| Herb ’n’ Lorna (A Love Story) | by Eric Kraft, as Peter Leroy |
| Chapter 20: | |
| In Which Herb and Lorna’s Secret Is Revealed and They Are Enshrined |
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 ARK
AND MARGOT AND MARTHA were again the catalytic agents. When Mark
graduated from college, Herb and Lorna sent him a congratulatory card,
inside which Lorna had written the following note:
Dear Mark,The situation for the trio had not improved. Separately, they had come to the conclusion that there was no future for them as a trio, that some kind of choice must be made, some choice that would leave a pair and a singleton. They said yes to Herb and Lorna’s invitation, thinking that a vacation might help, might move them to a resolution. They drove down to Punta Cachazuda and spent a wonderful week there. They saw all of Herb and Lorna’s slides of their trip, played countless games of cards—canasta with the women for Margot and Martha, poker with the men for Mark—swam in the Gulf of Mexico, collected shells, sat in the sun, listened to stories about the trip, praised Herb’s watercolor portraits of Punta Cachazudans, and puzzled through some logic problems with Lorna. On the night before they were to leave, Margot and Mark became engaged. It was a perfect night—a clear sky, a bright half-moon, brilliant white sand, a soft breeze. M & M and Mark were walking along the beach, hand in hand in hand, carefree. “Mark,” said Martha suddenly, with a playful tone in her voice that disarmed him, “you’ve been cheating on us.” She looked straight into his eyes. His heart began to pound, and his palms began to sweat. He opened his mouth to protest, but she laughed and said, “Don’t say that you haven’t. We know you have. We know you’ve been cheating on us because we’ve been cheating on you. We have to—the only way we can get laid is to go to bed with somebody else.” There was a silence, and then they all burst out laughing. It was real hysteria; they fell against each other and stood in a huddle, laughing at the ridiculousness of their Situation. Finally Martha said, “Mark, ask Margot to marry you and end this.” She was serious. “But—” Mark began. “She’s the older one,” said Martha. She turned and walked away. When Margot and Mark caught up to her, they had become an engaged couple, and Martha had become Mark’s fiancée’s twin sister. The next day, Lorna planned the full Sunday-dinner spread for their last meal together: carrot and celery sticks, olives, sweet gherkins, Waldorf salad, fricasseed chicken, dumplings, peas, chocolate cake. Margot and Mark and Martha had decided to save the announcement until they were all at the table together, and they must have looked like impatient children while they waited for Herb to pour beer for all of them. “We have something to give to you,” said Herb when he had finished pouring. He turned toward Lorna, and she lifted a napkin to unveil, on the table between them, a tiny box, wrapped in white paper and tied with a white ribbon. “And we have something exciting to tell you,” Mark said. He looked in turn at Margot and Martha. All three of them were grinning, pleased, excited. “Well,” said Herb, “since I’m the oldest—” Margot and Martha and Mark snickered. Herb gave them a quizzical look. “It’s nothing,” Mark said. “It just has to do with our announcement. I’ll explain in a minute.” “Well,” said Herb again, “since I’m the oldest, I’m going to go first.” “Oh, Herb,” said Lorna, “can’t you see they’re bursting to tell us? The three of them look like the cat that swallowed the canary. Let them tell us their announcement first, Herb.” “Oh, no, no,” said Martha. “That’s all right. Herb should go first. Age does have its privileges.” The three of them snickered again. “You’ll find out why we’re laughing,” said Martha. “Well,” said Herb, “now you’ve got me so curious that I want to hear what you’ve got to say.” “Please, Herb,” Mark said, “you go first.” “Nope,” said Herb. “I’ve made up my mind. I’m the oldest—” He paused, waiting for a laugh and getting one from Margot, who just couldn’t hold it in— “and I say I want to hear the announcement.” “Good for you, Herb,” said Lorna. “All right,” said Margot. “I’ll make it.” She sat up straight, folded her hands in her lap, and said, “Mark and I are going to get married.” Silence. Mark and Margot and Martha sat there smiling, saying nothing, and Herb and Lorna sat there with their mouths hanging open, saying nothing. After what seemed like quite a while, Lorna looked at Herb and then looked at the little box on the table. It seemed to startle her. “Oh,” she said. She reached out impulsively and covered the box with the napkin again. “Oh, my,” she said. “Well,” said Herb. “That’s a surprise.” “It’s wonderful,” said Lorna, as if she had just recalled that that was what one said in such a situation. “I’m very happy for them,” said Martha, beaming and nodding her head. She seemed to want to convince them that she was. “Really,” she said. “Margot’s older; that’s why she got him.” “Oh, yes,” said Lorna, smiling, but smiling in an abstract, theoretical way, as if she were testing the theory that a smile might be the appropriate response. “You’re the first to know,” Mark said. “Well, it’s lucky that we have a present for you,” said Herb. He seemed to have recovered his exuberance all at once. “It’s something we’re really proud of, and there’s quite a story behind it. Wait until you hear—” “Herb,” said Lorna. She was shaking her head rapidly, her brow was wrinkled, and she was looking down at her plate. Herb went on, but he faltered. “Wait until you hear how we worked it out. See, I—um—it turns out that Lorna and I both, for years—that is, we never knew that we both were in—um—we got to thinking about what you said, Mark, after that night—” “Herb,” said Lorna again. “Well,” Herb went on, “it took a lot of thought, a lot of thought, but we came up with—and then Lorna carved it out of ivory, a very good piece of ivory, and just wait till you see the workmanship on this—” He reached for the box, but Lorna had her hand clamped firmly over the napkin that hid it. “No, Herb,” she said. “We can’t give it to them now.” Herb turned toward the trio, confused and, more than that, disappointed. “But—,” he said. Lorna raised her glass and said, “To Mark and Margot: every happiness for now and evermore. And to Martha: may you find someone just as nice as Mark.” They all drank, but the atmosphere in which they drank was certainly strange. The next day, during the good-byes, Herb apologized for “all that gift business,” and Lorna said that they’d send Margot and Mark something “more appropriate.” When they asked what the gift was, Herb was all set to get it and show it to them, but Lorna wouldn’t let him, and she said that the best thing would be “for all of us to just forget all about it.” Then she looked at Mark and Margot and Martha for a moment and added, “At least for now.” All the way home Mark and Margot and Martha wondered what the heck was in that box.
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 HE
CLASSES were a success from the start, though Herb and Lorna tried to keep
them from growing too quickly by swearing the students to secrecy.
The secret was a hard one to keep, as hard as the original secret discovery
of one’s own sexuality, that secret we’re immediately eager to spill, the
biggest and best secret that we ever have held in common, the secret that
joins us. How rare it was and how delightful it must have been for
the wrinkled citizens of Punta Cachazuda to get, late in life, a chance
to wear again the self-satisfied smirks they had last worn when, as adolescents,
they each had first discovered whatever bit of the great mystery of human
sexual pleasure each had first discovered. Rarer still, and quite
possibly more delightful still, was the unexpected return of the opportunity
to reveal the discovery to a friend, or, if one’s friends already knew
(and how disappointingly often they did or pretended to), to an acquaintance,
anyone who would admit ignorance and listen. Many a student of Herb
and Lorna’s rediscovered giggling. Every one of them was bursting
to tell someone else, and most of them had a specific someone in mind.
I wish I could say that they wanted to tell out of a spirit of generosity,
an elevated desire to enlighten other Punta Cachazudans, but in most cases,
it was a desire to show, even though it would be only for the brief moment
of the telling of the secret, that they knew more than their fellows.
It’s a baser desire, but it may underlie more didactic efforts than the
nobler one.
Since every student wanted to enlist someone else, and neither Herb nor Lorna could resist for long the pleading of one student to bring in another, the classes grew and grew. Not every student arrived in a state of ignorance. A few brought with them treasured, and long-hidden, examples of coarse goods. Two of these were products of Herb and Lorna’s unwitting collaboration. One, they discovered to their great surprise, was an item they had sold to a lanky, dark-haired, gum-chewing gas-station attendant in Sundown, Texas, not very long before their arrival in Punta Cachazuda. The first classes, hardly classes at all, were held in Herb and Lorna’s garage. When the enrollment exceeded the capacity of the garage, they expanded into the living room, and when the combined garage and living room became too crowded, they began meeting twice a week, then three times a week, and eventually they were meeting six days a week and still were unable to accommodate everyone. Clearly, the thing to do was to crawl out from underground and move the classes to the recreation hall. By this time, the secret was hardly secret within the town: nearly every Punta Cachazudan with any mechanical or modeling ability at all was enrolled in one of the classes and had set up a little clandestine workshop at home, usually in the garage, most of workshops built according to plans Herb furnished, so that the whole operation could be folded against a wall and concealed behind what appeared to be a handy swing-away ironing-and-mending center. Those who couldn’t make erotic jewelry or sculpture sold it, and those who couldn’t sculpt or sell modeled. To get the use of the recreation hall, the Punta Cachazudans were going to have to speak to the only people in town who weren’t yet in the know: the Bagnells. It dawned on Herb and Lorna and their students, when they found themselves giggling and blushing while discussing the need to approach the Bagnells, that the timidity, the fear, and the embarrassment they felt were nearly identical to the feelings they would have felt, or had felt, in admitting—confessing—to their parents, however indirectly, that they had experienced some of the secret pleasures that separate adults from children. A delegation was chosen. They marched, giggling in spite of themselves, to the home of Bobo Bagnell, and, biting their tongues to keep their faces straight, demanded that they be given permission to use the recreation hall for classes in the design and manufacture of erotic jewelry and objets d’art. Bobo, baffled, consented, in the belief that the bizarre request was just part of a scheme to get him to come to the recreation hall the following evening, where, he supposed, the Punta Cachazudans intended to throw a surprise party to celebrate his eightieth birthday. The next evening, he dressed in his white linen suit and walked to the recreation hall, which, he could see, was filled nearly to capacity. When he entered, a moment passed before anyone noticed him, but when people did, they began to applaud him, and their applause made more notice him, and they began to applaud him. When they began singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” Bobo’s eyes misted over. The cupcakes and coffee they served him were not, he admitted to himself, a lavish spread for an eightieth birthday celebration, but it was the thought that counted, and he thought that the decorations on the cupcakes, little amorous couples intimately entwined, were clever, amusing, and flattering. In the years that followed, the Punta Cachazudans tried to confine their secret to the town, to protect their art and industry from an uncertain reception outside, but there was in them that urge to tell, and now and then one or another gave in to it, and the secret spread somewhat, underground, whispered or mumbled. The farther it spread from Punta Cachazuda, the more preposterous it seemed, and so there were no southward swarms of the curious and salacious except for a small flock of young people inspired by a mention in the second edition of The Whole Earth Catalog: If you’re going to be in the area, you might want to check out a neo-Transcendentalist erotico-artistic community in west coastal Florida called Punta Cachazuda. I didn’t have a lot of time to really get to know the place, but I got a lot of good feelings about it when I was there. These people are old, but a lot of them are into some interesting ideas in collaborative art and city planning, and I think there’s some kind of pan-linguistic movement going on here, too, like home-grown Esperanto or something. Check it out.That, however, was a passing curiosity, and the widespread recognition that Punta Cachazudans simultaneously feared and desired didn’t come until recently. We’ll get to that in a moment, but to be faithful to chronology I have to tell you what happened next. Herb had never really been healthy after he and Lorna reached Punta Cachazuda. He was bothered by a flurry of minor ailments, and they left him weakened and wary. Then one evening, after he had finished teaching a class in the articulation of hip joints, he had a heart attack. It struck him while he was sitting quietly in his easy chair, reading the latest issue of Amateur Mechanical Engineer. The attack scared the hell out of Herb and made Lorna so solicitous of him that he couldn’t help laughing at the way she bustled about, doing for him. Her own heart ached with concern for him. She couldn’t stand being out of reach of him, and the possibility of losing him seemed to be dwelling in their little cement-block house like an unwelcome guest. At night she often found herself awake, murmuring a plea to this presence, this possibility of death, to get out of her house, to go visit someone else for a while, to go, go away. After a while, Herb’s fear began to wane, and he began to make light of the first attack, calling it, as many of his Punta Cachazudan cronies did, “his warning.” Lorna began letting him out of her sight again, and she began to feel that the possibility of death had moved on, was visiting elsewhere for a while. When she returned from a shopping trip one morning, Herb was dead in his easy chair. One glorious fall day, years later, I gained, accidentally, an understanding of how Lorna must have felt then. I was driving alone along a country road, feeling an exhilaration that sometimes comes to me on a fine fall day and at no other time. It is due, I think, partly to the vestigial rhythm of the academic calendar, which makes spring a time of anxiety and fall a time of rebirth, new opportunities, a clean slate; it is also due in part to the crisp weather, of course, and the autumn colors in the countryside. In the road ahead of me was a dead male pheasant. He was lying on his side, with his neck extended and one wing in the air. At the side of the road was a female pheasant, his mate. She approached him, calling, not keening, but calling out. Then she turned away, began to walk away, turned back and called out again, turned away, turned back, and so on, as if confused and almost annoyed, as if she were saying, “Come on now, get up. Quit fooling around. We still have a long way to go, a lot to do. Don’t lie down now—we have a long way to go together.” I stopped the car and watched her in painful fascination. I couldn’t have driven on anyway; my eyes were full of tears. Lorna stayed on in Punta Cachazuda for a couple of lonely years, but then the house where she and Herb had lived together in Babbington came back on the market, and Lorna bought it, for cash, and returned to Babbington. Everything that she and Herb had had in the house had been lost in the warehouse fire, so Lorna lived with secondhand furniture that she and Ella picked up in a week of rapid shopping, which Ella enjoyed enormously but Lorna thought of as something she wanted to get through as quickly as she could. Ella had been attracted to new Colonial-style things, but Lorna had wanted to duplicate as closely as she could the feeling the house had had when she and Herb had lived there, when it had been furnished with things that Herb had made and things they’d picked up here and there over the years, and so she avoided stores that sold new furniture and steered Ella toward secondhand shops. The house was furnished, and looked cozily cluttered, but there was a hollow in it, a rarefied pocket where Herb should have been. Of Lorna then, May said: Well, after he died, I mean, after Herb died— Well. Oh, Lorna and I still had some grand times— No. No, we didn’t. Not really. I tried to play Lorna to her May—cheer her up, make her look forward to something—but she was just coasting after Herb died, you know. Just coasting.When her cancer was diagnosed, Lorna told no one, but something about her manner, a finality in the way she began to handle her affairs, in her visits to old friends, convinced Ella that something was fatally wrong, and because cancer was what Ella feared most, she guessed, correctly, that that was it. Mark and Margot and Martha visited Lorna. Ella had told them what she feared and made them promise not to betray to Lorna in any way what she had told them. They found themselves, against their wills, looking for and finding signs that Lorna was weakening. Was she thinner? Was she fragile? Was she too tired? Was she having trouble breathing? Yes, she was. She was eager to hear their news, but it seemed that they didn’t have enough news to fill the time they spent with her, certainly not enough to fill the hollow in the house. The news they had brought was gone too soon, like firewood that’s too dry. After an hour or so, Lorna began to drift into reminiscence. The three M’s loved hearing her stories, and they would have listened contentedly for hours, would have asked for more, would have asked the questions they were curious about, if they hadn’t worried that the reminiscences were painful for her, that perhaps it hurt her to have Herb come to mind. The truth was that Herb was always on her mind, and that reminiscing about him was more pleasant than painful. Not having him with her was what hurt her; remembering him didn’t hurt her at all. Mark drove to the Gilded Peacock and brought back cartons of chicken chow mein. While they ate, Lorna recalled their visit to Punta Cachazuda, and the fricasseed-chicken dinner at which Margot had announced their engagement. When Lorna began talking about that dinner she sat up straighter, and her spirit seemed to return to her. Soon she was even laughing. This wasn’t just the feeble laughter she’d managed earlier in the evening, but real laughter, laughter that betrayed her illness when it made her breathless, but a joy to hear despite that. “Poor Herb,” she said. “I remember the way he tried to go on with the speech he’d practiced and give you the gift we’d made.” She laughed again, and ran out of breath again. “You can’t imagine what we went through to make that.” Her expression became serious. She put down her fork. She put her elbows on the table and laced her fingers together. “Tell me something,” she said. “Tell me how it’s working out. Are you happy?” “Are we happy?” Mark asked. “Are—all three of you happy? Martha, you haven’t married. I wonder—I wonder if I know why. What—how—how do the three of you—get along?” “Oh, very well,” said Martha. “We get along beautifully together.” “But—how?” asked Lorna. “I want to hear all about it.” “Well—” said Mark, sheepishly, looking into his plate. “You remember the night when you told Herb and me that you three were in love, don’t you?” “Of course,” said Mark. “You told us everything then.” “I was a little drunk.” “You’re a little drunk now, aren’t you?” “Just a little.” “I’ll tell,” said Margot. “Me too,” said Martha. Together, the three of them managed to tell Lorna what sort of life had evolved for them. Shyness, coupled with the youthful assumption that the experiences of the old have been too limited for them to understand young lust, kept them from telling her quite everything, but they told her most of it.
“WELL,” said Lorna when they had finished. “Well, well, well.”
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THEN, well, I’ll let May say it:
And then, well, Lorna died too. At least neither of them had to go through that dreadful Alzheimer’s business. I mean, what a damned injustice it is for someone who’s been an absolute delight to have to become all sort of baffled. But—they didn’t, thank God. They even became famous—quite famous. They’re the only famous people I’ve known, really. The only famous people I’ve had dinner with. I wish they were around to enjoy it. I’m sure they would enjoy it. I know I would enjoy it.Today, in Punta Cachazuda, clusters of multi-story condominium buildings occupy most of the section nearest the Gulf, where Humboldt and Bitsy Bagnell built the first of the original cement-block houses. Each of the apartments boasts a balcony that faces Gulfward, and on these balconies the residents sit at sunset and think. The town has reproduced itself many times, spreading farther and farther inland. Its plan of meandering roads, sidewalks, and canals has become the model for many other communities along the Florida coast. The town’s population is many times what it was when Herb and Lorna lived there, and fully ninety-six percent of the residents are engaged in some aspect of erotic sculpture. Notoriety came, when it came, first through admiration, not condemnation. The revival of interest in crafts and folk art led to the “discovery” of erotic jewelry and the other erotic crafts and arts, to the revelation of the “colony” in Punta Cachazuda, and to the Smithsonian’s mounting of the erotic-jewelry exhibit. In the current cultural climate, the Punta Cachazudans prosper, and their art prospers, despite the occasional outraged yowl. Since it is in the nature of humankind to diversify in matters of taste, it shouldn’t be surprising that today’s Punta Cachazudans work in a bewildering variety of media and styles. There are traditionalists who work in shell, amber, and a plastic substitute for ivory, who make nothing larger than a Watchcase Wonder. There are ultraminiaturists, some of whom “carve” with laser light and observe their work under electronic magnification with the aid of computer-enhanced imaging made possible in part by a grant from ChacalliTech. There are “charmers,” who produce coy, vulgar, cheap cast-metal and plastic charms with elementary moving parts. Apparently enough people consider these trinkets amusing “gag gifts” with which to mark birthdays, engagements, and wedding anniversaries to make manufacturing the things a profitable business. The charmers are to be distinguished from the “charmists,” say the charmists, whose work is equally vulgar, but, because they work in precious metals, not cheap. There are some who work life-size, in the pliable flesh-emulating plastics used for bouncing baby dolls. Their work may be obscene; I haven’t made up my mind. There are also, I hasten to say, many Punta Cachazudans who have no collective name for themselves, who make intricately animated, individualized, affectionate, delightfully lusty charms and men’s jewelry in the Lorna-and-Herb tradition. The Punta Cachazuda recreation center today is much more than the single cement-block building it was in Herb and Lorna’s time. It is a cluster of buildings, situated in the empty place left between four replications of the original plan for the town, like one of the four-cusped bits of dough left after cutting cookies. Its handsome buildings and broad lawns make it look much like a college campus. The largest and most impressive of the buildings are the sculpture studio and the hangarlike mechanical shop, in either of which, at any time of day, you will find men and women whistling, and sometimes giggling, while they work on erotic sculpture and the mechanisms to make them move. At the center of this recreation campus is a huge wind-driven erotic mobile. It is a smooth, idealized work. It depicts a copulating couple, a dozen times life size. When the wind passes over the arched and rounded surfaces of their bodies, they rise and fall, embrace and draw apart, tumble and turn, kiss, caress, and couple, in ways designed by the artist but powered, prompted, and provoked by nature. In a zephyr, their movements are gentle and tender. In hurricanes, their antics are the stuff of legends, of giants in the earth, whose couplings make the ground beneath us tremble. The figures are intended, I’m sure, to represent Everyman and Everywoman, but in a certain gesture, a little eccentricity, a moment in which they pause and he brushes her cheek with his lips, from certain angles, in a certain slant of light, I seem to see my grandparents, Gumma and Guppa, Herb and Lorna. |
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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
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SITE CONTENTS
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ITH
THE MARRIAGE of Mark and Margot, the trio seemed to have found a solution
to their Situation, a conventional, traditional solution. Martha
was maid of honor at the wedding, and after Margot and Mark left the reception,
they didn’t see Martha for months. Naïvely, simplemindedly, all three
imagined that their Situation had been left behind in their crazy past,
part of a complicated courtship that they would recall with laughter in
the years to come. None of them knew how much more complicated their
Situation would grow.
