pages of the photo album of their lives.  Do you follow me?”
    “Yes, Dudley,” said Lorna.
    “No,” said Reynaldo, icily, “I do not.”
    “I suppose,” said Dudley, “some of those people are so pleased with their lives that they simply want to continue as they are, to ‘let well enough alone,’ but more of them, I think, fear the future.  They would rather have nothing happen to them than to have anything else go wrong.  I hope I’m not getting too philosophical for you, Lorna.”
    “Oh, no,” said Lorna.  She turned back to her work to hide her smile.  “I follow you.”
    “He said, ‘Traveling is a fool’s paradise,’ ” said Ellen.
    “This, I think, was Ella’s situation,” said Dudley.
    “Yes, I can see that,” said Lorna.
    “Now I have something shocking to say, Lorna.”
    “Perhaps you will find that your Beaverton is a fool’s paradise,” said Reynaldo.
    “Yes?” said Lorna.  My God, she thought, what if he’s fallen in love with Ella?  When she had sent Ella to Dudley’s, she hadn’t fully considered what might result, she had just had an inspired idea for pulling Ella up from the dumps she was down in.  Since then, she had begun to wonder whether she had done the right thing.  Would Ella remain forever in love with Dudley?  Lorna had begun to worry that she might.  And now, if Dudley was serious about her—
    “That’s something I’ll have to find out, I guess,” said Ellen.
    Dudley pushed his cup and saucer away from him.  He put his hands flat on the table.  He bowed his head.  He said, “Ella has—I may as well be direct—fallen in love with me.”
    “Yes, I know,” said Lorna, without thinking.
    Dudley’s face went white.  “Has she—confided in you?” he asked.
    “Oh, of course she has,” said Lorna.
    “I’m trying to be delicate about this,” said Dudley.
    “I’ll always remember you, Reynaldo,” said Ellen.
    “I want you to understand, Lorna, that Ella has developed a deep and passionate love for me.”
    “Yes, yes,” said Lorna.  She turned to her work again.  She stabbed the fork into a potato, pulled it out of the pot, and began peeling it.
    “I think it’s just as well that she has,” said Dudley.
    “Yes,” said Lorna.  She didn’t turn around.  She worked at the potato.
    “I have no doubt about that,” said Reynaldo.
    “I don’t mean to shock or upset you,” said Dudley, “but I think that I am just what Ella needed.  I think that by falling in love with me she has broken the spell, so to speak.  I have played the part of the handsome prince in a fairy tale, freeing the virgin—ah—freeing the princess—from her enchantment.”
    Lorna compressed her lips and applied herself to the potato.
    “What is necessary now,” said Dudley, “is to free her from her enchantment with me.”
    “Good-bye, Reynaldo,” said Ellen.
    “Yes!” said Lorna.  Hope filled her like a breath of the sweet mountain air of Chacallit.  She forked another potato.  Dudley, you pompous dope, she thought, you’re exactly right.
    “You must admit,” said Dudley, “that we are not exactly a match.  Ella’s a darling girl, wonderfully attractive, with all the freshness of youth and so on, but I think I would be just too much for her.”
    “I’m sure,” said Lorna.
    “Goodbye, Ellen,” said Reynaldo.  “You were—an amusing diversion.”
    “I’ve given quite a bit of thought to this,” Dudley went on, “and I’ve decided that it would be best for me to go away for a while.  I’ll be called away on family business—perhaps a death—or—no, perhaps not—money troubles, then.  I’ll stay away until Ella finds someone better suited to her, someone who—”
    There was a knock at the door.  Dudley and Lorna turned but saw no one.  Ellen opened the door.  “Is that Reynaldo guy gone?” asked Dave.
    “It was the radio,” said Lorna.
    “ ‘That Reynaldo guy’ has not yet gone,” said Reynaldo, “but he was just—”  Lorna reached up and turned the radio off.
    Dudley went on talking.  Lorna turned her back on him and returned to her work.  She finished peeling the potatoes, sliced them, put them into a huge crockery bowl, poured vinegar over them, and began tossing them.  While she worked, she wore a small, contented smile that Dudley couldn’t see, and she hummed, so softly that Dudley couldn’t hear, the up-tempo novelty version of “Lake Serenity Serenade” that Kay Kyser had made popular that winter.  The kitchen filled with the odor of warm vinegar.
    Dudley said, “Did you hear me, Lorna?”
    “What?” said Lorna.  She turned around and was surprised to find Dudley at the door, with coat and galoshes on, ready to go.  “Oh, I’m sorry Dudley,” she said.  “I did hear you.  Yes.  You’ll go away.  Fine.  It’s best.  You’re right.  Ella will find someone else.  We’ll see you when you get back.”
    They were startled by a knock at the door.  Standing outside, his face framed in the window, his breath freezing on the glass, was Bert Leroy.

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Here's a swell idea from Eric Kraft's sparkling publicist, Candi Lee Manning:
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Amazon.com	Barnes&Noble.com
Herb ’n’ Lorna	Herb ’n’ Lorna
Reservations Recommended	Reservations Recommended
Little Follies	Little Follies
Where Do You Stop?	Where Do You Stop?
What a Piece of Work I Am	What a Piece of Work I Am
At Home with the Glynns	At Home with the Glynns
Leaving Small's Hotel	Leaving Small's Hotel

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

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

Bookbound at 1-800-959-7323 
Book Call at 1-800-255-2665 (worldwide 1-203-966-5470)

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.