339: Herb began work ...
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 13 continues
HERB BEGAN work on the new room at once. He persisted in referring to it as “the den,” in the hope — which he never expressed in any other way, not through any dropping of hints, not through any irony or the slightest ambiguity in his tone of voice — that before he had actually finished the new room Mrs. Stolz would have decided that she’d really rather return to the River Sound Hotel, and the room would in fact become his den. For the time being, Mrs. Stolz slept in the room that had been intended for Ella, and Ella slept in the living room, on the rose-colored sofa.
As the odd arrangement developed, it seemed likely to make everyone but Herb quite happy. Ella loved Mrs. Stolz with the comfortable old-shoe, familiar-sweater, cuddles-and-hugs kind of love that a child comes to feel for a grandparent if the child and grandparent are fortunate enough to be able to spend a lot of time together from day to day. She had developed her own explanation for Mrs. Stolz’s presence in her family: Mrs. Stolz had come with the house, like a fixture, the fence or the oven, and this was the way such things ordinarily happened. (The little girl who formed that notion was the one that Ella most liked to recall from her years in the stucco house on No Bridge Road, and when, five years after her marriage, she had a house of her own, the girl in her was disappointed that it was new, with no previous owner lingering on.)
Mrs. Stolz adored Ella, and she was pleased to find that she showed a respect for Mrs. Stolz’s opinions that Mrs. Stolz had never seen in her own children or grandchildren, who seemed to regard her as hopelessly out of touch, a relic of another time. Mrs. Stolz was astonished to realize how much she enjoyed the feeling that in this household she was needed, desperately needed. To her great relief, Lorna had, apparently, lapsed into a period of rational calm. Certainly, there were odd things about her, though — the way she slipped off to the cellar to work at her table for hours every day, for one thing. Mrs. Stolz knew, from snooping, what she worked on.
One afternoon, about a year after Mrs. Stolz had come to live with them, a telephone call from Ella’s school had sent Lorna rushing off to bring Ella, who’d been sick in the lunchroom, home. Mrs. Stolz had, after a couple of minutes’ battle with her scruples, convinced herself that in order to be better able to help Lorna she really needed to know what was in the locked work table, and why Lorna insisted that she not be disturbed while she was at work, wouldn’t even permit Mrs. Stolz to come down the cellar stairs when she was working. Mrs. Stolz accepted in general Lorna’s explanation, that she worked on jewelry — she had seen the jewelry, after all, and she admired Lorna’s work and marveled at the way God sometimes bestows a compensating asset on those He’s burdened with pitiable liabilities — but she felt a need to know Lorna’s work in all its particulars. She felt a need to know what she hadn’t been permitted to know.
Mrs. Stolz descended to the cellar and found Lorna’s work just as she had left it. In the center of her work table was a large magnifying glass, mounted on a swivel, that Herb had rigged up for Lorna, to make her jewelry work easier on her eyes, which were beginning to show the strain. Mrs. Stolz bent over the glass and looked through it. She saw two beautiful, though unfinished, figures, engaged in an activity that made her gasp.
“Oh, my goodness,” she said aloud. The sound of her voice frightened her. She rushed back to the foot of the stairs. She held her breath and listened. When she was sure she was still alone in the house, she returned to the worktable and studied the little ivory couple through the glass. She became so absorbed in her study that she almost failed to hear the door. She was out of breath and perspiring when she greeted Lorna and Ella in the kitchen, and she was so flabbergasted by what she had seen that she forgot why Lorna had brought Ella home, offered her no comfort, didn’t even notice how pale and tremulous she was.
In bed that night, Mrs. Stolz said to herself, “The poor child,” meaning Lorna. “I suppose she needs that sort of thing somehow. It’s crazy work, but at least she keeps it out of sight.” She vowed to carry the burden of her discovery alone, since Herb — poor soul — had enough to worry about already. She fell asleep wondering whether there really were any men with tongues as long and agile as the one she’d seen the little ivory man employing in so fascinating a manner.
[to be continued on Thursday, September 15, 2022]
In Topical Guide 339, Mark Dorset considers Gadgets: Mechanical
and Tools: Magnifying Glass from this episode.
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