314: Lorna profited . . .
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 10 continues
LORNA PROFITED from the move in an unexpected and wonderful way. She found a lifelong friend: May Castle (then May Hopper).
Oh, good! It’s time I stepped in. Well, there I was, all alone in the handsomest house in Babbington, because, you see, my parents were dead, poor things. They had died in Paris, well, just outside Paris, in a train wreck, a disaster, really. Hundreds killed. And they left me absolutely everything — well nearly everything — including the house, of course, and I had the entire place to myself. Well, nearly to myself. I had a wretched aunt living with me, because she had no permanent place to live, and you see I was only a girl. Was I nineteen yet? No, I don’t think so. I may have been seventeen. No, that’s not likely. I must have been eighteen. Now the less said about this aunt, Auntie Phipps, the better. Ooooh! She was awful!
I’m quite certain that when the family went looking for a companion for me, someone must have said, “Oh, how about Auntie Phipps?”
“Oh, yes! She’ll be just perfect! Where is she?”
“Oh, I don’t know, she must be in the back of a closet somewhere. We’ll just dig her out and make her go and live with little May.”
I’m sure that’s where they found her, in some closet. Well, I couldn’t stand having her around all the time, and having no one else to talk to. That’s why I decided to rent the guest house. We always called it the guest house, but it was actually attached to the house, the main house, so it should have been called the guest wing, I suppose. Well, I ran an ad, and Lorna showed up at the front door. I liked her at once, and she liked me, of course. She was lively and attractive, and she was young! Actually, she was eight or ten — I don’t know — say eight — years older than I, but she was, well, no older than an older sister. And yet, she hadn’t really been anywhere or done much of anything, so that put us on a more equal footing. Oh, we were friends from the start.
May’s was a pretty place: shady patios, ivy-covered trellises, trim lawns, a rose garden, a long gravel driveway. The guest house was linked to the main house by a porte cochère, “attached,” as May said, but quite private. There were two bedrooms, a living room with a view every bit as good as that from the front rooms of the main house, and a small kitchen tucked into a corner in the back, with a view over a patch of lawn behind the garage, where a rope swing hung from a twisted apple tree, a swing that May’s father had hung for her.
The years that Herb and Lorna spent at May’s were exciting ones, years of progress and innovation, rising expectations and increasing prosperity. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Vannevar Bush and a team of scientists and engineers constructed an electromechanical calculator that nudged the slide rule a little further toward death. Tutankhamen’s tomb was opened. Lindbergh flew to Paris. Paul Whiteman bought Arnold Abbot Adler’s arrangement of “Lake Serenity Serenade,” added a vocal by the Rhythm Boys, and made a hit of it. Studebaker introduced the pretty little Erskine Six sport roadster and ran a pair of President Eights around the Atlantic City Speedway for nineteen days nonstop at an average speed approaching seventy miles per hour.
At May’s, Herb and Lorna enjoyed luxuries they would never have found anywhere else. May employed a gardener, handyman, housekeeper, and cook; the gardener tended the grounds outside the guest house just as carefully as the rest, the handyman kept the guest house in as good repair as the main house, and the housekeeper cleaned Herb and Lorna’s quarters once a week. More often than not, May insisted that Herb and Lorna eat dinner with her. Her generosity had a simple motive: she wanted Herb and Lorna, especially Lorna, to be free to be her friends and boon companions.
[to be continued on Thursday, August 11, 2022]
In Topical Guide 314, Mark Dorset considers History: Real: Momentous Events from this episode.
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