| Herb ’n’ Lorna (A Love Story) | by Eric Kraft, as Peter Leroy |
| Chapter 17: | |
| In Which Herb and Lorna Come to the Brink of Despair |
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 FTER
A POSTWAR SLUMP, the demand for slide rules began to pick up, and Edwin
Berwick asked Lorna to return to work. At about the time when she
began her new duties as supervisor of the cursor department at Hargrove
Slide Rules, technology took another step toward the slide rule’s eventual
obsolescence when the first programmable computer—that is, the first computer
that could store a program in its memory—became operational: UNIVAC 1.
Herb never did become the top Studebaker salesman in the country, but he was the top salesman at Babbington Studebaker year after year, and that distinction won for him and Lorna several trips to South Bend, Indiana, home of the Studebaker company. During the dozen years or so after Bert and Ella and I left, Herb and Lorna had a new car nearly every year. They owned a 1949 Land Cruiser, a bullet-nosed 1950 Commander Regal DeLuxe convertible, a 1952 Commander State Starliner hardtop, a beautiful white 1953 Commander Starliner hardtop, a 1955 President State hardtop, a 1956 Golden Hawk, a 1958 Commander Provincial station wagon, and a 1960 Lark VIII DeLuxe convertible.
A proud family of Babbingtonians,
typical of Herb’s satisfied customers,
One evening Lorna said, “Herb, you remember when we drew those arcs on the map and chose Babbington as a place to live.” “Mm,” said Herb. “Have you ever wondered what it would have been like if we had moved to West Burke, Vermont, instead?” It was all the opening Herb needed. In the months that followed, he bought basic camping gear and built a wind-powered generator, a miniature refrigerator, an inflatable sofa, a campfire oven, collapsible cots, cotside reading lamps, and a Geiger counter hidden in a picnic basket, since it was possible to strike it rich with a uranium find, and if he was going to be tramping around in the mountains he might as well be doing something useful. The following summer they made a camping visit to West Burke. They returned every summer for the next fifteen years. I remember those trips well. Bert and Ella and I went along on many of them. I remember a campground at the edge of a lake, surrounded by mountains. I wonder what I failed to notice, though. Did Herb and Lorna slip out of their tent on moonlit nights, row to the middle of the lake, and make love there? I don’t know. I used to sleep right through the night. Piper Poker survived the war, at least in the Spotters Club. The Spotters continued to meet weekly, at the home of a different member each week. Sometimes, on evenings when the Club gathered at Herb and Lorna’s, Lorna would baby-sit for Bert and Ella so that they could go out to see a movie. At other times, she would go to visit one of her friends from work or she would go to Whitey’s and spend the evening with May. Piper Poker was the only game the Spotters played—until they began playing the stock market. On one of the Club evenings, divorced from Lorna’s cautious skepticism, Herb succumbed to the Piper failing. He let himself be convinced that the Spotters’ buying a few shares of stock was an undertaking free of risk, since they would only invest money that they had already lost. That was the essence of the argument advanced by Bob Schoop, who proposed the venture. “Look,” Bob said, “it’ll be fun, we might make some money, and it’s a nothing-to-lose deal. Here’s what I say we do: we skim something off the top of the winnings every week and put it aside. We use that as a fund to buy some stock. What have we got to lose? The winners still win—not quite as much, but they still win—and the losers would have lost anyway, so what’s to lose?” Poor Herb. He should have known better. He should have realized that this would lead to trouble. I think it may have been Lorna’s ruse, the story she used to convince Bert to accept the money for the house, that made Herb think that, perhaps, just possibly, the Piper curse had been lifted from him, that maybe he really could make some money by investing. Since there did seem to be nothing to lose, Herb and the others agreed to the plan. From the start, the Spotters bought cautiously, and they made such small investments that they had, if not nothing to lose, next to nothing to lose. An aspect of their caution was their insistence on buying stock only if they had “inside information” about the company’s condition and its future. The folly of trusting inside information is discussed in Lucille Prang’s amusing little “nonbook” A Thousand and One Wrong-Headed Notions (great bathroom reading), under Number 842, “They know more than you do”: Why do we think this? You’ve heard the argument: “The poop that you and I and the other schmoes can get our hands on isn’t the real poop. Only they have access to the real poop, so they know what’s what.” They have inside information. They know the business. They must know what they’re talking about. Well, let me tell you something: don’t bet on it.The Spotters began following the stock quotations in the paper, and they pumped friends, family, and casual acquaintances for any bit of information that would give them the inside track on a good thing. When the first photographs and descriptions of the forthcoming Lark arrived at Babbington Studebaker, Herb decided at once that he had something important to pass along to the Spotters. He knew that the Lark was a car he could sell to people who had been turning him down for years. It was small but solid looking, inexpensive and economical, and, as Lorna had said at once when Herb showed her the first pictures of it, it was cute. At the next gathering of the club, Herb could hardly contain himself. He delivered a thorough presentation. He passed the photos around. He displayed charts that compared the Lark and the Rambler, the only other small American car available at that time. He read a list of Babbingtonians whom he considered prime prospects for each Lark model, and he was able to explain exactly why a Lark was just the car for each person on the list. These were persuasive arguments for buying Studebaker stock, but more persuasive than any of those was the argument of Herb’s own conviction. That was what impressed the Spotters most. Herb had inside information. Herb knew the automobile business. He must know what he was talking about. He certainly seemed convinced. This was their chance. Not only did the Spotters Club decide, unanimously, to buy stock in Studebaker, but two of the members ordered Larks. When the Spotters bought, the price of Studebaker stock was low, Studebaker sales were low, and the company had debts of more than fifty million dollars. When the Lark was released, the picture began to change. Larks sold. Studebaker stock rose. The company moved into the black. The Spotters did well. They did so well that, secretly, each began buying more stock on his own. The fact that they were investing individually came out when Simon Misch mentioned that he expected to be able to send his son to college by selling “some of his Studebaker stock.” Herb was surprised. “I hadn’t really thought of it as being divided up that way,” he said. “But it does make sense. And it’s a good cause. I guess if we all agree to sell some, we could—” “Oh, I didn’t mean the club’s stock,” said Simon. “I—uh—I’ve been buying a little on my own—now and then—whenever I’ve got some spare cash.” Others begin admitting it too. It was soon clear that all of them had been buying, and that they had been buying more and more heavily, using not merely spare cash, but money wrung from household budgets, withdrawn from savings, earned in overtime hours, even money from their children’s paper routes. They had all come to think that this was the chance of a lifetime, that they were never likely to run on the inside track again. Then the “big three”—General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler—brought out their compact cars—the Corvair, the Falcon, and the Valiant. Studebaker’s advantage was lost. Sales began to fall. The company began an accelerating downward slide, like a runaway croquet ball in Chacallit, on its way down Ackerman Hill, headed for the chilly waters of the Whatsit. Herb read the sales reports. He read the stock quotations. He read the company announcements. He listened to the rumors. He passed every scrap of information on to the Spotters, but he simply couldn’t believe the clear, solid evidence he found, because he had so thoroughly convinced himself that Studebaker was on the right track. He preferred to believe the most unlikely of the encouraging rumors, the wildest of the optimistic forecasts. So fervent was he in his convictions that, as the price of Studebaker stock fell, he persuaded the Spotters to buy more. Herb was convinced, and he convinced the others, that with a full range of cars to sell, from the sporty Hawks and rumored Avanti to the practical little Lark, the company was in a perfect position to appeal to the entire vast and various stewpot of potential car buyers. The company would succeed. The stock would rise. All the Spotters believed him, and Herb believed himself. He also invested more and more heavily. Slowly, as time passed and the fortunes of the company grew worse and worse, Herb came to see that he had finally done the foolish Piper thing. The Avanti would never have widespread appeal. The Lark would never outsell the other compacts. Studebaker would not recover. The stock would not rise. The Spotters would lose their money. So would he and Lorna. Herb was ashamed. |
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 HE
ESSENCE of the Piper failing was a tendency to let the heart rule the mind.
We all suffer from this disease at some times, to some degree. It
has consequences other than bad investments. It makes some of us
write books and compose music and paint pictures. It makes some of
us try to restore two-hundred-year old wooden houses or twenty-year-old
British sports cars. It makes some of us fall in love. It makes
some of us insist that, of all the people who have collaborated on an error,
we are supremely blameworthy. That is how Herb felt. He couldn’t
escape the feeling that all the blame for the losses the Spotters were
going to suffer was his. He could think of only one way out, one
way to make things right and relieve his conscience, and the key to the
door that led to that way out was coarse-goods work. Herb hoped that
he could earn enough money to buy the Spotters’ stock for what they had
originally paid for it. (He expected, by the way, that they would
refuse to sell. He thought they wouldn’t want to let him increase
his suffering to relieve theirs. He expected that he would have to
persuade them that he was buying the stock because he still believed that
he would make a profit on it. He was wrong. These feelings
were merely further symptoms of the essential Piper failing.)
Fundamentally, the plan made sense. Herb had, however, no goods left to sell. The last of them had gone toward raising money for Bert and Ella’s house. Uncle Ben was long dead, and Herb had no idea who Ben’s contact in Chacallit had been. Throughout Herb’s years in the business, he had never wanted to know, had never wanted to become so involved that he needed to know, and so he had made it a point of honor to know nothing about aspects of the business that didn’t concern him. Now, Herb couldn’t imagine himself going to Chacallit and trying to make contact on his own. He thought, instead, that he would try to do all the work himself. He could certainly design new pieces. He could certainly sell new pieces if he had some. If he could make them, he’d be set. He certainly tried. He spent night after night in the cellar, pretending to work on one project or another—new camping gear, household gadgets, a shortwave radio for me—but actually he was trying to carve little men and women who could perform the ingenious, intriguing, and complex acts he had devised for them. He had no talent for it, and every figure was a failure. If he managed a leg that pleased him, it was likely to be attached to a trunk that seemed to belong to another figure altogether, someone much smaller, whose other leg was turned to the first at an angle that is never achieved by pairs of actual human legs. On the face of this poor figure appeared, in place of the desired expression of preorgasmic glee, a twisted grimace, as if his lover had, at what ought to have been the height of his pleasure, stabbed him in the back. Still, he thought of selling them, until the thought struck him that the figures were so grotesquely malformed that it would take a client of grotesquely malformed desires to be interested in them. They weren’t beautiful. He would have been ashamed to sell them. He knew who could carve beautiful, elegant little figures, knew that she was sitting right upstairs, working at her puzzles and problems, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask her. Lorna couldn’t do it all by herself, either, though she tried. She wanted desperately to help Herb out, and coarse goods were, she knew, her best hope for helping him. “I tried,” she told May, “but I can’t do it. I wanted to make some of those animated figures, but it was ridiculous. Whenever Herb was down in the cellar, puttering away at his projects—I shouldn’t say it that way. ‘Puttering’ makes it sound as if I’m belittling him. I’m glad he has those projects of his. They give him something to do. They keep his mind off his troubles. I was happy for him, really, when I thought of him down there puttering while I was giving myself a headache trying to figure out how to make those figures move their parts—” “Yes, indeed!” said May. She raised her glass. “I’ll drink to that. Here’s to the dignity of labor and the pleasures of moving parts.” Lorna chuckled despite herself. “Anyway,” she said, “whenever he was working in the cellar and I felt that he wasn’t likely to catch me, I tried to figure out how to make the men and women move, even in just some simple way, but I couldn’t. I would get such headaches, horrible headaches. Finally, I had to admit that it’s just not the sort of thing I can do. I said to myself, Lorna, give up. You’ve wasted a lot of time trying to make these little people move. Just make some that don’t move, and get to work at it. So I started in on that, and—oh, my heart just wasn’t in it. I knew I was doing the right thing—but you know—” She stopped. Her head was down, as if she were looking at the tabletop, but her eyes were focused somewhere far away, on an old dream. When she spoke, her voice was husky. “It was those charms that I saw in Life. ‘Moving parts.’ I’ll never forget those words. That was what appealed to me. That was what I wanted to make. I couldn’t get that phrase out of my mind.” “Well, we all want moving parts, dear,” said May, “and we all want another Manhattan.” She raised her hand and wiggled her fingers at Whitey. “None for me,” said Lorna. “I couldn’t.” “Well, I can,” said May. “And I will. Just one, please, Mr. White.” “I finished some pieces anyway,” said Lorna, “but they weren’t very good, and while I was working I began to see that there was another problem. I wasn’t going to be able to bring myself to sell them. My face would get flushed and my hands would start shaking whenever I even imagined selling them. Where on earth would I find people to buy them? Not ‘people.’ Women. It would have to be women. Can you imagine me showing them to men? What would I say? How would I bring it up? ‘Excuse me, would you like to buy a charm that shows a man thrusting his penis into a woman’s—’ ” “Shhh!” said May. She looked around quickly. “My dear,” she said, “it’s good you didn’t have another Manhattan.” Lorna giggled and colored. “I did have an idea, though. Suppose I made some other charms, simple things, horses or dogs. I could advertise those. Suppose someone called me and said, ‘I’d like to see your charms—’ ” May snorted. “All right, all right. I might take a box full of charms to a woman’s house. I’d begin taking them out of the box, putting each on a piece of velvet to display it. A couple of horses, a dog, and—‘Ooops! How did that get in there? Oh, no, no, you wouldn’t be interested in that—that’s something I did for—well—it’s a special order. Well, I suppose there’s no harm in letting you see it. I have to admit that the workmanship is really very good, if I do say so myself.’ ” “Well done!” said May. She clapped her hands. “Oh, but it seems so ridiculous to me. I can’t imagine that it would ever work. It wouldn’t work for me, anyway. I’d start blushing and trembling as soon as I thought of showing one of my couples, and I’d forget everything I meant to say.” “Why not just sell horses and dogs?” “I’d never make enough money,” said Lorna. “Herb doesn’t know this, but I’ve kept track of every cent that he put into Studebaker stock, and I found out how much the others lost. May, we wouldn’t have enough to buy them out even if we sold our house, and the house is all we’ve got. All our savings has gone into Studebaker, and Herb’s salary and mine from Hargrove Slide Rules don’t add up to much more than we need from week to week.” “Lorna, you have to let me—” “Shhh. Don’t say it. Not yet. It might come to that. It might. And if it does, I’ll come to you. But I hope not. Herb would be sure to find out eventually, and it would humiliate him so. I just hope that something else comes along. You know the worst of it?” “What?” “I know who could give those figures moving parts. I know who could sell them too. Herb could.”
Two homely sisters were on their way to school one day and suddenly realized that they had forgotten what day of the week it was.There is bitterness in that puzzle, bitterness and sorrow, the kind of sorrow that, Henri Bergson points out in Time and Free Will, begins as a facing toward the past. But, thank goodness, there is no sorrow that isn’t sweetened by some joy, and there were some sources of joy in those years, some things that turned Herb and Lorna toward the future, toward hope. I think I was one. I hope I was one. Children often are a source of joy for their grandparents, so perhaps I was. Still, however happy they might have been at times, their worry was always there, cold and threatening, like the winter wind that blew through the Whatsit Valley. |
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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 1-800-959-7323You can order it on the Web from
Libros en Español: Herb ’n’Lorna is also available in Spanish from Ediciones Destino.
Herb ’n’Lorna copyright © 1988 by Eric Kraft Herb ’n’Lorna is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, dialogues, settings, and businesses portrayed in it are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. First published by Crown Publishers, Inc., 201 East 50th Street, New York, New York 10022. Member of the Crown Publishing Group. Now available in paperback from Picador USA, a division of St. Martin’s Press. The illustration at the top of the page is an adaptation of an illustration by Stewart Rouse that first appeared on the cover of the August 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions. The boy at the controls of the aerocycle doesn’t particularly resemble Peter Leroy—except, perhaps, for the smile. |
LITTLE
FOLLIES
COMPLETE
SITE CONTENTS
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THOSE DIFFICULT YEARS, Studebaker’s declining years, Herb and Lorna had
much to worry about, and worrying changed them. I didn’t notice the
change; during those years I passed from childhood into adolescence, and
I was far too interested in the ways that I was changing to notice what
was happening to them. Oh, I noticed the details, but I didn’t see
the pattern. I was blinded by self-concern and also by the idea I
had of them, an idea that I had already held for so long that it possessed
the tempered strength and burnished gleam of immutable truth. Now,
forced to reconsider them, I see what I never saw then.
