367: Herb built . . .
Herb ’n’ Lorna, chapter 16 continues
HERB BUILT ME A MODEL of Speedy’s Reliable Service. It was wonderfully complete. There were wooden cars, gas pumps with little rubber hoses, an air pump with a thinner red hose, cans of oil and antifreeze on the shelves inside, a grease rack, tires, tools, a trash heap of engine parts and old tires in the back, and best of all, miniatures of Mr. Nuts and Miss Gumball. Tiny pebbles that Lorna had collected at the beach, each selected for its nutlike shape, filled Mr. Nuts’s head, and BB’s, painted in gumball colors, filled Miss Gumball’s.
THE FIVE OF US ate, I calculate, two hundred fifty Sunday dinners at the dining room table, making allowances for Sundays when we were on vacation and Sunday dinners we ate as guests in other people’s houses. Of these, about eighty were pot roast with string beans and Lorna’s warm German potato salad, seventy were fricasseed chicken and dumplings, sixty were sauerbraten with red cabbage and potato dumplings (Kartoffelklösse), ten (Thanksgivings and Christmases) were turkey, and the remaining forty were a miscellany.
SOMETIMES we went to May’s cottage, at the beach. I particularly enjoyed playing under the boardwalks, where the sun shone through in thin, brilliant lines that wrinkled on the wind-rippled surface of the sand. Often, on clear nights, we would all lie on our backs on the sand, listen to the surf, and look at the stars.
THESE WERE wonderful years. They were the ones during which I formed the notion of Herb and Lorna as cuddly and comforting, as Guppa and Gumma. I didn’t notice anything that might have suggested to me a life for them without reference to me. I certainly didn’t notice anything to suggest that my grandparents lived secret lives, that they were secretly burning with passion, that they were the geniuses behind the art of American erotic jewelry.
But it is amazing to me, when I cast my memory back to that time, to discover how much I saw but did not notice, how much I noticed but ignored. I remember, for instance, a time, on one of those nights at the beach, when May got to talking about Garth and began to wonder what had become of him, and began to cry. Bert said to me, “Peter. Come here. Take this.” He gave me a bottle. “Go carry this over to the other side of those dunes and bury it.”
When I had finished, and I came back over the top of the dune, May and Herb and Lorna were walking away together, toward the cottage, and my parents were waiting for me alone. Herb and Lorna were on either side of May, with their arms around her. She stopped and turned around to face the sea, forcing them to turn with her. She gesticulated toward the dark water. “He’s dead!” she cried. “I’m sure of it now! He’s dead!”
Well, I can’t say that I recall that particular occasion, but I certainly did go through a period when I was quite a tragic figure. When Garth — took off — he left a note behind. Well, it was positively embarrassing. “I love you — you’re an extraordinary woman — you’re beautiful — but a man has yearnings — I’m not the husband type, I guess — ” That sort of thing. My God! He actually wrote that — “I’m not the husband type, I guess.” Well, I mean really! He might have done the decent thing. He could have written, “Darling, I have cancer and I can’t bear the thought of being a burden to you so I’m going off to kill myself.” Yearnings! Not the husband type!
I tried to pretend that something awful had happened to him — shanghaied, you know, or a victim of amnesia, wandering in Calcutta somewhere in a stupor of pathetic confusion. Well, not even I could believe it, so I began telling people that he had died on a business trip, in Baltimore. I don’t know why I chose Baltimore. Well. I began dressing in black. Loose, robelike things — quite attractive getups, really. I was a striking sight — sort of Greta Garbo playing Georgia O’Keefe.
I began spending weekends at the cottage, alone, just drinking by myself. I was all right when I was with other people — at Whitey’s, or anywhere, as long as I wasn’t alone. But at the beach I would just fall apart. Herb and Lorna saved me. I mean that they absolutely saved me. They caught on, you see, and then they wouldn’t leave me alone.
I certainly couldn’t have understood all of that at the time, not even if anyone had wanted to try to explain it to me, but I knew that something awful had happened to May, and I could see that all the others were affected by it. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised to see, looking back, that my little self wanted nothing to do with it.
[to be continued on Tuesday, October 25, 2022]
In Topical Guide 367, Mark Dorset considers Simulacra, Miniature; Scale Models; Projects, Practical and Impractical; Work versus Play; Art: Literature: Responding to: Sharing the Experience; and Food: Kartoffelklösse from this episode.
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