| Herb ’n’ Lorna (A Love Story) | by Eric Kraft, as Peter Leroy |
| Chapter 18: | |
| In Which Herb and Lorna Are Saved by the Art of Love |
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 HEN
I THREW A PARTY at Herb and Lorna’s house, and at that party Mark Dorset
fell in love with the Glynn twins, and, therefore, everything turned out
all right, eventually.
I had grown up while Studebaker had declined, and at about the time when the Avanti and the first transistorized electronic calculators appeared, I met the love of my life, a girl named Albertine, an exotic, beautiful, intriguing girl, of whom I spoke to my friends so often and in such tedious detail that they had begun to sidle off when they saw me approaching, slinking off to the grease pit so that they wouldn’t have to hear about her again. None of my friends knew her, since she went to a private school and lived on the east side of the Bolotomy River, in a part of Babbington separate from the rest of the town, a remote and unfamiliar region, a place unto itself. I wanted Albertine to meet my friends, and I wanted them to meet her. So I decided to throw a party. Like most people at sixteen, I was embarrassed by my parents, so I didn’t want to have the party at home. I wanted to have it at Herb and Lorna’s. They were delighted when I told them and consented at once. Among the people I invited was Mark Dorset, a new friend, a newcomer to Babbington. He accepted, but with mixed feelings, since he was one of those high school students for whom a party meant, primarily, the possibility of romance, a possibility sweet in anticipation, but which too often vanished as soon as the party began. I knew how he felt. I had sometimes felt that way myself, before I met Albertine. In the hours before a party, while I was deciding what clothes, what look, what attitude to wear to this affair, the party as it might be would run through my mind again and again, a wonderful scampering thing, elusive and attractive, darting from possibility to possibility. With whom would I fall in love? Who would fall in love with me? Ahhh, but the parties in fact never equaled the parties in anticipation. For a few early moments, really only the first few moments after I had walked through the door, the pleasure of possibility remained, but soon the possible began a slow dissolve into the actual, and toward the end of the evening the actual was likely to take a form something like this (and at one party it took a form exactly like this): the girl with whom I had fallen in love, to whom I had confided some of my most cherished hopes and dreams, who had listened so wide-eyed while I was confiding those hopes and dreams, whose wide eyes had inspired me to some quite spine-tingling turns of phrase, who had held my hand during the if-only-the-world-were-just part, who had kissed me quickly and shyly in the hall and again, slowly and thoroughly, while we sat on the porch, left suddenly (squeal of tires, smell of rubber, cloud of smoke) in a battered convertible driven by a guy who had quit school the year before and now installed linoleum flooring, left laughing, leaving me behind, grinning like an idiot to hide my disappointment that this girl for whom I had had such hopes, to whom I had said so much, could have fallen at the last minute for muscles and a ragtop. Mark was often one of those people who were still hanging around after a party, when it was time to clean up, one of those who, having nothing better to do, would scramble around, trying to find all the bottles and glasses, trying to reconstruct vases, to wash beer stains from the rugs and upholstery, trying to hide from the parents any evidence that a party had been thrown in their house. The party I threw for Albertine was different. Mark came with small hopes, but it turned out to be a wonderful evening. He fell in love, doubly in love, with the Glynn twins, Margot and Martha. By the time Herb and Lorna returned home in the small hours, Mark was euphoric, happily befuddled, drunk on love, adolescent love. He was learning how pleasant desire could be, how unlike the desperate longing he had known, when it wasn’t hopeless, and he was experiencing a sweet torture from the feeling that he was going to have to choose between those identical beauties, that he couldn’t have them both. Better than all these feelings, though, was his feeling that Margot and Martha loved him. He could see in their eyes, in their grins (“You look like the Grin Twins,” he said), that they weren’t going to run off in a convertible with a linoleum-installer, but would leave with him. Mark was sitting on the living room sofa with his right arm around Margot and his left arm around Martha, when Herb and Lorna, who had come in through the kitchen, suddenly appeared in the archway between their dining room and their living room. His first impulse was to jump up and thank them, he felt such a rush of gratitude. He was grateful for their having brought all this about, for having provided the house, the fireplace, the sofa—that sofa upholstered in scratchy, rose-colored fabric that he knew he would never forget—on which he had become so happy. At the same time he was a little worried for them, worried that they’d feel they were in occupied territory. He thought they might be offended by the way he and the others had taken over their living room, made themselves at home. We had built a fire (for its flickering, aphrodisiac light), and that seemed to Mark a violation. There was party clutter everywhere: bottles (beer in quarts and Haig & Haig Scotch in Pinch bottles, which were chic in my circle then), cigarette packs and butts and ash-trays and lighters (in memory, it seems as if all of us had Zippo lighters with totemic college emblems), snack packages and the remains of some onion dip. There were couples in various styles of embrace, and there were loud conversations. Lorna took all of this in, and she smiled. There was endorsement in her smile, not the condescending youth-must-be-served sort but an elevating this-is-meet-and-right sort, as if the purpose behind Herb and Lorna’s return was not to see what we might be doing wrong, but to see that we were doing it right. Lorna’s smile seemed to give to everything we were up to in her living room the endorsement of an elder, a sage. This interpretation comes long after the fact, I admit, and I can’t pretend that I read all of it in Lorna’s smile that night. Herb was right behind Lorna, wearing a similar smile. He was less forward, eager but hesitant, and he stood in what I thought of as his ready-when-you-are posture, bent slightly at the waist, as if he wanted to come right on in and start shaking hands but felt that he had to wait for an invitation—not an invitation into his own living room, certainly, but an invitation into our party, into our youth. Lorna called out, “Hello!” in a tone she might have used to welcome guests to a party of her own. The sound of her voice occasioned some squeals in corners of the room and a crash in one of the bedrooms down the hall. There was much scrambling, and tucking in of shirts and blouses. I hopped to my feet, greeted them, and began introducing them at once, sometimes to couples who were still buttoning themselves up. They sat down. I made them drinks, and they began chatting. From them came the familiar cuddly, soothing, reassuring warmth, the active ingredient in the kind of hug mothers use as an analgesic for the pain of a scraped knee. Most of my friends, charmed by them, warmed by them, attracted to them, stayed around for another hour or so. We did a little cleaning up and put things in order a bit, but for most of the time we were just talking, sitting in front of the fire. Finally, everyone but Mark and the Glynns and Albertine and I had left. It was time for me to walk Albertine home. I urged Herb and Lorna to go to bed and leave the rest of the cleaning up to me in the morning. They said they would, but I could tell that they didn’t mean it. The five of us left. It is possible that, without that quiet, domestic ending to the evening, the love that Margot and Martha felt for Mark would, when the three of them finally left, simply have evaporated in the outside air. Instead, as soon as Herb had closed the front door behind us, Margot linked her arm with Mark’s, snuggled against him, and said, “Weren’t they wonderful?” “Oh, yes,” said Martha. She snuggled against Mark from the other side. “They’re so sweet. They’re so homey.” “You can just see them serving Thanksgiving dinner, can’t you?” asked Margot. “Right!” said Martha. “She’d be wearing a starched apron, with ruffles—” “Oh, of course!” said Margot. “And she would have made about three pies—” “And he would carve the turkey at the table,” Mark said. “That’s just the way it is,” I said. We separated at the end of the street. Albertine and I took our time walking home. Warmed by Herb and Lorna’s happy domesticity, we sketched something like it for ourselves. Mark and Margot and Martha, similarly warmed, were allowing themselves (but without admitting it) to hope that somehow they might, as a trio, achieve something like it, too. |
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 VER
THE NEXT FEW YEARS, while Herb and Lorna’s financial problems deepened,
Mark saw them fairly often. Sometimes he would see them at my house
when they were visiting. More often, though, Mark walked to their
house specifically to visit them. The Glynns lived near Herb and
Lorna, so Mark often headed for No Bridge Road after seeing Margot and
Martha or after finding that the girls weren’t at home when he called.
Unfortunately, for quite a while, especially during summers when the three
of them were home from college, Margot and Martha were frequently not at
home when Mark called, because the three were trying to fall out of love.
They weren’t able to decide what to make of themselves, what to do with
themselves, if they remained in love. When they were together in
public as a trio, when they went to the beach, to the movies, to dinner,
to someone’s house, or to a dance, they were friends. They weren’t
pretending to be “just friends.” They were just friends, friends
of a romantic and flirtatious sort, but still just friends. That’s
how they felt. That’s how they thought of themselves. When
they were alone, when they sat up late together in the courtyard of the
old carriage house where the Glynns lived, or when they walked through
town and along the docks in the evening or at night, holding hands and
talking, they were lovers, but they were lovers who didn’t go to bed together.
Oh, how they didn’t go to bed together! The agonies they went through
during that time may have acquired an amusing and poignant flavor as time
has passed, as the three of them have aged, and as mores have changed,
but what agonies they were then. For the average young couple in
that place and time, however much groping they might do, actually achieving
coitus was like breaking a tape at the end of a hundred yards of moral,
emotional, cultural, psychological, and physical hurdles. Mark and
Margot and Martha were neither average nor a couple. For them, there
were extra hurdles to leap. Loyalty and jealousy wouldn’t let Mark
sleep with either Margot or Martha alone or let either of them sleep with
him alone, and convention kept the three of them from trying to entangle
themselves simultaneously (in some way that they could, to tell the truth,
only begin to imagine). What they referred to as their “Situation”
(and they talked and talked about their Situation on those nights, on those
walks) made life confusing for all of them. Margot or Martha would
date almost any other boy who asked her out alone, hoping that some night
she’d fall in love with someone else, that she’d be able to leave Mark
to her sister and go her separate way. That didn’t happen, and as
time passed it seemed less and less likely to happen. Mark even tried
to make himself fall in love with other girls. It wouldn’t work.
The three were in love. They didn’t know what to do.
There is a great need, when one is having trouble with love, for a confidant, but what they felt and what they wanted seemed so bizarre and impossible that they couldn’t manage to talk about it. They wanted some kind of plan, something that would show that there was a future for them, but it was too soon for them to see it. You know how it is—when we’re young we don’t know how we want to live. We don’t even know what there is to want. We only know conventional names. We only recognize commonplace models. It takes years for us to see how many ways there are to live. In the back of Mark’s mind, he knew—or at least he had some kind of hunch—that Herb and Lorna were the people he wanted to—needed to—talk to, and so he visited them often. As Studebaker’s fortunes fell, Herb spent less and less time at the showroom and more and more time at home, tinkering, so the chances were good that he would be at home whenever Mark dropped by. To alleviate his worries, Herb had thrown himself into building equipment for the tour of the United States that he and Lorna had always wanted to make. Mark would often find him working on the trailer he was building from pieces of old Studebakers. He might be cutting up a garden hose to make a speaking tube to run between the trailer and the car that would pull it. He might be building, from parts of a sewing machine and a vacuum cleaner, one compact device that would do the work of both and make toast to boot. Lorna also spent more and more time at home, in part because the demand for slide rules was falling, but also because she wanted to keep an eye on Herb, to be sure that his enthusiasm wasn’t a mask, that he wasn’t falling into despair over the Studebaker decline. Most often when Mark dropped by he would find her cooking, or planning the route for their tour, or working at recreational mathematics and logic problems, sitting on the porch or on the sofa, that scratchy rose-colored sofa, with a Whitman’s Sampler beside her. One night at the very start of summer vacation, after Mark had finished his junior year in college, he was walking to the Glynns’ along the dark and twisting road that had once been the driveway to the mansion, burned long ago, for which the Glynns’ house had been the carriage house. A convertible passed him. In it, Margot was sitting beside a dark-haired young man who wore a blue blazer, a young man who seemed self-confident and rich. In a few minutes, a motorcycle passed. Martha was perched on the back of the seat, holding on to a sandy-haired guy with thick arms, a guy who looked self-confident and lusty. Mark had never actually seen Margot and Martha with other boys before. He realized that he had hoped their dates were straw men, intended only to show that they had tried to fall out of love with him but failed. He walked on to their house, and he stood outside for a few minutes, debating with himself whether he ought to go in and find out from their parents who these rivals were. He decided not to go in. He began walking. He was afraid that he might on this night lose not one but both, and that fear made him weak, empty, desperate. He walked into town and bought some beer, and then he walked back to the Glynns’ and sat outside, drinking the beer and waiting. Mr. and Mrs. Glynn went to bed. The dark and the silence made Mark terribly miserable, and the beer made him a little dizzy. He began walking again. He found himself, beery and blue, at Herb and Lorna’s. It seemed as if one minute he was on their porch, and the next minute he was sitting on their sofa, saying, “It was right here on this sofa that I fell in love, and it was the most miserable thing that ever happened to me. The most wonderful thing and the most miserable thing. The most miserable thing. Let me explain why I say that. I say ‘the most miserable thing’ because it isn’t going to work out. It just isn’t going to work out, and it isn’t going to work out because there isn’t any way it can work out. I can’t have two wives, it’s as simple as that.” Somehow, he next found himself sitting between Herb and Lorna at the kitchen table. Herb was pushing a hamburger at him from one side, and Lorna was pushing a huge plate of something that he didn’t recognize at him from the other. “What is that?” he asked Lorna, trying to be very precise in his speech because he had begun to sense that he was a little drunk, and he didn’t want it to show. “This is potato salad,” she said. “And Herb’s got a hamburger for you.” She dropped her voice. “You ought to eat something, Mark,” she said. Mark looked closely at the potato salad. “It looks as if it isn’t finished,” he said. “In other words, that is, it seems to me that someone stopped making it in the middle. It looks like just potatoes.” He chuckled. “Oh,” Lorna said, surprised, laughing. “It’s German potato salad. It doesn’t have any mayonnaise.” “And you’ll never eat any that’s better than Lorna’s,” said Herb. “You know,” Mark said, “I know why you’re doing this. You’re worried that I’m drunk and I won’t be able to walk home if I don’t eat something.” He put his arms around them, and as soon as he had he felt that he had put the three of them into an awkward position. “You don’t have to worry about me,” he said. He gave them a squeeze that he would never have presumed to give them if he had been sober, and then he let go of them. “I’ll be careful,” he said. “You have to at least try some of Lorna’s potato salad,” said Herb. Mark laughed. He adored them. There was in Herb’s voice such boundless pride in Lorna’s potato salad that Mark gave in and began eating at once. He stayed for a couple of hours, eating a bite now and then, taking a swallow of coffee now and then, and talking, talking, talking. He told them all about Margot and Martha, how he felt about the girls, how the girls felt about him, how the three of them felt about each other, how hopeless their prospects seemed to be. They were wonderful listeners. They didn’t offer a word of advice, but Mark left them feeling that things might work out. He still had no idea how exactly they might work out, but he had the general idea that everything might, somehow, be all right. Only when Mark was about halfway home, when rain had begun to fall and his memory had begun to clear, did he realize that not only had he confessed to them, in a rambling, uncertain way, grinning, blushing, groping for a suitable vocabulary, that he wanted to go to bed with Margot and Martha, to make love to both of them, but he had also admitted that he had no specific idea how, gracefully, admirably, romantically, such a thing might be done. He remembered the looks they wore: looks of interest and curiosity but not a trace of embarrassment, and he even remembered telling them about the way his mother had blushed at the end of the evening when he had brought Margot and Martha home to dinner for the first time. A little tipsy, she had giggled and said to him before he went to bed, “Remember that you can’t be in two places at once.” After Mark left, Lorna began moving around her kitchen, following her accustomed patterns, clearing the dishes, washing them. Herb went through the house in his accustomed pattern, turning lights off, turning the radio off, locking the doors. Everything they did was familiar, habitual. But tonight there was something odd about all this homely activity. They were making far too much of it, and the little sounds attendant to it, each click of a lock, each creak of a door when Herb tested it, each clink of a plate on the counter, the slosh of the water in the kitchen sink, the squeak of Lorna’s towel when she polished a glass, echoed in the house like amplified recordings, hyper-precise, hyper-audible, because the only background for them was the echoing silence of people wholly preoccupied by their thoughts. Lorna was recalling her mistake of so many years ago, when she had told Ella that she had to do the conventional thing, that she had to choose between Buster and Bert, but she was also imagining the pleasure of carving that handsome Mark, those beautiful Glynns. Though the mechanical question of their intricate entanglement aroused and intrigued her, it also made her head begin to ache, and so she set it aside and concentrated instead on sculptural details: the girls’ smooth necks, their plump lips, their breasts, ripe fruit from the land of youth (and four!—a bountiful harvest!), their bellies and thighs, where she would be able to show off her skill at suggesting the strength beneath the curves, an effect like rocks softened by snow, the smooth muscles along Mark’s back, the lenticular concavities in his tense buttocks, the venous ridge along his erect penis, its jaunty cap— She caught herself breathing hard, clutching the edge of the sink. Her heart was all aflutter. In her belly she felt the old familiar ripples, and between her legs the eager wetness of— “An interesting problem,” said Herb, and he was about to say more, but Lorna flinched and cried out, “Oh!” She hadn’t been aware that he was standing there, at the back door, looking out, into the dark. She blushed, as if somehow Herb might know what she’d been thinking, might know how elementally she had responded to what she’d been thinking. “You scared me half to death,” she said. “Don’t sneak up on me like that.” “Sorry,” said Herb. “I thought you heard me come in.” “That’s all right. What did you say?” “I said it’s an interesting problem. Mechanically, I mean,” said Herb. He coughed. “What—um—? Oh, you mean Mark—and the girls?” She pulled the stopper from the sink, and the water swirled away. Herb cleared his throat. “Yes.” His ears reddened. “He’s a nice boy. Nice looking.” Lorna looked at the dish cloth, lying in a wet lump in the sink. She rubbed her thumb along the porcelain. “An interesting mechanical problem,” said Herb. He looked at Lorna’s reflection in the glass. He felt his ears and cheeks burn. He reached into his pocket and tugged at his shorts to make room for his erection. “Lots of moving parts,” he said. Lorna turned from the sink to look at Herb, and even in the rude light of the circular fluorescent fixture Herb could see that her elusive loveliness had returned. For some time fear and fretfulness had poisoned Lorna’s system like allergens, had made the skin under her eyes puff and redden, had made her forehead break out, had made her cheeks pale and her jaw slack. Now, instantly, she seemed cleansed, cured. She had been revivified by what I think I’ll call God’s Own Wonder-Working Tonic, an invigorating compound of three potent ingredients: work to be done (keeps the eyes bright and focused on the future), self-respect (keeps the head up, also the corners of the mouth, and makes the past, on the whole, a pleasant place to visit), and lust (keeps important bodily fluids flowing and makes the present thrilling). “Herb,” she said. “I want to show you something.” Her heart was racing. She dried her hands on her apron. She could feel them tremble. She took the flour cannister from the shelf. She hesitated for the briefest of moments; then she pulled the lid off and turned the flour out on the counter. “Lorna?” said Herb. Lorna poked her fingers into the flour and pulled out what she wanted at once, her only souvenir of her coarse-goods work, one of the animated ones, one that she had modified to please herself. She wiped the case on her apron. Then she turned and held it out toward Herb in her trembling hands. Herb’s jaw fell. He brought his hand to his mouth. “Oh,” he said. “Is that—? How did you—? So you know. I—” Lorna pressed the stem, and the lid popped open. There was one of the little couples, but this pair had been carved with special care. They resembled, quite clearly, Herb and Lorna, and the arena for their enthusiastic performance was not a rumpled bed but a rowboat. “Why, that’s—” “It’s us,” said Lorna. “I made it.” “You? I. I made it.” “What?” “I made it. Isn’t that what you meant? That you knew? You found out?” “Herb, I made this. I carved the little rowboat. I carved these figures. I had to fit the little sections of their bodies onto fine wires and rods that fit onto—” “—wires that run onto pulleys, rods that run to shafts that are turned by the gears in the bottom of the case.” “That make the man and woman perform—” “The way I designed them.” “It can’t be.” “Wait here.” Herb dashed down the stairs to the cellar, and, in a moment, dashed back up them, carrying the green metal box marked with a skull and crossbones. He set it on the kitchen table, opened it, lifted the tray from it, and pulled out a stack of papers. “Look,” he said. “Look here. These are my designs. All of them.” He was beaming. He spread the drawings out on the table and stood back with his arms crossed over his chest, proud, exhilarated. “Herb—” “Lorna—” “All these years?” she asked. “I guess so,” he said. “Oh, Herb,” she said, “ignite me please, right this minute.”
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Do you find yourself muttering, “Gee whiz,
I wish I could do something to support the good work Kraft is doing in
that dusty garret of his.”
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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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ATER,
IN BED, in the pleasant lassitude after love, it all came out, slowly.
If we had overheard, if we had been, say, Dudley, outside, beneath their
windows, eavesdropping, we wouldn’t have been able to catch it all, just
a snatch of mumbled revelation, a bit of whispered confession, the occasional
bold declaration, a giggle, a chuckle, with interstices of silence, of
ignorance, where we would have been forced to imagine, to insert ourselves
in their murmurings, using what we know to suppose what they said.
