🎧 363: One afternoon . . .

ONE AFTERNOON a couple of weeks later, while a team at the University of Pennsylvania was hard at work on the first electronic computer (the “electronic numerical integrator and calculator,” or ENIAC), thereby hastening the eventual obsolescence of the slide rule, Lorna was alone in the kitchen, whipping up a batch of potato salad and listening to The Loves of Ellen Burch on the radio. Dudley appeared at the back door, tapping on the window, fogging the glass with his breath. Lorna motioned to him to come in, and he did. He closed the door behind him and stood on the mat. “Lorna,” he asked, “is Ella home?”
     “No,” said Lorna. “She’s at Emily’s.”
     “Good,” said Dudley. He began pulling his galoshes off. “You and I have to talk.”
     “Oh?” said Lorna. “What about?”
     “About Ella,” said Dudley. An organ crescendo came from the radio. Ellen Burch, a young girl with dreams, had arrived at an important fork in her young life just as Dudley had arrived at the back door. Lorna wondered whether she had decided to travel to Patagonia with the darkly intriguing Reynaldo or stay in Beaverton with Dave. Two actors portraying the Bullard Brothers began an advertisement for Bullard Brothers’ Double-Roasted Coffee. “It’s roasted,” said the first. “And roasted again,” said the second. “For twice the coffee flavor,” they said together. “So your second cup is almost as good as your first.”
     “Do you want some coffee, Dudley?” asked Lorna.
     “Yes, thank you, that would be nice,” said Dudley.
     Lorna struck a match and lit the gas under what was left of the morning coffee.
     “Poor Ella,” said Lorna. She stuck a fork into one of the potatoes and found it not quite done. “I’ve felt so sorry for her.” A male chorus sang the Bullard Brothers’ jingle. “She just seemed to fall apart when Buster was killed. She simply couldn’t imagine a future without him in it. Do you know what I mean?”
     “Yes. I do,” said Dudley. He sat at the kitchen table, a square table with wooden legs and a metal, enamel-coated top, white with black edges. With his fingernail, he traced zigzag routes through the network of scratches and knife cuts on the tabletop. The organ played the Ellen Burch theme. “It’s quite odd, the way people think of the future,” Dudley offered. “Some of them seem to have the expectation — the hope, I should say — that they will turn a corner one day and find that everything is new, all is changed, yet others seem to hope for just the opposite, that things to come will somehow be just as they’ve been before, that life will stop in a way, freeze, like a snapshot.” Lorna poured coffee for Dudley.
     “You’re missing a chance to see the world beyond Beaverton,” said Reynaldo.
     “I know, Reynaldo,” said Ellen, “but, well, you know what Emerson said about travel.”
     “People like that,” said Dudley, “want copies of the same snapshot, strung out from here to eternity. They want to be able to think that they already know what they’ll be pasting on the blank pages of the photo album of their lives. Do you follow me?”
     “Yes, Dudley,” said Lorna.
     “No,” said Reynaldo, icily, “I do not.”
     “I suppose,” said Dudley, “some of those people are so pleased with their lives that they simply want to continue as they are, to ‘let well enough alone,’ but more of them, I think, fear the future. They would rather have nothing happen to them than to have anything else go wrong. I hope I’m not getting too philosophical for you, Lorna.”
     “Oh, no,” said Lorna. She turned back to her work to hide her smile. “I follow you.”
     “He said, ‘Traveling is a fool’s paradise,’ ” said Ellen.
     “This, I think, was Ella’s situation,” said Dudley.
     “Yes, I can see that,” said Lorna.
     “Now I have something shocking to say, Lorna.”

In Topical Guide 363, Mark Dorset considers Gadgets, Electronic: Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator; and Literature: Popular, MassMarket: Radio Drama (“Soap Opera”): Fictional from this episode.

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