🎧 250: Lorna thought . . .

     Lorna thought that Uncle Luther’s affections had been parceled out quite satisfactorily. What Bertha had received Lorna didn’t want, and what Lorna had received Bertha must certainly, she supposed, be willing to let her have. For the most part, Bertha was willing to let Lorna have what now seemed to her nothing more than an indulgent uncle’s fondness for a talented child. She didn’t mind his praising Lorna’s talents; she had discovered talents of her own. She did, however, mind the time that Luther spent with Lorna. Time spent with Lorna was time that might have been spent with her. It was hard enough for Bertha to find times and places to be alone with Luther without arousing her parents’ suspicions, though it was certainly easier now that Bertha was working in the mill and had developed friendships with young women who had no one but themselves to whom they had to account for the way they spent their time. Bertha began demanding more and more of the time that Luther would have spent with Lorna.
     After a while, though, Lorna didn’t miss Luther’s teaching. She had already surpassed him in modeling ability, and she could see that she was learning more from her own work than he could have taught her. She was working in other materials now — clay and plaster — and she had begun to make a little money doing jewelry work at home, doing piecework on links and studs, mounting glass in cheap settings of tin or pinchbeck, work that was far below her abilities.
     As soon as she persuaded her parents to let her work for an hour or two each day in the mill, she was able to work with much better stuff, mounting mother-of-pearl and garnet and onyx in silver and gold. In a very short time, she had gone beyond mere mounting to fabrication, fabricating link swivels, the interlinked projecting wires that join the two parts of old-fashioned cuff links and shirt studs. The ends of the wires are turned into loops and joined in the manner of the Chinese puzzles that so frustrated me when I was a boy, puzzles that I have taken care to avoid ever since I learned, as an adult, that there are some things I do not have to be able to do. Making these link swivels was skilled work, work that lay on the border between the mechanical operations — setting the stones and other ornaments, cutting, stamping, and buffing — and the artisanship of those who actually made the gold and silver settings or those who carved figures in ivory.
     One could become good at making swivels in a way that one never could at gluing or buffing. There was room for style and grace here. The pliers could be manipulated in an individual manner. The loops could vary slightly. A swivel maker could vary the styles of loops from oval to round, could even introduce triangularity or, if very adept — and Lorna was — attempt squarish loops now and then. Any variation had to be accomplished within formal constraints. There was the constraint of time, indirectly applied through the piecework method of payment. There was the constraint of length, since the managers of the link-and-stud works railed against the women who used too much of the wire that formed the swivels.
     When I examined the link-and-stud collection at the Chacallit Historical Society, my first reaction was that fabricating link swivels must have been boring work, but I’ve come to understand that there were elements of dance (in the movements of the fabricator’s hands), of sculpture (in the shaping of the swivels themselves), and of mathematics (in the geometry of the loops and in using just the right length of wire). I can see how it led to Lorna’s exacting work in the slide-rule factory later on, to her affection for logic and for recreational mathematics, and, of course, to the making of erotic jewelry.

In Topical Guide 250, Mark Dorset considers Amusements and Pastimes: Puzzles from this episode.

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