🎧 252: Had Luther had all ...

HAD LUTHER HAD all his fingers, he would probably have been Lorna’s first lover. It nearly happened one moonlit spring night, when Lorna was eighteen. Luther took her for a ride in a rowboat, on Lake Serenity, not far from Chacallit, where there was a large ballroom that extended out over the lake. The night was one of those warm, hazy ones in spring that anticipate summer and lift the spirit.
     When Luther helped Lorna into the boat and pushed off, Bertha and Clara were standing on the dock with several of the young men who hung around the Huber girls because they were enchanted by Lorna’s elusive beauty. Each stroke Luther took, each set of circular ripples the blades left in the wake, made Bertha feel more furious, more horribly betrayed, more determined to get even, at least to show Luther that he wasn’t the only object of her desire. She thrust her hip against the hip of the young man beside her, Richard Reuter. Richard was surprised; Richard was pleased. He was a frequenter of the Serenity Ballroom, a poor dancer, a young man too shy to approach young women alone. He usually stayed in the company of other young men who were too shy to approach young women alone and so stood on the fringes of the flirting and dancing and gaiety, making remarks about the others and trying to appear, instead of shy, bored. This evening, he had wandered outside with Bertha and Clara because many others had. He didn’t consider Bertha one of the more attractive young women, but she was a young woman, and that was what he wanted. He glanced at Bertha, and he almost put his arm around her. He caught himself, however, and kept his hands to himself, remembering the startled reactions he’d occasioned in the past by that sort of impulsive grabbing. When Bertha repeated the pressure of her hip, however, he was emboldened to return the pressure, tentatively. He felt, unmistakably, an increase in pressure, and — there could be no doubt about it — he felt Bertha turn so that she rubbed herself against him, just enough so that the gesture could be understood as intentional before she pulled away. By the time Bertha had grown angry enough to link her arm with Richard’s and lead him off into the shadows, Richard had decided that he was in love.
     Clara watched her sister walk off with Richard Reuter and felt much as she had felt when she had watched Bertha heaping her plate with potato salad so many years before. She was frightened and impressed. She intended to show Bertha that what Bertha could do, she could do. And she did, with Harold Russell, a much better catch.
     Luther pulled at the oars with steady, sure strokes. Lorna was careful not to look at the hand with the missing fingers, and she was careful not to praise Luther’s rowing ability because she was afraid that if she did, Luther would think that the unspoken qualification to whatever she said was “for a man who has only seven fingers.” So careful was she not to praise his rowing ability that Luther had to do it himself. He said, at a lull in Lorna’s talk about the stars twinkling through the haze, the mild weather, the breeze that drifted through the tiny, pale, spring-green leaves, the bright half-moon, the light and the shadows and the reflections, “I’m not doing bad for a fellow with only seventy percent of his fingers, am I?”
     Lorna laughed and turned away.
     “What do you say we just drift for a while?” asked Luther.
     “Oh, yes,” said Lorna at once, glad to relieve Uncle Luther of what she felt certain must be a difficult and painful labor. “I’d like that — just to drift and look at the stars.”
     “Do you know the constellations?” asked Luther.
     “I know some,” said Lorna. “Let’s see. There’s Orion.” She pointed, and Luther turned his head to look at the sky.
     “That’s right,” he said. “Do you know Cassiopeia?”
     It all happened so quickly, was accomplished with such fluidity of movement, that the boat never rocked in the water and Lorna didn’t even have time to be surprised. Truly before she knew it, Uncle Luther was by her side, they were reclining against the cushion in the stern of the boat, Uncle Luther was pointing to Cassiopeia with one hand, and the other lay idly, just resting on her dress, as if it had fallen there of its own accord and Luther had no idea where it had gone to, along the inside of her thigh.
     Lorna’s heart began to pound. A number of emotions and sensations raced crazily through her, dashing this way and that, like clowns at a circus. She was curious, certainly. What Luther might be on the way toward doing did intrigue her, after what she had seen in the barn and had elaborated so often in her imagination, at night, lying awake in her bed. The rosiness she saw in Bertha’s cheeks after she’d spent some time with Luther, and the smiles Luther put on the faces of his papier-mâché couples, suggested that what Uncle Luther seemed to be proposing was sure to be a pleasure.

In Topical Guide 252, Mark Dorset considers Natural Beauty: The Night Sky from this episode.

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