317: May had to . . .
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 10 continues
May had to elude Auntie Phipps to go out with Garth. She pretended that she went out only with Herb and Lorna, but they all went off to meet Garth, and a foursome was established that would endure for more than twenty years. They went to dances at the Boat Club (which, years later, became the Yacht Club, without a noticeable increase in the size or opulence of the boats that belonged to its members). They went picnicking, hiking, swimming, sailing, and rowing. They played cards, talked, drank, ate. They went to movies together, and occasionally they drove into New York together. Once they even drove to Chacallit together.
The trip wasn’t entirely successful. In the Hubers’ parlor, Garth looked like a city slicker, and Richard Huber refused to carry on a conversation with him. Lorna’s sisters, Bertha and Clara, spat venom from the start.
“Lorna!” cried Clara as soon as she saw her, “you look so pale! Have you been sick?”
“And so thin!” said Bertha. “I’m worried about you. Are you taking care of yourself?”
May recognized all this for what it was. She was surprised only by the crudeness. She expected to see some fight in Lorna, but she was disappointed. “I’m fine,” said Lorna. “Just fine.”
May appointed herself Lorna’s champion. Eyes wide, lashes flapping, she said, “Yes, it’s the fashion now to be slim. At home, all the women are slim.”
May claimed to find Chacallit enchanting, but she found it considerably less so after she slipped, while stepping from stone to stone, and fell into the chilly Whatsit. Only Lester Piper really enjoyed the visit; he enjoyed it thoroughly. He was delighted to be able to show Herb that he had made a success of himself in Richard Huber’s sales department, and he was quite taken with May. Millie Piper, on the other hand, found May shocking, and she feared that within the quartet of young people there might be goings-on of a type that she had hoped she’d never have to concern herself with.
Of course, the grandparents, Richard and Lena and Lester and Millie, adored Ella. She was curious and quick, and in the course of a morning she did a hundred little things that seemed to be worth telling. When Bertha and Clara arrived with their fat and stolid children, they had to listen to a hundred annoying little stories. Though they smiled, one could see in their eyes the look of an employee at Babbington Studebaker who hadn’t managed to slip off to the grease pit.
During this visit, May noticed something unsettling about Ella:
She — fell in love too easily. She fell too hard, too fast. I had had an idea of this before. I had seen it a bit, back at home. We often took her with us, of course, when the four of us went here and there, and she seemed to think I was her mother sometimes. I mean, she seemed to feel toward me just as she felt toward Lorna. It bothered me. It did. It didn’t seem right. She didn’t seem to know the difference — oh, how can I put this — she didn’t have the idea of degrees of love. Well, now I’m talking about later, of course. But there, in Chacallit, she just got this mad crush on that man — that Clara’s husband. Why? Who can say? One never knows. She fell for people that way — too quickly — too strongly. No apparent reason. You can’t tell sometimes.
[to be continued on Tuesday, August 16, 2022]
In Topical Guide 317, Mark Dorset considers Love: Falling in Love, Susceptibility Thereto from this episode.
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