377: The essence . . .
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 17 continues
THE ESSENCE of the Piper failing was a tendency to let the heart rule the mind. We all suffer from this disease at some times, to some degree. It has consequences other than bad investments. It makes some of us write books and compose music and paint pictures. It makes some of us try to restore two-hundred-year old wooden houses or twenty-year-old British sports cars. It makes some of us fall in love. It makes some of us insist that, of all the people who have collaborated on an error, we are supremely blameworthy. That is how Herb felt. He couldn’t escape the feeling that all the blame for the losses the Spotters were going to suffer was his. He could think of only one way out, one way to make things right and relieve his conscience, and the key to the door that led to that way out was coarse-goods work. Herb hoped that he could earn enough money to buy the Spotters’ stock for what they had originally paid for it. (He expected, by the way, that they would refuse to sell. He thought they wouldn’t want to let him increase his suffering to relieve theirs. He expected that he would have to persuade them that he was buying the stock because he still believed that he would make a profit on it. He was wrong. These feelings were merely further symptoms of the essential Piper failing.)
Fundamentally, the plan made sense. Herb had, however, no goods left to sell. The last of them had gone toward raising money for Bert and Ella’s house. Uncle Ben was long dead, and Herb had no idea who Ben’s contact in Chacallit had been. Throughout Herb’s years in the business, he had never wanted to know, had never wanted to become so involved that he needed to know, and so he had made it a point of honor to know nothing about aspects of the business that didn’t concern him. Now, Herb couldn’t imagine himself going to Chacallit and trying to make contact on his own. He thought, instead, that he would try to do all the work himself.
He could certainly design new pieces. He could certainly sell new pieces if he had some. If he could make them, he’d be set. He certainly tried.
He spent night after night in the cellar, pretending to work on one project or another — new camping gear, household gadgets, a shortwave radio for me — but actually he was trying to carve little men and women who could perform the ingenious, intriguing, and complex acts he had devised for them. He had no talent for it, and every figure was a failure. If he managed a leg that pleased him, it was likely to be attached to a trunk that seemed to belong to another figure altogether, someone much smaller, whose other leg was turned to the first at an angle that is never achieved by pairs of actual human legs. On the face of this poor figure appeared, in place of the desired expression of preorgasmic glee, a twisted grimace, as if his lover had, at what ought to have been the height of his pleasure, stabbed him in the back. Still, he thought of selling them, until the thought struck him that the figures were so grotesquely malformed that it would take a client of grotesquely malformed desires to be interested in them. They weren’t beautiful. He would have been ashamed to sell them. He knew who could carve beautiful, elegant little figures, knew that she was sitting right upstairs, working at her puzzles and problems, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask her.
Lorna couldn’t do it all by herself, either, though she tried. She wanted desperately to help Herb out, and coarse goods were, she knew, her best hope for helping him.
“I tried,” she told May, “but I can’t do it. I wanted to make some of those animated figures, but it was ridiculous. Whenever Herb was down in the cellar, puttering away at his projects — I shouldn’t say it that way. ‘Puttering’ makes it sound as if I’m belittling him. I’m glad he has those projects of his. They give him something to do. They keep his mind off his troubles. I was happy for him, really, when I thought of him down there puttering while I was giving myself a headache trying to figure out how to make those figures move their parts — ”
“Yes, indeed!” said May. She raised her glass. “I’ll drink to that. Here’s to the dignity of labor and the pleasures of moving parts.”
Lorna chuckled despite herself. “Anyway,” she said, “whenever he was working in the cellar and I felt that he wasn’t likely to catch me, I tried to figure out how to make the men and women move, even in just some simple way, but I couldn’t. I would get such headaches — horrible headaches. Finally, I had to admit that it’s just not the sort of thing I can do. I said to myself, Lorna, give up. You’ve wasted a lot of time trying to make these little people move. Just make some that don’t move, and get to work at it. So I started in on that, and — oh, my heart just wasn’t in it. I knew I was doing the right thing — but you know — ” She stopped. Her head was down, as if she were looking at the tabletop, but her eyes were focused somewhere far away, on an old dream. When she spoke, her voice was husky. “It was those charms that I saw in Life. ‘Moving parts.’ I’ll never forget those words. That was what appealed to me. That was what I wanted to make. I couldn’t get that phrase out of my mind.”
“Well, we all want moving parts, dear,” said May, “and we all want another Manhattan.” She raised her hand and wiggled her fingers at Whitey.
“None for me,” said Lorna. “I couldn’t.”
“Well, I can,” said May. “And I will. Just one, please, Mr. White.”
[to be continued on Tuesday, November 8, 2022]
In Topical Guide 377, Mark Dorset considers Guilt: Feelings of; and Naïveté; Folly from this episode.
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