The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy: Recent Episodes
Eric Kraft
The entire Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy, read by the author. "A masterpiece of American humor." Los Angeles Times
peterleroy.substack.com
In Episode 13 of Well, What Now, “Faire Cattleya,” Peter and Albertine consider the intimate language of a “society of two.”
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In Episode 11 of Well, What Now, “Solid Citizens” Peter and Albertine ramble through Manhattan seeking wisdom.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
In Episode 10 of Well, What Now, “Something Knotty” Peter and Albertine explore the manifold mysteries of mathematical knots.
Subscribe to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy
Share The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy
Watch Well, What Now?This series of short videos continues The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy in the present.
-
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide. The Substack serialization of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here; What a Piece of Work I Am begins here; At Home with the Glynns begins here; Leaving Small’s Hotel begins here.
-
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed. The Substack podcast reading of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here; What a Piece of Work I Am begins here; At Home with the Glynns begins here; Leaving Small’s Hotel begins here.
-
You can listen to “My Mother Takes a Tumble” and “Do Clams Bite?” complete and uninterrupted as audiobooks through YouTube.
-
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
-
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of Little Follies, Herb ’n’ Lorna, Reservations Recommended, Where Do You Stop?, What a Piece of Work I Am, At Home with the Glynns, Leaving Small’s Hotel, andInflating a Dog.
-
You can buy hardcover and paperback editions of all the books at Lulu.
-
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document), The Origin Story (here on substack), Between the Lines (a video, here on Substack), and at Encyclopedia.com.
The serialization of The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy is supported by its readers. I sometimes earn affiliate fees when you click through the affiliate links in a post. EK
The illustration in the banner that opens each episode is from an illustration by Stewart Rouse that first appeared on the cover of the August 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions.
www.erickraft.com
www.babbingtonpress.com
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
In Episode 9 of Well, What Now, “What’s the Big Idea?” Peter encounters FluddBot the ChatBot.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
I’ve posted episodes in the serial republication of The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy daily for nearly three years. I need a break. I’m pausing the serial republication for a while. However, I will continue to develop the videos in Well, What Now? and post them here on Substack.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
THE IDEA that I reported on the preceding page came to me not on that sunny afternoon in Babbington but on a nasty night in Newark, Delaware, a night when rain was falling in sheets and a blustery wind made umbrellas useless.
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Clasping, but not actually wringing, my hands, I said, “I’ve started wondering whether my mother — ” “What?” Patti asked after I had allowed a moment to pass in silence.
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I TOLD MYSELF that if I couldn’t get what I wanted from Patti, I would have to learn to be content with what she was willing to give me, which was friendship. . . .
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NATURE had assigned Patti a sexy part, and she played it. . . .
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Chapter 5The Cynical Detective
IF I STILL HAD A LOT TO LEARN, and I did, I felt that I’d come to the right place. In Dudley’s own house I ought to be able to find out what I wanted to know, and Eliza had given me permission to poke and pry.
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Chapter 4A Lot to Learn
AS SOON AS ELIZA HAD LEFT for Europe, I visited the house on my own. I told my parents that, as a diligent lad who took his duties seriously and meant to go about them in an organized way, I intended to get right down to work . . .
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“I’d like you to take care of this house for a while,” she said. I felt a great disappointment, as you might expect. Arrivederci, Roma. So long to Germany. Farewell to France.
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A COUPLE OF WEEKS LATER, about a month after Dudley’s death, his wife, Eliza, telephoned me and said that she would like to see me. She had, she said, a proposal that she would like me to consider. A proposal? A proposition? I was on my bicycle in a minute.
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ANY FATHER WOULD DO, any one but the one I supposedly had. I chose Dudley Beaker; by that I mean that . . . I chose to believe that my mother had chosen Dudley Beaker.
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BASTARDY has been good to me. I don’t actually know that I am a b*d, but I’ve tried legitimacy and I’ve tried bastardy, and, on the whole, bastardy has been more rewarding.
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MANY YEARS LATER, I had attained some small success. . . .
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AFTER THE CANDY-MAKING FAILURE, my mother tried nothing else; she didn’t even talk about trying anything else. She had been defeated. She was finished. One day when I came home from school, she was sitting at the dining room table, looking straight ahead, weeping.
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MY FATHER WOULD BE HOME in two or three hours. I think that I felt the pressure of that deadline more than my mother did, . . .
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TRY SHE DID. I came home from school one afternoon to find the kitchen glazed with sugar. Threads of crystallized sugar crackled when I pushed the back door open, and they webbed the room, running along the walls, across the countertops and the stove and the sink, across the faces of the white metal cabinets.
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WHEN PEOPLE ASK what my mother was like, I tell them the story of her lunch launch, because in that story so many of her best attributes show to good advantage — particularly her enthusiasm . . .
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I know what temptations the devil has to offer, one of the greatest of which consists in putting it into a man’s head that he can write a book and have it printed and thereby achieve as much fame as he does money . . .
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IN THE MORNING, BEFORE DAWN, Eric slipped out of the hotel as silently as a shadow, made his way to the dock in the dark, patted the flank of the Chris-Craft triple-cockpit barrel-back mahagony runabout, and drifted across the bay . . .
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IN BED, Albertine and I squirreled under the covers, and she took my hand. “Did you always intend to have her kill herself?” she asked. “No,” I said, “not at all. When I started, I just wanted to . . .
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BALDY’S SHOW that night was unremarkable until the end, when he announced that it was time to look into the Catalog of Human Misery. . . .
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Chapter 50October 29Someone, Somewhere
In some ways these people (I am one) cannot exist without the oxygen of laughter. Dawn Powell, diary entry
The ability to burst out laughing is proof of a fine character. I mistrust those who avoid laughter and refuse its overtures. They are afraid to shake the tree, mindful of the fruits and birds, afraid that someone might notice that nothing comes off their branches. Jean Cocteau, “On Laughter”
ALBERTINE AND I spent the whole day packing, with help from Lou and all his friends and from professionals hired by Artie for the heavy work. By dinnertime all of our worldly goods were en route to a small apartment in Manhattan, to be delivered the next day.
MY BIRTHDAY “CAKE” was a pecan pie with fifty candles. Before I began reading the final installment of Dead Air, I yielded the floor to Lou, who said, “Listen — for the last forty-nine nights I’ve been sending my show in on tapes that Elaine’s been shuttling to the studio — except for one piece of the Catalog of Human Misery a few nights ago that I phoned in from my room here — but tonight, right after Peter’s reading, I’m going to the studio to do this one live, because tonight’s my last show, the sign-off, the gala, the big finish — so tune in, will you? It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity! Don’t miss it!” Then I read “Someone, Somewhere.”
WE ALL MAKE MISTAKES. On my thirteenth birthday, I made one. I was, at the time, the sole supplier of flying-saucer detectors in Babbington, New York, clam capital of America, my home town; I also ran a broadcasting network from a cave in my back yard; and I had begun spying in a small way, planting an electronic eavesdropping device camouflaged as a flying-saucer detector in the bedroom of Mr. and Mrs. Roger Jerrold, a couple who lived down the block from me — or around the corner — in the hope that I might hear Mrs. Jerrold having sex with Mr. Yummy, a man who delivered baked goods and other joys to the housebound wives of Babbington. As it so often does, curiosity led to my mistake. One day, instead of attending to my duties as broadcaster and announcer, I plugged my tape recorder — a birthday gift to myself — into my transmitter and let a tape play over the air while I went prowling into the secrets that my friends Raskol, Marvin, Spike, and Matthew kept in the cave. When I had snooped enough to make myself feel guilty about it, I returned to the transmitter and put my headphones on to see what point I’d reached in my prerecorded palaver. I discovered that, instead of a recording of myself acting the part of Larry Peters, the congenial substitute host of “The Peter Leroy Show,” I had been broadcasting a tape that I had stolen from the Jerrolds, a recording of Mrs. Jerrold and Mr. Yummy that had probably been made in secret by Mr. Jerrold, who may have been a spy — not an amateur like me, but a professional, a soldier in the cold war. The tape was nearly at its end, and Mrs. Jerrold was screaming “Oh, Yummy, Yummy, Yummy!” her voice rising in a crescendo of pleasure. When one is in a cave sitting in front of a radio transmitter broadcasting a signal into an unseen world, it is hard to tell whether anyone at all is out there listening, unless one has a feedback system of some sort that allows one to detect the effects of the signal on the outside world. I had one of those effect-detectors: the electronic eavesdropper that I had installed in the Jerrolds’ bedroom. I bent my ear to the radio that I kept tuned to the eavesdropper, listening for any sound that might suggest that the Jerrolds had heard the tape that I’d been playing. At first, I didn’t hear much, because the eavesdropper wasn’t sensitive enough to pick up sounds beyond the bedroom, but then I heard Mr. Jerrold’s voice, increasing in volume as he came within range: “. . . not a fit mother, you b***h! Junior — get your coat. We’re going to Grandma’s.” Then some banging and thumping — a crash — the ringing of a bell — and then nothing. The persistence and spaciousness of the nothingness led me to conclude that someone had knocked my eavesdropper to the floor and that it was going to require some repairs before it would work again. I shut the transmitter down, came up out of the cave, lowered the stump into place, and walked to the Jerrolds’ house. The car was not in the driveway. I walked up the side of the driveway, at the edge of it, on the grass, so that my footsteps wouldn’t make a sound on the gravel. When I got to the window at the end of the living room, I stood on my toes and peeked inside. I saw Mrs. Jerrold, at the opposite end of the room, sitting on the sofa, in the gray light of the television set. She was smoking a cigarette. I ducked immediately, fearful that she would see me. I went home. I ate my dinner. I helped wash the dishes. I went out for a walk. I returned to the Jerrolds’ house. It was dark downstairs, but there was a light on in the bedroom. I went around to the back door and stood there trying to work up the courage to knock. If there ever was a time when I could knock at the door and say to Mrs. Jerrold, “Let me in, let me in, let me in, I implore,” and hope to be admitted, it seemed to me that this was it, but I didn’t have the nerve, and so I turned away, and put my head down, and put my hands in my pockets, and went home and went to bed. What happened after that I know only at second hand, from the Jerrolds’ neighbor, Mrs. Breed, who got it from the cops. Following a domestic dispute, Mr. Jerrold drove off with his son to visit his parents in Minnesota. Sometime after he left, Mrs. Jerrold locked all the doors and windows in the house, stuffed towels under the doors and up the flue of the living room fireplace, taped the cracks around the windows, taped wrapping paper over the glass, and drew the blinds and curtains. She heaped combustibles in the center of the living room: paper and boxes, scrap wood, rags, wooden tables and chairs, Mr. Jerrold’s clothing, and reels of recording tape. While she was heaping the combustibles, or perhaps after she had finished the work, while she was taking a look at the heap and congratulating herself on a job well done, she drank a pitcher of whiskey sours (“made with good Canadian whiskey,” according to what Mrs. Breed said the police said) and took several sleeping pills. Sometime after finishing her whiskey sours and sleeping pills, or perhaps just before she finished her whiskey sours and sleeping pills, she doused the pile of combustibles with some cleaning fluid and kerosene and set fire to it, and sometime after that she passed out, and sometime after that she died, but the house was not destroyed. Mrs. Jerrold had gone to great lengths to ensure that there would be no drafts, no air to save her from the end that she had designed for herself, but in her agitated state she had forgotten that a fire needs air as much as an unhappy woman does. Neither the police nor Mrs. Breed made any mention of a visitor who stood outside the kitchen door, thought of knocking, did not knock, and left. Mr. Jerrold and Junior never returned to town. The house was put on the market, but it took a long time to sell, because it smelled of smoke and needed work. Was it all my fault? It may have been. The effects of the things we do extend themselves, like a chain or a relay network, reaching farther than we suppose, so all our acts have unforeseen consequences, and I suspect that someone, somewhere, suffers for every mistake I make.
EVERYONE SAT IN SILENCE until Lou said, “I have to admit that I was expecting a happy ending.” Then he looked at his watch and said, “Hey, I’ve got to go.”
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Share The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy
Watch Well, What Now?This series of short videos continues The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy in the present.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
-
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide. The Substack serialization of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here; What a Piece of Work I Am begins here; At Home with the Glynns begins here; Leaving Small’s Hotel begins here.
-
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed. The Substack podcast reading of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here; What a Piece of Work I Am begins here; At Home with the Glynns begins here; Leaving Small’s Hotel begins here.
-
You can listen to “My Mother Takes a Tumble” and “Do Clams Bite?” complete and uninterrupted as audiobooks through YouTube.
-
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
-
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of Little Follies, Herb ’n’ Lorna, Reservations Recommended, Where Do You Stop?, What a Piece of Work I Am, and At Home with the Glynns.
-
You can buy hardcover and paperback editions of all the books at Lulu.
-
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document), The Origin Story (here on substack), Between the Lines (a video, here on Substack), and at Encyclopedia.com.
The serialization of The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy is supported by its readers. I sometimes earn affiliate fees when you click through the affiliate links in a post. EK
The illustration in the banner that opens each episode is from an illustration by Stewart Rouse that first appeared on the cover of the August 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions.
www.erickraft.com
www.babbingtonpress.com
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
LOU AND HIS CREW spread sketches and drawings and charts and graphs along the bar to show Al and me what they intended to do with Small’s. . . .
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THIS DAY, Monday, was the first real working day for Lou’s takeover team, and they spent the day in constant conference, proposing and planning, scheming and dreaming. They were still buzzing after dinner, when we gathered in the lounge, but I silenced them with my reading of “Shame on Me,” episode forty-nine of Dead Air.
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I TOOK A WALK around the rim of the island at dawn, walking along the sand, with my shoes off, in the lapping water, through the stones, pebbles, and broken shells. The water was cold now, but I wanted to walk in it, . . .
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ALTHOUGH Otto and Esther tried their best to enter the hangover culture, they couldn’t quite manage it. By mid-morning, those of us who had lived through the night before had returned to something like our everyday charm, but . . .
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OTTO AND ESTHER — parents of Louise, son and daughter-in-law of Artie the Demolition Man and his wife Nancy — returned to the island after nineteen days away and found themselves surrounded by a bunch of zombies walking around in a hangover haze. . . .
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ANARCHY REIGNED around the bar, with Albertine’s relatives invading Lou’s territory to make their own drinks and gathering in knots of three and four to sing the bits and pieces of old songs that they found almost unforgettable. Lou threw in the towel. . . .
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WHEN THE TIME ARRIVED for my reading, I thought of saying something sentimental about the comforts of friends and family, but the crowd had become boisterous to the point of riot, so, instead, I took a deep breath and delivered episode forty-seven of Dead Air, “Still No News from Outer Space,” without a pause.
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MY FRIENDS DID SHOW UP, and Albertine’s mother, all of her siblings, all of her aunts and uncles, and most of her cousins, so all the tents were full. I wished that Albertine’s father could have been there, but wishing couldn’t make it so, since he was among the dead, . . .
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IN BED, Albertine rolled over onto me and made love to me slowly and thoroughly. She was so tender and affectionate that I began to suspect that she was administering delight as a preventive analgesic against some disappointment.
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THE AUDIENCE THAT NIGHT for my reading of episode forty-six of Dead Air, “Suspicions Confirmed,” was a good one, a Friday crowd, but, looking out at them and beginning to read, I savored the pleasant expectation that Saturday’s turnout would be even better.
BECAUSE I was attracted to Mrs. Jerrold, but she was attracted to Mr. Yummy, I was frustrated and jealous, jealous enough to build an electronic eavesdropping device and install it in Mrs. Jerrold’s bedroom. I set up a secret listening post in a cave in my back yard, and I spent every spare hour in that cave, with my radio tuned to the eavesdropper in Mrs. Jerrold’s bedroom, waiting to hear the details of her tumbles with Mr. Yummy, so that I would know just what I was missing, but hour after hour I heard nothing. My parents began to wonder what I was doing during these absences, and I had begun to wonder myself. To camouflage my real occupation, spy, I offered them a cover that was nearly the truth.
I interrupted myself to say, “I have since learned, by the way, largely from this experience, that a cover that is nearly the truth is the best sort of cover to use. Convincing people that you are someone they already think you are is far easier than starting from scratch and convincing them that you are what you wish you were, what you want to be, or what you have been struggling all your life to become. In my case, I have put so much effort into disguising myself as a country bumpkin, assistant innkeeper at a small hotel on a small island, have done the job so thoroughly and so well, that I’m convinced that that is what I have become at last, just at the time when I have sold the job out from under myself.”
“Peter,” my father said at dinner one evening, in a casual tone meant to catch me off guard, “what are you doing with yourself these days?” “Me?” “No. The man in the moon.” “Well,” I said, “that old man in the moon, he’s just sitting there, watching us down here, spying on us while we do the crazy things we do, shaking his head, smiling that enigmatic smile.” “Don’t get smart with me, Peter.” “But — I thought that was the point of my going to school, so that I’d — ” In a clipped, no-nonsense tone, he said, “I want to know what you’ve been doing and where you’ve been going every afternoon, young man. You’ve got your mother worried to death.” My mother pushed her plate away from her, lit a cigarette, and took a swallow of wine. She did look worried. “I’ve been in my cave,” I said. “Your cave?” said my father, as if this were the last thing he had expected to hear. “Yeah,” I said. “Raskol and Marvin and Matthew and Spike and I dug a cave in the back yard, and I’ve got a radio transmitter out there, and I’m going to go on the air tomorrow.” “Don’t mock me, young man,” said my father, reddening, clenching his fists. Turning to my mother, I said, “You’ll be able to listen to me on the kitchen radio, and then you’ll know where I am.” “Listen, Peter — ” my father began, raising a finger to tick off the first of the points he planned to make. “Come on out in the back,” I said, cutting him off, “and I’ll show you.” They followed close behind me, though I set a sprightly pace. Suddenly, having been forced to tear away the camouflage and reveal what lay beneath it, I found that I was eager to do so, eager to show them my handiwork, and I was growing more eager with every step. I knew what responses to expect; that is to say, I had imagined their responses and I’d come to believe what I had imagined. Previously, the supposed certainty of those expectations had kept me from showing the cave to my parents, but now I found that I wanted to check my assumptions. I imagined that my mother would be amazed by what I’d done and proud of the skill I displayed in doing it, that she would understand the effort that had gone into the work, and that she would find in it evidence that I was going to amount to something someday. My father would be annoyed that I had been so presumptuous as to tunnel through a section of his back yard without his permission, would interpret my tunneling as a metaphor for my undermining his authority, would wonder why I couldn’t put this kind of effort into mowing the lawn, and would find in what I’d done evidence that I was never going to amount to anything. We stopped at the place where my landscaping camouflaged the entrance to the cave, and my mother said, “Oh, this is that spot I was telling you about, Bert! Isn’t it perfect? Those birches, that clump of wildflowers, the mossy hill, the stump — ”On that cue, I flipped the stump back on its hinges to reveal the entrance to the tunnel that led to the cave. My mother was amazed. My father was annoyed. How satisfyingly predictable they were — people you could count on! I was glad to see my beliefs, my expectations, confirmed. It made me think that I had become the kind of savvy guy who really knows what’s going on.
[to be continued]
Subscribe to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy
Share The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy
Watch Well, What Now?This series of short videos continues The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy in the present.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
-
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide. The Substack serialization of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here; What a Piece of Work I Am begins here; At Home with the Glynns begins here; Leaving Small’s Hotel begins here.
-
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed. The Substack podcast reading of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here; What a Piece of Work I Am begins here; At Home with the Glynns begins here; Leaving Small’s Hotel begins here.
-
You can listen to “My Mother Takes a Tumble” and “Do Clams Bite?” complete and uninterrupted as audiobooks through YouTube.
-
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
-
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of Little Follies, Herb ’n’ Lorna, Reservations Recommended, Where Do You Stop?, What a Piece of Work I Am, and At Home with the Glynns.
-
You can buy hardcover and paperback editions of all the books at Lulu.
-
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document), The Origin Story (here on substack), Between the Lines (a video, here on Substack), and at Encyclopedia.com.
The serialization of The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy is supported by its readers. I sometimes earn affiliate fees when you click through the affiliate links in a post. EK
The illustration in the banner that opens each episode is from an illustration by Stewart Rouse that first appeared on the cover of the August 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions.
www.erickraft.com
www.babbingtonpress.com
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Chapter 46October 25Suspicions Confirmed
Chance, my friend and master, will surely deign to send again, to help me, the familiar devils of his unruly kingdom! I have no faith, except in him — and in myself. Particularly in him, for, when I sink, he fishes me up again, and grips and shakes me like a rescuing dog . . . So that every time I sink, I do not expect a final catastrophe, but only some adventure, some trivial, commonplace miracle which, like a sparkling link, may close up again the necklace of my days. Renée Néré, in Colette’s La Vagabonde
YOU MAY SUSPECT that you have no real friends, and yet when you die, if you could somehow arrange to attend your own wake — disguised, perhaps, as a shadow in a corner or a mist drifting in through an open window — you might be surprised and delighted to see how many people show up. Of course, it is equally likely — at least equally likely, probably more likely — that your suspicions would be confirmed, and that the room where your corpse lay a-moldering would be empty except for a melancholy shade or a dispirited fog, so it’s best not to leave such matters to chance. Make arrangements now for an open bar, hot hors d’oeuvres, and a jazz band. That’ll bring them in. I was thinking along those lines, and consequently sinking into self-pity, when I happened to bump into Lou at the coffee urn, where I thought I would probably find him at that time of the morning. “You know, Lou,” I said, in a casual tone meant to catch him off guard, “I’ve been thinking.” “Uh-oh,” he said. “I’ve been thinking that we ought to celebrate your acquisition.” “Great idea.” “I was figuring that Small’s Affairs could handle the catering, and Nancy and Elaine could take care of promotion and public relations.” “Sure. Sounds fine.” “Tony T could put the whole fleet of runabouts into service, perhaps decorate them a bit.” “Decorate?” “I was thinking of a special pennant of some kind.” “A pennant?” “Something like — oh — how about, ‘Happy Birthday Peter’?” “What?” “Only kidding.” “Uh-huh.” “If we all pitch in, we could erect enough tents by tomorrow, I think.” “Tents?” “Well, my guess is that if we turn Artie loose with a list of my closest friends we’ll have an invasion on our hands by tomorrow morning — if he remembers to mention the open bar, the free food, and the jazz band.” “Jazz band?” “Loretta can make it happen. I’m sure she can.” He looked at me for a minute, then asked; “Is it okay if some of the pennants say ‘Good Luck Lou’?” “Of course,” I said. “We’d better get Cutie working on those.” “Right,” I said. “No time to lose.”
[to be continued]
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“LOU,” I said to Lou, at the bar, where he was pouring free drinks for everyone, “I want to tell you a story.” “Isn’t that what you’ve been doing?” he asked. “All my life,” I said, “but this is a story with a message.” . . .
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ALBERTINE sat on a stool at the bar for my reading of episode forty-five of Dead Air, “Project Number 102: Electronic Eavesdropper.” She was drinking champagne and beaming, glowing with the relief that had come with the news that in a few days she would be free.
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We sat there for a while in silence. I was trying to think of the right words with which to begin to broach the subject of his buying the hotel as a way out of the world he had come to hate, as a cave in which to hide from it. . . .
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THUNDERING WINDS pummeled the hotel all night, drafts blowing through the windows and under the doors, but by morning, everything was still, and a heavy fog filled the unmoving air. . . .
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BALDY THE DUMMY was miserable throughout his program that night. His wisecracking style was gone. He didn’t even tease Bob as he ordinarily did. He was bitter and snappish. When he got to the end of the show and turned to the news, the Catalog of Human Misery, I had to turn the volume up to hear him. . . .
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WHEN I WAS A BOY, not yet a teenager, I found myself engaged in several projects that seemed to ask more and more of me — improvements, embellishments, and enlargements that kept me very busy for a boy of my age at that time. . . .
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DICK AND JANE returned, as they had said they would, and Albertine gave them their old room, as she had said she would, but it wasn’t the same as it had been when they left it, because during their absence Alice had redecorated it . . .
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WHEN I FINISHED, I said, “I would like to say a little something about getting caught up in one’s own work, something I sometimes call the art of self-deception. . . .
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MY AUDIENCE for “Refinements and Improvements,” episode forty-three of Dead Air, consisted of the remaining inmates — Lou, Elaine, Clark and Alice, Artie and Nancy, Louise and Miranda, Tony T and Cutie, Loretta, Theodore and Carolina, Mark, Margot, Martha, Martha and Edward, Margot and Daniel, and five lingering dinner guests.
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ONE STEP FORWARD, one step back. With two clients for Memoirs While You Wait, I spent hours planning how to deal with the crush of new clients that was clearly on its way, or would be on its way just as soon as Manuel and Porky did their word-of-mouth work. . . .
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IN BED, Albertine asked, “Do you know where the word camouflage comes from, my sweet?” I said, “No, ma petite. I confess that I do not, but I imagine that you are going to tell me that it comes from the name of one of your countrymen, a Capitaine Camouffe who dressed in leafy green and woodsy brown so that he could hide in the trees and bushes when Napoleon was looking for volunteers to lead the Russian campaign.” . . .
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THE FISH had begun to smell by the time I read episode forty-two of Dead Air, “Playing to the House.” The odor hadn’t penetrated the hotel yet, but I knew from experience that it would the next day. . . .
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THE LAST GROUP of potential buyers for the hotel arrived early in the morning. (I call them the last group of potential buyers because two days later I persuaded Lou to buy the place.)
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Peter has made a start on Kap’n Klam: The Memoirs of Porky White, Nonpareil American Restaurateur, Entrepreneur, and Raconteur, As Told to Peter Leroy. So far he has only two episodes. The second episode was an attempt to get some of Porky’s wit and wisdom into the book.
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I MADE A START on Kap’n Klam: The Memoirs of Porky White, Nonpareil American Restaurateur, Entrepreneur, and Raconteur, As Told to Peter Leroy that very night. . . .
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JUST BEFORE I began reading “The Art of Obvious Subtlety,” episode forty-one of Dead Air, a guest arrived from out of the past. He slipped into the back of the room — as well as a big man with a face familiar to millions can slip into a room — and settled himself into a wing chair. He gave me a wave, and I returned it, and then I read.
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I BEGAN THE DAY in my cave, at my computer, working on the forty-first episode of Dead Air, but when I took a break to get a second cup of coffee from the kitchen, . . .
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AFTER THE READING, I delivered an advertisement for myself. “I’ve been in the memoir racket for as long as I can remember,” I said, . . .
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THAT NIGHT, I read episode forty of Dead Air, “Hardly Working.” . . .
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WITH THE GENERATORS supplying the power, I was able to get Memoirs While You Wait off the ground. I printed a stack of flyers on my Little Giant LG-6000 laser printer and wrote an advertisement for the classified sections of popular magazines that I thought were likely to reach the segments of the population most likely to yield clients: . . .
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I HELD MY HANDS UP to forestall the applause that would probably otherwise have drowned me out and said, “You may be asking yourself, ‘What on earth made those kids think that they could dig a cave?’ . . .
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FOR MY READING of “The Hole and the Hill,” episode thirty-nine of Dead Air, I had quite a sizable audience. The Friday turnout for dinner and drinks was very good, and we acquired seven new resident guests in the afternoon . . .
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AN EARNEST YOUNG COUPLE, Theodore (“Don’t call me Ted”) and Carolina (“With an a”), friends of friends of Lou’s, arrived in the morning with a couple of small gasoline generators to provide electricity for the island temporarily . . .
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I HAD A WONDERFUL TIME reading to this group. They were shy about responding at first, but when I began hamming it up a little more than usual they began to realize that they could laugh, . . .
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WHEN I WAS A BOY, I was for a while the head of a broadcasting network that stretched from one end of my home town to the other. It consisted of 107 small radio transmitters built from kits. Mine was the parent station, WPLR; the other 106 were repeater stations that extended my transmitter’s range like a string of pearls.
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WE WERE STILL POWERLESS by mid-morning, when Ms. Fletcher-Hackford’s seventh-grade English class from the Babbington Central Upper Middle School arrived. Their visit had been planned some time ago, and I had forgotten all about it, which meant, of course, that I had forgotten to prepare anything for it. . . .
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I HAD HOPED to begin putting my salesmanship to work on Lou that night, but he stood behind the bar in unwonted silence, looking for all the world like a grumpy guy. My instincts told me that the direct approach wasn’t going to work; I was going to have to be subtle. . . .
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WE DINED BY CANDLELIGHT that evening, and by candlelight I read episode thirty-seven of Dead Air, “Act Now! Offer Limited!” . . .
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THIS IS THE STORY of the death of Rockwell Kingman. Like every success story, it begins with a need. In this case, the need was money. That need had driven me into the dark recesses of my mind, . . .
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In Episode 3, “Simulations” Albertine asks, “Are we living in a simulation?” and Peter asks, “Where are the martinis?”
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BALDY THE DUMMY’S closing story that night was the one that Albertine told me Lou had read on the porch, about the twelve-year-old girl who killed herself with a single gunshot to the head. . . .
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FOR MY THIRTY-SIXTH READING from Dead Air, “The Relay System,” I was in a very good mood, a little high on hope. . . .
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I SAT AT MY COMPUTER, staring at the screen and writing nothing. I spent an hour that way, and then I turned the thing off and went to the kitchen for some coffee. The other early risers were in the lounge, but I avoided them. . . .
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ALBERTINE sat at her vanity, looking through a photograph album. I looked over her shoulder. A depression was coming over us. I could feel it, not only in myself, but in her, too. . . .
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MY READING of the thirty-fifth episode of Dead Air, “Thank You for Letting Me into Your Home,” was preceded by the first dinner that Louise and Miranda had prepared entirely on their own, . . .
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PIANO MOVERS, sent by Steinway at Albertine’s request, came and took her piano away. They left her a check for what it was worth to Steinway, . . .
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VERY EARLY in the morning, I was at my computer working on Murder While You Wait. . . .
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“YOU THINK you still owe him an apology?” asked Artie. “Matthew, I mean.” “Yes, I think so,” I said. . . .
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I TRIED to persuade Matthew and Effie to stay for my thirty-fourth reading from Dead Air, “The Persistence of Memory,” because it was one of two episodes — the other being number forty-nine, “Shame on Me” — that I would have wanted Matthew, especially, to hear, . . .
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Episode 2: “Keep Moving” in which Peter suggests that he could build a shed.
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BRIGHT AND EARLY, Tony T brought two realtors and a chubby couple in identical nylon suits of the type that used to be called jogging suits, and may still be called jogging suits for all I know, . . .
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“THE STORY BEGINS on a cold winter’s night in Charlestown — part of Boston — where I was running along a dark street, breathing hard. I had been in a fight, which isn’t like me . . .
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AFTER THE READING, I stood Matthew and Effie to a round of drinks. (To be completely honest about it, I ordered drinks from Lou with the expectation that I would never have to pay for them.) . . .
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THE TWO NEW GUESTS were a couple. They took the smallest of the cottages, and for my reading of episode thirty-three of Dead Air, “101 Fascinating Electronics Projects,” they sat right up front, displacing Manuel Pedrera. . . .
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WE HAD the busiest Saturday we had had in a very long time, and if I had not come to believe that every new guest was more money lost, I would have thought that we were making progress, but I had come around to that point of view. . . .
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WHILE THE RECORDING was playing at Small’s, Albertine and I were touring “Summerset,” which the owners called a bed-and-breakfast, employing the obvious irony of deliberate understatement. We tried to keep our mouths from hanging open, but it wasn’t easy. . . .
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NATURALLY, the people who ate their clam fritters within the low-anxiety zone surrounding the flying-saucer detector at Kap’n Klam, secure in the knowledge that there were no saucers in the immediate vicinity, wanted detectors of their own for home use. . . .
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I TRIED TO RECORD my reading of episode thirty-two of Dead Air, “Beyond the Firelight Lies Endless Darkness,” but I failed. I owned four tape recorders of various degrees of sophistication, but I couldn’t get one of them to make a decent recording. . . .
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WHILE CIRCUMAMBULATING the island in the morning, I came upon Ray Pedrera. He was standing with his hands in his pockets, looking at the wavelets lapping at his feet. To my eye, he looked uninspired. “Morning,” I said, as I approached. . . .
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BALDY THE DUMMY said, “Let’s try this, boys and girls: sit up in bed for a minute, okay?” “Yeah,” said Bob. “Not you, Bob. I’m talking to my vast unseen listening audience, out there in the dark. Are you sitting up, boys and girls?” . . .
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FOR MY READING of “Up the On-Ramp to the Road to Riches,” episode thirty-one of Dead Air, Manuel — that is, Ray — sat virtually at my elbow, and he took notes.
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THIS WAS A BUSY DAY for all of us. After writing, I spent most of the day at the dock, repairing and patching and reinforcing, and chatting with Tony T, who was working on the launch, trying to find the source of a gas leak . . .
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AFTER I’D HAD A BALDY and slipped into a confessional mood, I said, “I have to admit that I have never understood what Baldy meant when he said that I got the joke. In fact, to be completely honest about it, I don’t think I even know what the joke is. . . .
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MY READING of “Butts of the Joke,” the thirtieth episode of Dead Air, was interrupted after the first paragraph, as you will see. . . .
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IN THE LAUNDRY ROOM — though it might be more accurate to call it a “laundry nook,” since it is a corner of a corner of the cellar, a dark, dolorous place that some employees, back when we used to have some employees, refused to visit on the grounds that it was “spooky” . . .
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ALBERTINE WAS STILL IN BED when I returned to the bedroom after writing. She had the covers pulled up to her chin, and she was lying on her back staring at the ceiling. . . .
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WHEN I FINISHED READING, I remained standing in my reading spot beside the fire, and I said, “If I may be permitted to say something slightly sentimental — a great sin in our cynical times — I would like to thank all of you for being here and listening to me, . . .
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THAT EVENING, I read episode twenty-nine of Dead Air, “Bedroom Suits,” to an audience that was not, even though water was still being rationed and we had no working washing machines, noticeably more odoriferous than any of the audiences for any of my previous readings.
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“DO YOU KNOW ANYTHING about this ‘Manuel Pedrera’?” I asked Albertine. “Nothing much,” she said. “He’s a cute little guy, though.” “I think he’s a phony of some kind,” I said. . . .
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“ISN’T IT FUNNY the way we don’t sound like ourselves when we hear ourselves on a tape recorder — not to ourselves, I mean?” asked Nancy. . . .
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ON MONDAY NIGHTS, we don’t get much of a dinner-and-drinks crowd, and on this Monday night we didn’t get any dinner-and-drinks crowd at all. . . .
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“LANA CALLED,” Albertine said, “and she thinks that we just might hook the water-sports consortium if we lower the asking price.” “How much?” “She doesn’t know, and she wouldn’t guess, but she said there is only one way to increase our chances of selling, and that is to lower the price.” . . .
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ROCKWELL KINGMAN was steamed. He was having a very bad day. He had missed a target. That was not a good thing. It was the kind of thing that could ruin a career. . . .
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THE RECEPTION WAS rowdy. The tip of the consortium was plastered. They kept shouting “Mosh! Mosh!” and trying to persuade Lana to get up onto the bar and jump onto their outstretched hands, and when she refused they tried Albertine, and when she refused they tried Cutie, and when Tony T threatened to rearrange their faces, they feigned terror and began shouting “Encore!” in my direction. . . .
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THE TIP OF THE CONSORTIUM stayed for my reading, and they insisted that Lana stay with them, so I had an audience of twenty for my reading of “Enough Is Enough,” the twenty-seventh episode of Dead Air.
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ANOTHER OF THE REALTORS, Lana, brought a group of potential buyers to the island. They came in their own boat, one of those long, powerful speedboats modeled on offshore racers, the kind that my friend Mark Dorset, the unaffiliated psychosociologist, calls a penis boat.
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BALDY THE DUMMY ended his program that night with a story that began with a question, his favorite kind of question. “Have you ever wondered what evil looks like, boys and girls?” He waited a moment, gave his listening audience a moment of dead air, so that we could answer, “Yeah.” . . .
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I READ “Filling Time,” the twenty-sixth episode of Dead Air, to a good crowd, but as I looked out over their faces I couldn’t help seeing them as agents of destruction, people who were going to make messes and break things and cost us money. . .
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I’VE SAID IT BEFORE: imagination can be a curse.
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AFTER THE READING, and after some discussion of the reading, I made my way to the bar, where I ordered a drink from Lou. When he handed it to me, I leaned across the bar and said, “We have to talk.” . . .
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THAT EVENING, I read “Testing, Testing,” episode twenty-five of Dead Air, to an audience of thirty-four — Albertine, Suki, Lou, Elaine, Clark and Alice, Artie and Nancy, Otto and Esther, Louise and Miranda, Tony T and Cutie, and twenty daytrippers.
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WHEN I WENT DOWN to the dock to pump the launch dry, I found that someone was already there. From a distance, he looked like a hood from my school days. (If you were not around during my school days, reader, you may not know that hoods were bad boys, or boys who wanted to be mistaken for bad boys. . . .
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“THERE ACTUALLY IS a drink called a hurricane,” said Lou, filling a line of glasses along the bar, “but I tried it and I didn’t like it, so this is my version of it, the Hurricane Lou.”
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THE WIND was still roaring in the evening, the tide was still high, the basement was completely flooded, the cabins were partly submerged, and our island was only a fraction of its usual size, . . .
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THE WORST of the hurricane struck us in the night. The winds roared, the shutters banged, the doors shook in their frames.
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LYING IN BED, waiting for the storm to strike, I was struck again by the astonishing discovery that there really is no fool like an old fool, and by the more astonishing discovery that I had become one — not so much because I was willing to sell without making a profit, but because I had bought something that I couldn’t even sell at a loss.
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THE CISTERN was empty. There had to be a leak somewhere. It would have to be fixed, but that would have to wait until the storm had passed. . . .
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I STOOD AT THE WINDOW of my workroom, looking down into the courtyard behind the hotel. It faces southeast, so it catches the sun in the morning, preserving an isolated bit of summer well into fall. Louise and Miranda were out there, taking a break from their kitchen work, sunning themselves, naked. . . .
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ESTHER SAID, “I loved that bit about ‘I’m pregnant and it didn’t even wake me up.’ “Uh-oh,” said Otto, “I think the conversation is going to take one of those anti-male turns.” . . .
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I SPENT the rest of the day doing the hundred little chores that consume an assistant innkeeper’s day at a failing hotel, chores that leave no visible sign of their having been done, but which if left undone scream, “Look at me, look at me! Fix me, clean me, mend me!” In the evening, I read the twenty-second episode of Dead Air, “No Sale.”
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HAVING IMAGINED Rockwell Kingman, I seemed to be stuck with him, and he was becoming annoying. He wouldn’t dance to my tune.
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WHEN I CAME TO BED, Albertine was reading, quite openly, the latest issue of Manhattan magazine. “Listen to this,” she said. “It’s my horoscope: . . .
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I USED TO ENJOY Mondays on the island. The weekend guests would be gone, and everyone who remained — guests, staff, owners — would feel liberated by their departure, enough to be lazy all day, figuring that there were four more before the next weekend arrived. That was in the days before the dredging, of course, and in the days when I still expected the hotel to succeed eventually.
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I EXPECTED the dredge to be gone when I walked out onto the porch. It wasn’t. I think I was relieved, but I was also disappointed, and although I am not quite certain about my being relieved, I am quite certain about my being disappointed.
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“HOW OLD would Mrs. Jerrold be now?” asked Louise. I glanced at Albertine before answering. She smiled; neither of us winked. “Well,” I said, “she was about seventeen years older than I am, . . .
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MY AUDIENCE for the reading of the twentieth episode of Dead Air, “Gratitude,” consisted of the inmates of Small’s Hotel (Albertine, Lou, Elaine, Clark and Alice, Artie and Nancy, Otto and Esther, Louise and Miranda), Suki and her boyfriend Daryl, and a quartet of Babbingtonians who stayed on after Sunday dinner.
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LIZA THE REALTOR brought another flock of mixed nuts to the island. Like the earlier shoppers who had come to kick the tires, these people were not interested in running a hotel. . . .
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“LET’S SEE what interesting things are happening outside the cave, boys and girls. Hand me the paper, will you, Bob?” . . .
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“I CAN’T COUNT the number of times I have calculated money that I haven’t earned yet!” said Artie. “You, too, right, Lou?” He pointed at Lou and said to the rest of us, “Of course, my buddy Hamlet usually ends up actually making the money, isn’t that right, Lou?” “Yeah,” said Lou. . . .
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I READ episode nineteen of Dead Air, “If Saucers Attack,” to a sizable Saturday audience that probably included a few lawyers and several potential litigants. . . .
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THE DEMOLITION MAN arrived in the morning. Lou and I went over in the launch to pick him up. We had expected the man and his wife, but we found six people waiting at the town dock. . . .
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GRUMPY CLUCK SAID, “Somebody should invent a detector that gives a readout on that, what you called the mood of the house. If you could invent a gadget like that, you’d make a lot more than you ever did on flying-saucer detectors.”
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I REMEMBER the rest of the day as a cacophonous competition between Dexter and Grumpy Cluck, with the nod going to Dexter, who put in an hour’s overtime, to the surprise and annoyance of all the inmates, with the possible exception of Alice, who found this development “fascinating,” and recorded it on her chart. . . .
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Chapter 18September 27No Worries, No Kidding
ALL OF US were on the porch, lined up in our rockers, waiting for Dexter’s dredge to start sucking sand and rending the air. When he started it up, we put our earmuffs on and sat there with our breakfast and our aspirin, watching him, at his mercy, . . .
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IN BED that night, however, I couldn’t sleep at all. Rain was falling, and the roof was leaking. It wasn’t leaking any longer in the spot from which drops fell on my head; now it was leaking in two other places. . . .
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Then I read the seventeenth episode of Dead Air, “Is Anybody Out There?”
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“BEFORE I BEGIN the next reading from Dead Air,” I said to the group in the lounge after dinner, “I have something more to say about fallout shelters. “ . . .
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AT ABOUT THREE I gave up trying to get to sleep. I slipped out of bed, dressed in the dark, tiptoed to the door, and pulled it silently shut behind me, . . .
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THAT EVENING, in the lounge of an old hotel on a small island artificially infested with feral cats, I read episode sixteen of Dead Air, “Anxiety Pays.” . . .
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IN THE AFTERNOON, Albertine and I walked the perimeter of the island, along the margin, circumambulating our domain. This walk was once a part of every day, a high point of every day. In our early years here, . . .
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THOUGHTS OF GUNS filled most of my morning. The day before, while Elaine had been at the Rush Service office (or, as I learned later, pretending to be at the Rush Service office), I had been at Sun and Surf, choosing guns. . . .
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THE GROUP that lingered in the lounge after the reading couldn’t get off the topic of fallout shelters. Apparently, I had revived for them an old debate that had been suspended but never concluded, . . .
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AFTER DINNER that night, Elaine distributed gifts. Each of us got a small gaily wrapped box, and she commanded us to open them in unison. In each box was a pair of earmuffs . . .
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DREDGING did not begin until seven. Albertine had managed to get the Department of Public Works to make Dexter hold off until then.
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THE QUIET seemed so precious that we broke it only gently for the rest of the day. All our conversations were conducted in whispers, and although I am generally a spirited reader of my own work, my reading of “Bivalves from Outer Space,” the fourteenth episode of Dead Air, was uncharacteristically subdued.
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HUPPA THUPPA WHUP! Huppa thuppa whup! Huppa thuppa whup! Fizzz. Huppa thuppa whup! Huppa thuppa whup! . . .
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BALDY closed his show that night with this: “Is this you, boys and girls? You are a refugee, an orphan, somewhere, anywhere, who knows where. You have been orphaned by tribal warfare, because the people of the other tribe hate your tribe because your tribe is not their tribe. Do you understand that?
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THAT NIGHT’S READING was “Local Boy Snaps Shots,” the thirteenth episode of Dead Air.
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I SPENT the rest of the morning trapping cats. . . .
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IT IS ALWAYS DIFFICULT to pin down the onset of an idea, but I think that it was this morning, when I surprised Albertine in the kitchen, on her hands and knees, scrubbing the floor, . . .
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WHEN I FINISHED, I held my hands up to silence the thundering ovation that was probably impending and said, “I have to ask you to forgive me for two mistakes in there, in that reading.
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WE HAD a fine crowd that night. The day was bright; the sunset was rosy; the night was mild. On days like that, people get the urge to wander, and Small’s beckons as an easy getaway. . . .
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I AWOKE before the alarm went off, got up immediately, pulled some sweat togs on, and went directly to my workroom without any coffee, drawn by the guilty pleasure of working on Murder While You Wait.
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GRUMPY CLUCK turned out to be a great fan of calvados. After a few, he threw his arm across Albertine’s shoulders and said, “Jeez, honey, you know, this is a great place. I’ve never been so relaxed on a vacation in my adult life. You know what I’m saying?”
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THAT NIGHT I read “Photographic Proof,” episode eleven of Dead Air, to a sizable Friday-night crowd (sizable, that is, for the time of year). . . .
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“JEFFREY the realtor called to say that he’s bringing some prospects on Sunday,” Albertine said, “and he asked me whether we could do anything about the wildlife.”
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I AWOKE feeling much better, even optimistic. I had slept the night through for the first time in weeks. . . .
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“IS IT OKAY if I ask a question?” asked Alice. “Sure,” I said. “Questions are encouraged.” “Two questions, really.” “Okay.” “Was there a clam salad sandwich?”
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THERE WERE NINE at my reading of episode ten of Dead Air, “Kap’n Klam’s Salad Sandwich,” since the tinkers made it off the roof safely and stayed to hear what I had to say, and Suki joined the group, too.
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I SPENT THE DAY going around the hotel touching up the paint where leaks had stained the ceilings and in the thousand little places where the walls had taken a beating, and for quite a while I felt content, almost elated. Painting does that to me. . . .
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LOU LINED SIX COCKTAIL GLASSES along the bar and filled them from a shaker. “Okay,” he said, “now if you don’t like this drink I want you please to at least give the appearance of enjoying it. . . .
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THERE WERE SIX in my audience for the reading of the ninth episode from Dead Air, “The Wall of Happy Diners.” Elaine had returned, and she had brought with her a gray and cuddly couple, Alice and Clark, longtime friends of Lou’s. . . .
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THIS WAS THE DAY of the funeral of the Big Tinker. The morning was gray, as it ought to be for a funeral. Clouds lay heavy over Babbington . . .
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“LET’S OFFER A BONUS,” she said when we were in bed, “payable to the individual realtor who sells the place. Maybe it will get them to start bringing more people out here.” . . .
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I TRIED NOT TO BE GLOOMY during dinner, and I think I succeeded, but by reading time I was exhausted. I felt old, finished. Everything had come to nothing, that was the feeling. . . .
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I TOOK MY COFFEE to my workroom and shut the door. Standing at the window, I reread the letter from Preston and Douglas announcing the cancellation of the Larry Peters series. As I read, I had the oddest sensation . . .
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LYING IN BED that night, awake, I found that I was afraid of moving to Foggy Cove. . . .
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WHEN I WAS A BOY, there was quite a lot of interest in flying saucers. . . .
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AT MY USUAL EARLY HOUR I sat at the computer to do some work on the passage that I would be reading in the evening, but it was Albertine who wrote: . . .
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MY LITTLE AUDIENCE was receptive, even appreciative, . . .
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ALBERTINE and I had the dining room to ourselves that night. After dinner, I built a fire in the lounge, poured the last of the cognac for us, and began reading the sixth episode of Dead Air, “Flying Saucers: The Untold Story,” to an audience of one.
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EARLY IN THE MORNING, I ferried our three guests back to the mainland. Dick and Jane sat in the bow with their arms around each other for the whole trip. They had told Albertine, while they were checking out, that their stay at Small’s had “really meant something,” . . .
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AS SOON AS we were under the covers, Albertine said, “The boiler is on its last legs.” “What happened to ‘Good night, my darling, I love you a zillion’?” I asked. “It’s the scale.” “Okay, a billion. I can understand that we’ve got to cut back — ” . . .
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AFTER DINNER, in the lounge, Lou stood the entire crowd of eight to a round of drinks from our well-stocked bar, and I read episode five of Dead Air, “A Case of the Family Illness.”
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ALBERTINE generally spends an hour or so reading in bed after she wakes up, then gets out of bed, pulls her workout wear on, runs seven circuits of the island, lifts her weights, showers, eats a light breakfast . . .
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THERE WAS APPLAUSE. It was Friday night, and the crowd — oh, let’s call it a crowd even if it was a very small crowd — was in a Friday-night mood.
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AMONG MY TUTORS when I was a boy were three who almost certainly never thought of me as their pupil. They were a nondescript man who lived around the corner (or, perhaps, across the street, or on the next block), his wife, and a ventriloquist’s dummy.
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MORNING CREPT IN like a guilty drunk.
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“BALDY THE DUMMY is still on the air,” I remarked later, at the bar, where Lou was again playing bartender. “I tune him in sometimes late at night when I can’t sleep.” “Really?” asked Jane. . . .
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BECAUSE I am an avid eavesdropper, I have often wondered why microphones are not made to resemble ears. After all, the point of a microphone is not that someone is speaking, but that someone else is, or will be, listening. . . .
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IN THE MORNING, Albertine called three real estate agencies to list the hotel with them, and in the afternoon I ferried a dozen realtors out to look the place over. . . .
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JUST BEFORE Albertine and I started up the stairs to bed, the phone rang. At that hour, Al generally preferred to let the machine take all calls, but I still had hopes that I would find on the other end of the line a representative of a vast extended family calling to inquire about taking the entire hotel for a reunion, . . .
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ONE SPRING NIGHT, thirty-eight years ago, I was camping in my back yard with my four friends Rodney “Raskol” Lodkochnikov, Marvin Jones, Rose “Spike” O’Grady, and Matthew Barber. Spike had brought our meandering conversation to a sudden end when . . .
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I WAS UP EARLY the next morning, as always, but when I entered the kitchen I found Cedric “Call Me Lou” Abbot already there, chatting with Suki, the cook, and making himself a breakfast sandwich from the meat loaf in the “leftovers” refrigerator. . . .
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WHEN I finished reading, my audience sat in awkward silence for a moment, until I said, “Please hold your applause until the author has completed the reading of all fifty episodes.” . . .
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IN THE EVENING, I had one drink too many before dinner, and, after dinner, in the lounge, I began the countdown to my fiftieth birthday by reading the first installment of Dead Air. . . .
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I STOOD AT THE WHEEL of the leaking launch, approaching the dock on Small’s Island and the end of my fiftieth year, throttling down, gauging the speed of my approach . . .
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WHEN THINGS GO WRONG, I sometimes wish that I were someone else, somewhere else, living a different life. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that you sometimes feel that way, too. In my case, . . .
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WHEN WE GOT HOME, we let ourselves in, and the girls immediately started up the stairs. I hesitated. “Peter,” they whispered, one in each ear, tugging my arms, “come on.” “Wait here,” I said. “There’s something I have to do.”
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BY THE TIME we reached the center of town, most of Babbington seemed to be there, drawn by the light of the fire or the sound of the sirens. . . .
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I had no interest in what I was doing. I barely had the will to do what had to be done. To make myself do something, I did what I could do without thinking.
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WE DIDN’T GO to the movies the following Friday. We had a falling-out instead. It began when I told Margot and Martha that I just had too much work to do. Martha ran her fingers over my lips and asked, “Why not ignore the drawings tonight and spend the evening with the originals?”
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THE NEXT WEEK’S MOVIE was, I don’t know, Frozen Dust or something like that. It was a love story, but a falling-out-of-love story rather than a falling-in-love story. Its tone was chilly and bleak. So was the weather. . . .
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AFTER THE NEXT WEEK’S FILM, the name of which I can’t even recall, I hurried the girls through the park, past the Nevsky mansion, toward home. “You’re in quite a rush this week,” said Margot. . . .
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MARGOT AND MARTHA got most of the secrets out of me in the first week. On the way home from Love and War in Dusty Rome, playing the parts of the circus acrobats Angela and Angelina, they took turns riding piggyback on my shoulders and interrogating me. . . .
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THUS I BECAME a sketch doctor. . . .
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He began pulling sketches from the pile and laying them out for me to examine. These were sketches of one of the girls; to be honest, I wasn’t sure which. If they had been the work of a single artist, they would have chronicled a worsening obsession with elephantiasis. . . .
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“At the next class I put Margot on the stand, seated on a low stool. I aimed a light at her right knee and told them to draw it. From the work in front of you, you can see how things have progressed. There are now classes four nights a week, and a waiting list. [. . .]”
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“I ENJOY MY WORK as I never did before,” said Andy. “I don’t mean the painting, though I still do it—it’s a living. And I don’t mean the teaching—that’s just a means to an end. I mean my study of the archetypal images that control our view of the world. . . .
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“Now answer this if you can: What shape is a watermelon?” Almost without thinking, I moved my hands into position to hold a nonexistent watermelon. “Well—” I said. “I mean exactly what shape is a watermelon?” said Andy. . . .
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The top sheet was blank. I turned it aside. I began flipping through the others. On the sheets were figure studies in pencil and charcoal. The drawings seemed to be the work of several hands, but only two models seemed to be represented: Margot and Martha. I saw them there, even though they were distorted in a fascinating variety of ways.
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“I WANT TO TALK TO YOU, PETER,” said Andy, one morning, about a month later. “Come into the studio.” “Okay,” I said, failing to apply any of the practical lessons of literature. I followed him into the studio. He shut the door behind me. He locked it. I began to sweat.
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AN ASIDE, just a short one, on the subject of the practical value of literature. I think that I supposed I had discovered one of the functions of literature: to show us how to behave under unusual circumstances. Since I was still at an age when most circumstances seemed unusual to me, I was grateful for all the help I could get, . . .
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What I recalled seeing was the painting that Andy had been working on for the last month or so, but the view I had gotten was much different from any I’d had before. . . .
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“I’M HUNGRY,” said Martha one night. She sat up in bed suddenly, interrupting what I was doing to her. Margot also sat up suddenly, interrupting what I was doing to her, and said, “Me, too.”
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IT BECAME MY HABIT, on Saturday mornings, after spending the night in the twins’ bed, to climb back down the ladder, scamper to the ground outside the courtyard wall, and slink around to the front door, in a crouch, staying below the windows. . . .
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For years—primarily, but not exclusively, my childhood years—I supposed that there was a clear demarcation between fantasy and reality, something like the edge of the sidewalk at the margin of the park we called Paradise. . . .
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FOR THE NEXT FEW MONTHS, life was a fantasy. Nearly every Friday I would go to the Fine Arts Theater with the girls. There I would eat éclairs and practice drinking my coffee black, the three of us sitting at a little table in a corner of the lobby, chatting like young flâneurs.
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I began to twitch. The muscles in my thighs and lips and eyelids began to ripple and flutter. I am, of course, looking at that morning through older eyes, but it seems to me that even then, . . .
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“Time to get up,” said Margot. “Our Father loves his breakfast,” said Martha, “and he loves to have his women around him while he eats.” . . .
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THE NEXT MORNING, I woke early. This was unusual, since I was, in those days, a heavy sleeper. At home, I slept as late as I could, and when I finally did wake up, or when my mother woke me with a shout up the stairs, I lingered lazily in bed for a while longer, trying to recapture and recapitulate my dreams, . . .
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AT THE TOP of the ladder, at the windowsill, I hesitated, waiting for my eyes to adjust. Their room was darker than the night outside, and there seemed to be a mist within it thicker than the fog. “Come here, Peter,” said Martha, whispering.
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WHAT DO I REMEMBER after that? Since I was so happily in a daze, I went where I was led. I have to be careful here not to fill the night with details from later memories, for I was to follow this route many, many times with the girls, . . .
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AFTER ANOTHER BLOCK, we were out of the business district. We walked another quarter mile or so, past a few houses that held the offices of lawyers and dentists, over a creek and past a canal, and came to a small piece of public land on the left side of the street. I hesitate to call it a park, . . .
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The car doors opened, and a couple got out, apparently on their way into the bar. I caught the surprised look on the face of the man, . . .
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“THEY’RE GONE,” said Margot in an elaborate stage whisper. “Good,” said Martha.
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I’m not posting today. It’s my birthday. Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five are sending me birthday wishes in the form of the “Happy Birthday Boogie.”
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IF THINGS HAD BEEN just a little different—if the Glynn twins had been younger, or if all of us had been several years older, if we had understood more, or less, of the world, we would have left the theater and walked along Main Street under the movie’s melancholy spell, . . .
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A shabby, shadowy garret. Rocky let himself in through the window, and once he was in the garret with the women, the whole tone of the movie changed.
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The rain-washed square. Of course, a car came around the corner. The girls stiffened when the light from its headlights washed over the wet cobblestones, but Rocky staggered on, laughing, and singing some song in French.
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I’ll fast-forward now to a point near the end of the film, after everyone in the troupe but Rocky, Lulu, and Lola had been captured or killed. . . .
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The stadium, inside. The size of the crowd strained belief. It seemed to be composed of thousands of identical men—lean, eager, easily led. A stage at one end of the stadium. A small man, tending to fat, mounted the podium and stepped up to the lectern, where several radio microphones were attached. . . .
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THE THEATER was small and dank. We stuck together, an uncertain little trio, trying to hide our uncertainty, . . .
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I SHUFFLED ALONG with the line. Silently I rehearsed saying “Three, under twelve,” so that I wouldn’t screw up when my turn came. . . .
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AN ASIDE, on the Babbington dialect. When we got to the theater, Margot and Martha sent me to wait on line, while they hung out at the curb, talking with their friends. I did not learn until years later that not everyone waits “on” line, that some people wait “in” line. . . .
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Like a photographic print in a developing bath in a darkroom, my understanding of some of the things Rosetta told me developed slowly as the seasons came around again to early fall. Two impressions stood out from all the others: . . .
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NEARLY A YEAR PASSED. Over the course of that year’s Saturday visits to the Glynns, a year of drawing lessons and contest entries, I got to know Andy and Rosetta. I learned quite a lot about their remarkable lives, . . .
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“HAVE A TRY,” she said. “I have announcements for dozens of contests here. I don’t have time to enter them all. Why don’t you try some of them?” She lifted some sheets from the stack of coupons and pages torn from magazines and placed them in front of me. . . .
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“I enter these contests,” she said. She indicated a pile of pages torn from magazines. “They all ask you to do the same thing. They want you to tell them, ‘in your own words,’ or ‘in twenty-five words or less,’ why you like the thing they make, whatever it is.
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I BEGAN SPENDING more and more time at the Glynns’, and my time with them began to take on the rhythms of a welcome and happy routine. . . .
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EVENTUALLY, THEY REACHED IRELAND, at that time a haven for scholars, artists, and intellectuals whose homelands had fallen under the control of yahoos, fascists, and philistines. . . .
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He made a gesture for me to follow, and he headed toward his studio. I found that I was full of nervous expectation. When I began to walk, my legs seemed not to recall how it was done.
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Now, however, I had made the bold step. I had already made my qualifying drawing for Andy Glynn, and he had as much as invited me to enroll in the Andy Glynn School of Art. . . .
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I FOUND that all the talk about drawing was making me twitchy, eager, and impatient. Earlier that morning, I had found myself awakened by a desire, the way I might have been awakened by the sun. Perhaps desire is too strong a word. I suppose it was just an urge. I wanted to learn to paint . . .
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“You misunderstand me, sir,” said the man, the ice in his voice melting. He was a small man with a round face, cherubic cheeks, and a bashful manner. “I’m here to help you.”
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ONE MORNING, when the time was right, Andy woke her with an armload of rolls and said, “My darling, it’s time. Today is the day. Hurry. We have to go while it’s still dark.” Rosetta gathered the few belongings she had with her, and in a moment she was ready to go.
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“He had a pad of paper mounted on a board that he held in the crook of his arm—like this—and in a hole in the board a pot of paint. Black paint. One big brush. And he would make his pictures with big gestures—like this—big swooping gestures. . . .”
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ROSETTA GLYNN greeted me at the big wooden door when I returned on Saturday afternoon. She wore a look that I recognized: the look of someone with a story to tell, sizing up her audience with bright, curious eyes.
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“Is this the only color you use—black?” I asked. “It’s charcoal gray,” he corrected me. “And no, it’s not the only color. If you look closely at each of my paintings, you’ll find a little bit of pink in it somewhere.” “Aha!” I said. “I thought so.”
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Margot pointed to a ladder, a jerry-built and flimsy thing, standing away from the comforting solidity of the stone walls, leaning against nothing more than one of the narrow catwalks above. I knew what I had to do: mount the ladder, climb up, make my way across the rickety boards to Mr. Glynn’s side, and make conversation with him. I had to try to win him over.
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THE CARRIAGE HOUSE, the Glynns’ home, had a roof of imbricate tile, like the mansion itself. The walls were made of stone, like those of the mansion. A stone building was an extraordinary thing in Babbington, for the town lay in the alluvial plain laid down by an ancient glacier, a plain of fine grains, silt, and sand. There were no sizable rocks anywhere nearby.
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AN ASIDE on the subject of the compulsion to tell a story. When, as a small child, I couldn’t get to sleep at night, my mother, after she tired of reading to me or just talking with me in the dark, used to tell me, “Make up a story for yourself.”
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First, a prerequisite bit of the history of Babbington. There was a period, from the 1890s until the Great Depression, when Babbington was a resort town, a destination. Easily reached by rail, it drew people from New York for the summer. . . .
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BECAUSE THE SHELL of the mansion survived, the Nevsky place was still the grandest house in town, still the largest and most substantially built, and even if it was uninhabitable, it still was able to play its most important role for Babbingtonians, including me: its role as a narrative device.
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HEARING THE STORY of the fire in the Nevsky mansion from so many sources on so many occasions taught me something about how to shape a story, because I got to see the storytellers at work, . . .
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“I couldn’t help overhearing,” said a voice from behind them. It was Mr. Locke, the principal of the high school. Joining the group, he moved in behind them, tossed his arms in a comradely way across the shoulders of the Leroy boys, and embraced the entire trio, pressing himself, at the height of the embrace, up against my mother’s teenage bottom.
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MY MOTHER felt the chill, and she gave a little shudder, and she linked one arm with Bert’s and the other with Buster’s and drew the boys closer to her.
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THE GLYNNS LIVED in what had been the carriage house for what had been the grandest house in Babbington. It was really the only house in Babbington that might reasonably be called grand at all.
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Mrs. Jerrold said, “Well, what can you expect? He’s an abstractionist, you know.”
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RECALLING, NOW, the stories told about the Glynns then, I think I hear, with my adult’s ear, a tone that I’m certain I never noticed as a boy. The tales of the Glynns and their wacky way of life were told with the tone one might use for a story about a particularly dense pet dog. It was, to be technical, ridiculous.
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“It’s about the Glynns,” said my mother after she’d gotten herself under control. “Mr. and Mrs. Glynn.” . . .
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I KNEW MARGOT AND MARTHA well, but I hardly knew their parents, Andrew and Rosetta, at all. At the time, I wouldn’t have said that, though.
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ONE EVENING, while I was practicing, Margot called me at home and asked me for a favor—perhaps I should say “another favor.” . . .
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“We’re not ready to have the whole school know that you’re honing your little skills, honey,” said Margot.
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BACK IN MY ROOM AGAIN, I hit on the idea of practicing with marbles instead of peas. I was a little beyond the age of playing with marbles. Among the other kids my age at school, marbles were no longer in favor.
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“THAT WAS DELICIOUS, Mom,” I said. “Thanks.” I stood and began removing the dinner plates. “What on earth are you doing?” asked my father.
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SO I DID begin practicing at home, but it wasn’t easy. I knew that my parents weren’t going to consider rolling peas a suitable occupation for my spare time, so . . .
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“Rolling peas?” I had the feeling that a joke was coming. “Try it,” said Martha.
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ONE DAY I was in the cafeteria at the new junior high school, making my way along the steam table in a line with the other scholars, collecting the various components of my lunch . . .
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ALTHOUGH THE THREAT of atomic warfare hung over us constantly when I was a boy in Babbington, New York, clam capital of America, we didn’t think about annihilation all the time. Sometimes we worried about war and rumors of war, it’s true, but at other times we had other thoughts: . . .
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If I were still working in the novella form, this short book would have had three parts: “Abed with Twins,” “Driven to Abstraction,” and “In Your Own Words.” . . .
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There I went, into an alley I had meant to ignore. As my work on this book progressed, as I kept poking my way a bit deeper into that alley, I found that I wasn’t alone . . .
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Permit me a brief aside on the subject of composition, recollection, introspection, and the effect of each on the others.
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Let me try to paint for you a picture of that enchanting Glynnscape. Imagine their bed, an improvised four-poster that the romantic and resourceful sisters had created by pushing their child-size twin beds together and . . .
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I WASN’T IN THE CROWD that gathered to watch the Nevsky Mansion burn, because I hadn’t been born yet, but . . .
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I HAD TO WAIT several months more for her next letter, but when it arrived and I read it, I knew that she had come to a spot where she would be staying put at last, and that I would be able to reach her . . .
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A FEW MONTHS LATER, a letter arrived from Sydney, one that she had apparently written in haste . . .
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THAT SUMMER I received a letter from Rangoon . . .
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WHEN SPRING came around the next year, it brought with it another of Ariane’s letters, one that brought a smile to my face as soon as I began reading it, [. . .]
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I DIDN’T HEAR FROM HER again until the following summer, when a letter arrived from Bombay . . .
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TOWARD THE END of that year, another of her letters reached me, one she had mailed before leaving Istanbul . . .
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66
IN APRIL, the following spring, another of Ariane’s letters arrived, this time from Florence:
Dear Peter,
Once, when I was in the kitchen with my mother, making chowder, I chopped up more carrots than she usually used. When my mother saw what I’d done, she said something like, “You’re not going to put all those carrots in, are you?” I said something like, “Why not? It’ll look great.” (I went through a period of exaggerated fondness for the color orange.) My mother sighed and said, as well as I remember, “Ariane, I spent a long time training myself, acquiring the necessary skills, educating myself, practicing, preparing myself for this work, the work of making a chowder that exhibits what my mother used to call ‘the magnificent balance of disparate ingredients brought together and invited to play.’ I have made this my life’s work, and I don’t take this work lightly. Don’t get the idea that I just improvise as I go along.” I said something like, “Oh, sure,” and in a state of embarrassed humility, I began sweeping the extra carrots aside, when she stayed my hand and said, “No, no, you needn’t do that. It’s just that we have to adjust everything else to balance the abundance of carrots. If we succeed, we’ll name this variation after you.” When I first began to think for myself, I recognized that I was still only a potential person, a beginner’s kit for making a person, a lump of clay, or a block of marble, or—as my mother would have said—a bag of groceries, and I had wasted too much time waiting for a potter or a sculptor—or a cook—to make someone out of me. I see now that the making of my self is as real a piece of work as the making of a painting or a building or a chowder. The idea that we make ourselves is cemented into our language, hidden in metaphors that we use so often that we hardly notice them anymore: “I don’t want to make a fool of myself . . . I want to make something of myself . . . He was a self-made man.” If you want to make a work of art, maybe you first have to make yourself into an artist, and it’s possible, it seems to me, that the artist will turn out, in the long run, to be the more important work, but we’ll have to see about that. For now, I’m practicing the art of making my self, and, by the way, I’ve lost another pursuer. I have no idea what happened to him, but he hasn’t been around for some time now, so I’m counting him out. The rumors among the survivors run toward his returning to the States to become a restaurateur, inspired by my accounts of my mother’s cooking and the pleasure it gave her. Could be. But back to training myself to make myself. In a way, I’ve spent years at it. Lots of mistakes, but the apprentices always make mistakes, don’t they, and I’m the master and the apprentice, which sounds like the blind leading the blind. Anyway, I think I know what I’m after. I think I know where I’m going, even if I don’t quite know how I’m going to get there. I’m going to make myself proud of myself, stop punishing myself, control myself, take care of myself, keep an eye on myself, behave myself, stop feeling sorry for myself, and enjoy myself. It’s hard work, and I don’t always feel up to it. Sometimes it seems too much for me, but never for the person I’m going to be. I wish that she would come along soon and give me a hand. To tell you the truth, I wish she would take over. She could make me into her. She could be the architect of me, the sculptor of me, the chef of me. Sometimes (no laughing, please) I can almost see her. I recognize her, you know. She’s out there and she’s waiting for me.
Love, Ariane
[to be continued]
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Dear Peter, The persistence of these people! Amazing! They hang on, following me everywhere like a trailing cloud, and sometimes if I stop suddenly, their inertia keeps them drifting on until they’ve caught up with me and they surround me more like fog than a cloud.
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ARIANE KEPT MOVING for the next few years, following an unpredictable course through the world, taking her inspiration from the river Meander, trying to shake the fans who followed her, the most devoted members of her audience, people with nothing better to do than pursue her, their fanatical ardor sustaining their dogged persistence.
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FROM The Films of Gregory Tschudin, by Andrew Cargill: On Display Daniel Turner (Hal Sorento), a builder who has been invited to bid on the construction of a house, is in the office of Terry Carp, a young architect (Jerry Burke), puzzling over a set of house plans.
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SHE RAN TO THE BEDROOM and got the two bags that had been waiting there, and when she returned she drew a deep breath and said, “Am I ready? What do you think?”
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Then, smiling, she said, “You’re right, though, Peter. You’re a perceptive little guy. It wasn’t intended as a punishment, but that’s what it became. That’s what I made it.” “Punishment for what?” I asked.
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SHE GLANCED AT HER WATCH, took a deep breath, and, with a particularly mischievous twinkle in her eye, said, “A few nights ago, I walked into my living room—from the kitchen, carrying a drink—some scotch, on the rocks, in a low glass—and stood for a moment, looking at the phone, trying to decide whether or not to make a call—
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“I HAD NEVER BEEN MUCH of a reader, and I didn’t know where to begin. I had certain advantages, though. I had time, and I had as many advisers as I chose to accept. [. . .]
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“WHEN THE SMOKE CLEARED, so to speak, I said to myself, ‘Ariane, honey, it’s not working out. Your life is out of control.’ What I meant, specifically, was that my life was out of my control. [. . .]
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YOU SEE, one night Terrence arrived in a sober mood. He embraced Ariane in silence, and held her long and hard. Then he kissed her once and set her aside—put his hands on her shoulders and moved her gently but firmly away, [. . .]
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“TERRENCE, sweet Terrence, was fiercely opposed to the war,” she said. “And I loved him for that. Not for that alone, but partly for that—that and the fact that as a lover he—”
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“The show that I always think of as the Ralph Kramden show was on, and although I had never cared much for him or his foolish schemes or his eternal whining and bullying, I left it on [. . .]”
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“TO EXPLAIN Terrence, I have to explain the popularity of my weeping and vomiting. Of all the things I did on this stage, in this house, that was the ultimate crowd-pleasing shtick. Weeping and puking. Tears and vomit. C’est la vie.”
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SHE GLANCED AT HER WATCH and said, “Each of my several cycles of popularity was characterized by a different set of ambitious lovers.”
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55
“WHEN I STOOD HERE, that first night—in this place, just as you see it—when I finally had the new house to myself—I felt that I had turned a corner.” She turned to me. “You know how it is,” she said. “In the labyrinth of life?” I asked. “Yeah! Take your solo.” “Now and then,” I said, rising from the couch and stalking toward the edge of the stage, holding my hands out, palms down, and rocking on the balls of my feet with each step, rotating my shoulders in a groovy kind of way, “you have that feeling that you’re on the right track. You’re making progress. You might actually be on your way to where you wanted to go. But the thing about labyrinths—” I gave them a sardonic grin, a shake of the head, rotated my shoulders, added just a hint of the cha-cha. “—the thing about labyrinths is that there are no straight courses. There’s always a turning just ahead, and every turning looks a lot like every other.” I spun to face Ariane, held out my hands, inviting her to dance. “You think you’ve reached a turning point in your life, and in a way you’re right. You’re right about having reached a turning, about your life’s having taken a turn, but remember that in the labyrinth all the passages are short. There’s always another turn just ahead.” I spun Ariane outward, and added, “Very often you’re wrong about where the corridor is taking you—” She whirled back into my arms. “And,” I said, concluding, dipping her, “many a route turns you round in circles.” She made a curtsy, thanking her partner for the dance, and informing me that my part was over for a while. I had to urinate anyway. I walked to the bathroom, and she, gracefully, moved to the center of the living room and began to speak seriously, commanding the attention of the audience, trying to take their eyes off me. She said, “I thought that the new house, my panopticon, would open me right up. I thought that I wouldn’t have any secrets, wouldn’t want to have any secrets, not even from myself. Now, well—I don’t know. I think that I may only have wanted to find some kind of confirmation that the self I was putting on display was a self worthy of display, and I think that I thought that that confirmation would be enough.” She stood in the center of the living room, standing very straight, with her arms at her sides, her hands overlapping in front of her pubes, her head slightly bent. She seemed taller, and she seemed about to say more. The audience waited, silent. My urine splashed into the toilet. The sound filled the hall. I thought of flushing the toilet to cover the sound, and then I told myself to play the scene with ironic detachment and just play it out to its conclusion. At last she said, “It wasn’t. With all respect to you, my audience, I have to say that although the self that I put on display here may have been enough for you—at least for some of you, maybe for many of you—it wasn’t enough for me. My panopticon taught me two things. Three things. First, how much I wanted to be by myself. Not alone. By myself. I might have left the stage right then, as soon as I realized that, I suppose, but for the second thing: that I wanted to be good company. I wanted to be worthy of myself. I had a hunch that I had a lot more to learn before I would be willing to be by myself, and I was right. So I stayed for another seven years and more, and by staying, I came to understand many things, including the true nature of secrecy.” I shook my penis, tucked it away in my briefs, zipped my fly, flushed the toilet, washed my hands, trying throughout it all not to look out at the crowd, but at the last moment, when I was returning the towel to the rack, I couldn’t resist any longer. I had to see what sort of reaction I’d gotten. I glanced out at the seats and saw there a very attractive young woman I recognized from one of the restaurants around town. She was looking at me and wearing a smile that I found absolutely impossible to interpret. I turned my eyes to the floor and hurried back to the living room. Ariane was saying, “I came to understand that the final hiding places, the only real hiding places, are the head and heart,” and I understood exactly what she meant. “To explain how I learned that,” she said, “I have to tell you about several other things, and just so that you don’t get lost when my story takes its twists and turns, let me give you a clue to what’s to come. I’m going to tell you about my ambitious lovers, about television and war, about the golden-haired Terrence, about my period of reading and study, my ‘moments’ and my silences, and my offstage excursions, but not necessarily in that order, and with a little necessary repetition, since another thing about labyrinths is that many paths arrive at the same place, and when I’m done, then—well, my bags are packed.”
[to be continued]
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You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide. The Substack serialization of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here; What a Piece of Work I Am begins here.
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You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed. The Substack podcast reading of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here; What a Piece of Work I Am begins here.
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You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document), The Origin Story (here on substack), Between the Lines (a video, here on Substack), and at Encyclopedia.com.
The serialization of The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy is supported by its readers. I sometimes earn affiliate fees when you click through the affiliate links in a post. EK
The illustration in the banner that opens each episode is from an illustration by Stewart Rouse that first appeared on the cover of the August 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions.
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WHEN DEREK and Bud and Bud’s gangs of carpenters and plumbers and electricians were finished, Ariane spent a night prowling her new home like a cat taking possession of a strange place. For a long time, she couldn’t seem to settle into it.
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Ariane motioned to the young architect to join her in the living room, and there they continued their discussion, while Bud, who remained in the kitchen, continued his discourse on the evolution of the functions of rooms in suburban homes [. . .]
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ARIANE stood at the kitchen counter with Duncan Rollo of the Zoning Board, Bud Costa, a Babbington builder, and Derek Rourke, a young architect. “So what I want to do,” she said, indicating with a wave of her arm the interior walls, the walls that hid the bedroom and bathroom from the audience, “is open the whole place up.”
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“SEX,” she said. She paused for a beat that she used to shoot me a glance full of comment on the power of that word to get the attention of an audience. “Onstage sex was a kind of guilty pleasure for me.”
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She shook her head, eyes down, with a sadness in the rhythm of the shaking that made me wish I had kept my mouth shut. Some members of the audience, speaking so softly that they were barely audible, began the long, drawn-out chant that one heard more and more often now: “Arrr-eeee-annn, Arrr-eeee-ann.” She immediately held her hands up to silence them.
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I FELT MYSELF GROWING more and more comfortable with the role of the suave interviewer, so, in that manner, I said, “Naturally, your new popularity—or perhaps I might say notoriety—
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THE THIRD WAVE of reaction and assessment, which peaked in the ninth and tenth years, was characterized by a tone of sneering superiority.
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WHEN GREG finished reading Donna Merrick’s column he threw the paper down on the kitchen counter and went to the refrigerator for a beer. “What’s the matter?” asked Ariane.
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DURING THE SECOND WAVE, people (and, invisibly, Ariane herself) began to consider questions of the nature of her existence as a person, or as a representation of a person.
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HERE ARE examples of viewers’ reactions during the first wave of interest in Ariane, which for me represents roughly the first two years of her decade on display. They are, I think, typical of the kind of response that arose from, explored, and exulted in the relationship between audience and work:
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IN THE ZONING BOARD DEBATES that ensued, Mr. Rollo became a tireless advocate for the “performing” position—that is, the pro-Ariane position, . . .
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DUNCAN ROLLO, chairman of the Babbington Zoning Board, opened the door at the back of the auditorium, allowed himself only a moment to glance around and size up the situation, then marched right down the main aisle to the edge of Ariane’s living room, where there would have been a wall if she had had any walls.
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“YOU WERE NEARLY CLOSED DOWN a few times, I know,” I said. As I spoke, I noted that I sounded like one of the more dignified television interviewers. I don’t mean one of those who discuss the weight-loss secrets of serial killers . . .
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ARIANE SAID GOOD NIGHT to the audience and pushed aside the curtain that in those early days hid the bedroom. She walked into the bedroom and pulled the curtain closed behind her. She was exhausted and happy to be alone.
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“WHAT A DAY that was!” she said. “What a night that was! Everything clicked. But then, how could everything not click? This play was a life, so anything that happened in it was a success, at least in the sense that anything that happened was exactly what we wanted to include in the performance, even if it wasn’t what we would have chosen to have happen in life. Isn’t that a neat trick? Not a bad way to live.”
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“LET ME START this way,” she said. “Let me start out with unpacking, and wondering about whether I’ve made a mistake and all, and then I’ll throw myself on the bed and call out to you, and you’ll come in and persuade me to stay—you beg me to stay, like this, just like this, and I’ll let you talk me into going through with it.”
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“WHAT A THING TO ASK! Be yourself! Over the course of my little lifetime I had put a lot of effort into trying to become someone else. Myself was the last person I wanted to be. There wasn’t anything Denny could have asked me to do that would have been harder. I had no self. There was nothing at the heart of me.”
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AS THE NIGHT approached, her first night on stage, her first night on display, she realized that she felt unprepared. She was astonished to find that she was nervous about this—her debut—her exposure.
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“MY FIRST MOMENT ON DISPLAY came the next day. I waited till around noon to go back to the warehouse. When I got there, Denny was hard at work. He worked in an odd, disorganized way, jumping from one thing to another, never finishing one job before he was distracted by the next.
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THE WAREHOUSE was full of seats. They were stadium seats, and they could have been from Ebbets Field. At the back of the warehouse, Denny had set up living quarters for himself.
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IT WAS A SLOW NIGHT at Corinne’s, so when Denny came in, Ariane was pleased to see him. She hadn’t seen him in a long time, and she hadn’t had anyone to talk to all evening. “Hey, stranger,” she said. “Where have you been?”
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SHE PAUSED for applause, and in the pause I applauded her myself. I also grinned and shook my head, making a little pantomime out of it, using a set of gestures to indicate that I was impressed by her performance. I was aware, of course, that I was performing, too. Let’s face it: I was hamming it up.
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“Now we come to Greg himself,” she said, and added her middle finger to the tally. “As I said, you’ll get no false modesty from me, so here is my immodest claim: next to myself, Greg Tschudin is my greatest creation.”
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She walked behind the sofa and patted the top of my head, then delivered her next speech standing there, with both hands on the back of the sofa, leaning over me, facing the audience.
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“I’VE TOLD THAT STORY so often,” she said—and there she paused, with a twinkle in her eyes, to telegraph the approach of the punch line—“that I almost believe it.” There was laughter. She had them.
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“I began to think that maybe he was trying to sell me drugs. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said, and that was pretty much the truth, since I didn’t know what a cynosure was, for one thing, ‘but you can buy me a drink if you want.’
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“You know—that’s an age when we want to seem so hip to it all. Already weary of it all. But we’re still sort of kids at heart. We’re quick to hope, eager to find the good news behind the bad, . . .
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ARIANE SAT UP. She gave me a peck on the cheek. She moved to the opposite end of the sofa. She crossed her legs at the knee and struck a pose like that of a guest on an interview program. She looked at me, raised an eyebrow, winked and smirked.
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At first this tense little exercise seems like nothing more than a twisted kind of homage to the windswept terror of Wuthering Heights and its cinematic offspring, . . .
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ARIANE LAY ACROSS MY LAP, with her head on the arm of the sofa. She didn’t bother wiping her tears away. “I had anticipated that night,” she said.
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“I RAN around to the back door and let myself inside.”
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CHAFING UNDER the frustrations and delays, Ariane worried about what her absence might make my grandfather think. She hated the idea of his supposing even for a moment that she would let him down, . . .
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42
“SHE WAS FAILING,” said Ariane, “so the point of the deception changed. Now we wanted to get to Rarotonga before she died.”
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RAIN PELTED the kitchen windows, and wind shook them in their frames. Ariane was glad to be in the warm kitchen, where she was beginning to feel at home.
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ARIANE GOT UP and lit another cigarette. “This is going to sound very strange,” she said. “I began dreaming of the voyage.” “That doesn’t seem surprising,” I said. “I don’t mean at night—I mean all the time.”
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WHEN ARIANE REALIZED Grandfather’s devotion for what it was, she was embarrassed to feel it resonating through her. She felt that she was taking something that wasn’t intended for her, even if she was only lapping up some of what had spilled over the edges, like a kitten, a stray invited into the kitchen to eat the scraps.
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40
“MOST NIGHTS,” she said, “while John was upstairs standing at the window and talking to Eleanor—”
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“I WOULD TELL HIM all these ideas of mine, my suggestions, what I’d found in my research, usually in the kitchen, while I was cooking, or sometimes, while something was simmering, when we were sitting at the table on the back porch, with the door closed and whispering, and then I’d send him upstairs with a tray and something to say.”
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ARIANE SPENT a lot of time in the kitchen, of course. She was intrigued by the idea of making the meals improve the illusion. She included a lot of fruit, and she used a lot of fish.
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[continuing the entry on Rarotonga from Scented Isles, a guidebook to the South Sea Islands by the Christensen sisters]
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[continuing the entry on Rarotonga from Scented Isles, a guidebook to the South Sea Islands by the Christensen sisters]
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ARIANE THREW HERSELF into the task with great verve. She studied Rarotonga and the route that they would take to get there. She found from the start that Rarotonga itself interested and appealed to her more than sailing the sea to get there, ...
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“I WANTED TO KNOW all about it,” she said. “Everything. More than John did. Enough to surprise him, anyway. So I went to the library. I was amazed to see how many books they had about Rarotonga.”
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GRANDFATHER gave her his charts and the books he had about Rarotonga and points along the way, and Ariane took them home and studied them when she was alone in her room at night. This meant that she was more often alone in her room at night, and this made her family suspicious.
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“THERE WAS A LOT OF WORK to be done,” she sa id, “and I threw myself right into it. If you think about it in terms of being on a boat—and I did think of it in those terms—I wasn’t really the first mate. I was the cook, and a deck hand, and the navigator—sort of—you’ll see—and also the boy—” “—the young landlubber who runs away to sea and will do whatever dirty job gets thrown his way, just for the thrill of being on board and underway.”
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UNTYING her apron and tossing it onto a hook, she said, “Red, I’m taking off.” Red didn’t seem to have any objection. He was as impassive as ever, but Ariane could read his immobile face better than others could, and she thought she saw some small annoyance there. “Look, I’m sorry,” she said, “but there’s something I’ve got to do.” She thought of trying to explain, but gave up. “There’s just something I’ve got to do.” “That’s okay,” said Red. “You’ve been gone for the last couple of hours anyway.” “I have?” “Miles away. Far, far, far away.” He picked up a glass and wiped it absentmindedly, imitating her faraway look. “Oh,” she said. “I guess I have. I’ll make it up to you.” “Forget it. Go on.” She left the bar and walked through the parking lot (which was uneven and unevenly lit and made everyone who walked across it look like a drunken sailor). She walked between the warehouses of corrugated metal, between the looming hulks of boats out of the water (quite a few of them waiting for repairs that would never be made). She walked onto Bearberry Street, turned to the right, where it curved toward the village, and walked along it to Sinkhole Road, where she took the shortcut, an archway cut through a hedge, to Sinkhole Lane, and walked to the tiny circular green. She stopped there, beside the pole that held the purple martin apartment house. She could see my grandfather’s house just across the way. She heard the voice of caution again. She shook her head and tried to ignore it. She crossed the green and turned right, headed for Grandfather’s side yard, where she would be able to see into the window. When she was in front of the house, she heard the metallic creak of the glider on the porch and she realized that he must be sitting there, in the dark. The night was quiet, so she supposed that he would have heard the sound of her footsteps on the pavement, might have looked up at the sound and seen her emerge from the archway in the hedge and cross the circle. What should she do now? Should she wait for him to speak? What if he said nothing? What if he just let her walk by? Then they would both know that the possibility of her saying something to him had passed without her saying anything. That would be hard to overcome. She would probably never approach him again. Her idea would die. She decided in an instant. She turned and walked straight up his front walk, up the stone steps to the front porch, and tapped lightly, ever so lightly, respectfully, on the screen door. (Grandfather had made that screen door when he was a boy, under the guidance and watchful eye of his father. The screens were held in place in the frame by half rounds of wood, and Grandfather had done all the work by hand: cutting the wood, assembling the door, stretching the screens, hanging the door and truing it. And every year—or at least every year since I first noticed—he would scrape the loose paint and touch up the bare spots, painstakingly painting the half rounds that held the screens in place, slowly, so slowly, so that he wouldn’t get paint onto the screens themselves, teaching me—but only by the way, without a word—that some work not only takes time, but needs time, as if it were alive, and had its needs.) “Come in,” said Grandfather. For a moment, Ariane thought of pretending that she hadn’t known he was sitting there, but as soon as she tried it out in her mind it felt wrong, like getting off on the wrong foot. “I heard the glider creak,” she said. “I know. You looked up.” “I did?” “You almost did. Started to, then thought better of it.” “I didn’t know if you wanted to be alone. Left alone.” After a moment, my grandfather said, “Well, I don’t know either.” Ariane told herself to just go ahead and say it, and to her surprise she plunged ahead. “I’ve got an idea,” she said. “It’s about—how I can help you. I can help you with Eleanor—Mrs. Leroy.” “That’s nice of you—but—” “Don’t say that,” she said. “Please don’t say that. Look, I don’t mean—like a nurse or anything—I know she can’t see me—” She lowered her voice suddenly. “I mean, I know she mustn’t see me. She has to keep thinking she’s on a voyage—” She moved closer to Grandfather. “She can’t hear me now, can she?” “She’s asleep, but—” “Maybe we should go walk down the street for a bit. Please just let me tell you my idea.” He was puzzled. She saw it in his wrinkled brow. “May I sit here?” she whispered. Quickly she sat beside him on the glider. She felt that she had to say it all, quickly, or lose the chance. Whispering, she said, “I was thinking about what you told me, about the trip. To Rarotonga. I mean that I’d like to help you. I can run errands for you. Go shopping. Clean the house.” It wasn’t what she had wanted to say. She had wanted to say, “I want to come along. I want to sign on for this voyage. I want to be part of the crew. I could be the cook. I could be the first mate.” She had wanted to put her hand on his arm and say, “Please, John,” but sitting there beside him, looking into his eyes in the dim light, an unfamiliar primness came over her, and she found it impossible to tell Grandfather what she really had in mind.
[to be continued]
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
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You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide. The Substack serialization of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here; What a Piece of Work I Am begins here.
-
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed. The Substack podcast reading of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here; What a Piece of Work I Am begins here.
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You can listen to “My Mother Takes a Tumble” and “Do Clams Bite?” complete and uninterrupted as audiobooks through YouTube.
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You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of Little Follies, Herb ’n’ Lorna, Reservations Recommended, andWhere Do You Stop?
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You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document), The Origin Story (here on substack), Between the Lines (a video, here on Substack), and at Encyclopedia.com.
The serialization of The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy is supported by its readers. I sometimes earn affiliate fees when you click through the affiliate links in a post. EK
The illustration in the banner that opens each episode is from an illustration by Stewart Rouse that first appeared on the cover of the August 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions.
www.erickraft.com
www.babbingtonpress.com
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36
AFFECTING THE VOICE of the movies’ idea of what was at the time called a dizzy dame, Ariane said, “Then I got another idea!” The dizzy dame seemed enormously pleased with and quite surprised by herself. “And the discovery that I could have two good ideas eventually led to my recognizing the dual nature of my personality.” “Wow,” I said, in my own voice. “Of course,” she said, continuing the act, “you got to understand the idea didn’t come to me right away.” She wiggled her bottom and said, “It took a while to form.” She was standing at the sink, washing the dishes. I was drying. She handed me a plate. “That’s the way with ideas,” I said. “All that crap about flashes of inspiration is just history, and like all history it’s truth simplified until it’s false.” I was at a stage when I enjoyed making statements like this, grand statements that implied long periods of cloistered contemplation. “Really?” she asked, wide-eyed. “Yeah,” I said. Then I got cold feet, so I added, “Maybe.” My feet got colder, and I said, “I think so, anyway.” Finally, I shrugged in the self-deprecating way that I was beginning to use as a way out of the sticky spots that my grand statements seemed always to get me into and said, “Who knows?” She dropped the dizzy act. “I see,” she said. “Well, in my case, when I realized what this idea was, and that it was my idea, I was amazed by it. I loved it—” “I know that feeling,” I said. “You wanted to embrace it.” “Something like that. Or maybe I wanted to embrace myself. I was so proud of myself for thinking of it. But then—” “You hesitated—” “Right. I thought better of it.” “You laughed at yourself, drew back from it.” “Yes,” she said, surprised that I should know the feeling so well. I gave her a knowing look. “You’ve been there,” she said. “Oh, yes.” “Well, you’re right. I laughed at myself. As if there were one part of me that could laugh at another. I was—not ashamed of myself, but embarrassed by myself, my silly idea, and so I reconsidered. It really was as if there were two of me. One—” “—quick, clever, confident—” “—had come up with this idea, but the other—” “—slow, plodding, hesitant—” “—kept questioning me about it. Was it really such a good idea? Yes! No! Maybe. Who knew?” She dried her hands on her towel and turned so that she was leaning against the sink. A faraway look came to her eyes. “But then I began to feel something else,” she said. “This was something I didn’t quite feel responsible for. It just sort of began to develop within me, part thought, part feeling, maybe without my agency. It was the realization that I wanted to do what I had thought of doing. It had been a long time since I’d felt that. And then I began to feel that I should do it, since it was my idea, and it seemed worth doing—now and then, anyway—and it was the only thing I could think of to do that might help John—” “You called him John?” “Yes. What else?” “Not Jack?” “No. John.” “Oh. Sorry—go ahead.” “And if I didn’t do it, or at least attempt to do it, I would probably regret that, and possibly for a long time, and when I had that thought, I wanted to act on it at once.”
[to be continued]
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
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You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide. The Substack serialization of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here; What a Piece of Work I Am begins here.
-
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed. The Substack podcast reading of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here; What a Piece of Work I Am begins here.
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You can listen to “My Mother Takes a Tumble” and “Do Clams Bite?” complete and uninterrupted as audiobooks through YouTube.
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You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of Little Follies, Herb ’n’ Lorna, Reservations Recommended, andWhere Do You Stop?
-
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document), The Origin Story (here on substack), Between the Lines (a video, here on Substack), and at Encyclopedia.com.
The serialization of The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy is supported by its readers. I sometimes earn affiliate fees when you click through the affiliate links in a post. EK
The illustration in the banner that opens each episode is from an illustration by Stewart Rouse that first appeared on the cover of the August 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions.
www.erickraft.com
www.babbingtonpress.com
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
35
ONE NIGHT, when my grandfather walked into Corinne’s and took the round table in the back, Ariane saw something in the way he walked that told her things had changed. What she saw was enough to keep her from calling out a greeting to him. If this were a melodrama, she would have dropped a glass, and she would have cut herself when she bent to pick up the pieces. The men at the bar didn’t see things as subtly as Ariane did, so they didn’t notice the difference in Grandfather. They waited until he sat down and then looked at one another, tacitly deciding whose turn it was to make a courtesy call. They gave the nod to Nasty Dunbar. “Evening, John,” said Nasty. Grandfather’s grim grin. “How’s she doing, John?” Grandfather drew a breath and said, “Hanging on.” Nasty nodded. “Hanging on,” said Grandfather, “but—” The “but” resounded in the room like a thunderclap. The men at the bar froze. Would he say what none of them wanted to have to hear? How should they react if he did? What could they say? What could they do? “Now, John—” said Nasty. “She’s weakening,” said Grandfather. “Well—” “Weaker every day.” “Ah.” “I’m going to have to be staying with her now—most of the time—just about all of the time now—from now on.” He shook his head. He hadn’t said it the way he might have wanted to say it if he had thought about how he might want to say it, but he hadn’t thought about how he might want to say it. He looked at Nasty, so discomfited by what he had said, and he knew that he couldn’t—he shouldn’t—say anything more. He couldn’t tell Nasty or Bitzer or any of the others anything about how he was struggling to keep an illusion alive. If he had told him about his preposterous voyage they would have thought he was nuts. If he had tried to explain that he was trying to hold Eleanor under the narcotic spell of the illusion that she was holding her own, that she was hanging on, they would have stood with their eyes down and felt ashamed of themselves for being so impotent in the face of this. He really wanted to explain himself. He wanted them to understand all of it, why he would have to be with her more now that she was weakening so much more quickly, so quickly that he could see it, that sometimes he seemed to see it from day to day. He wanted to tell them why they wouldn’t be seeing him anymore. But it would have made them feel awful, so instead he did the generous thing. “Hanging on, though,” he said. “Hanging on,” said Nasty. He nodded. He returned to the bar, where the men were still and silent. Ariane brought my grandfather his drink, unbidden, holding the glass with both hands for fear that she would betray herself by trembling. She wiped the table before she set the drink down, and as she did so she brushed his hand with hers. He seemed not to notice. He looked ahead, but at nothing, and his enormous hands lay unmoving on the table.
[to be continued]
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
-
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide. The Substack serialization of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here; What a Piece of Work I Am begins here.
-
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed. The Substack podcast reading of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here; What a Piece of Work I Am begins here.
-
You can listen to “My Mother Takes a Tumble” and “Do Clams Bite?” complete and uninterrupted as audiobooks through YouTube.
-
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
-
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of Little Follies, Herb ’n’ Lorna, Reservations Recommended, andWhere Do You Stop?
-
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document), The Origin Story (here on substack), Between the Lines (a video, here on Substack), and at Encyclopedia.com.
The serialization of The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy is supported by its readers. I sometimes earn affiliate fees when you click through the affiliate links in a post. EK
The illustration in the banner that opens each episode is from an illustration by Stewart Rouse that first appeared on the cover of the August 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions.
www.erickraft.com
www.babbingtonpress.com
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Dr. Roberts was my grandfather’s best friend. He was sometimes with my grandfather during those Sundays that he spent on the bay, and Dr. and Mrs. Roberts were part of my grandparents’ “set.” This set consisted mostly of people from families that had been in Babbington for generations.
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WE WERE SITTING at the table in Ariane’s kitchen. I was working on my second helping of lasagne. She was still poking at her first. “Night after night, he would stand at the window,” she said, “as if he were standing at the porthole of their cabin, and he would describe their progress.”
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ONCE THE VOYAGE was underway, there could be no turning back. It wasn’t an easy trip for Grandfather. Often, along the way, he had doubts about the wisdom of having set out at all.
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GRANDFATHER WALKED ALONG, toward home, through the rain. As he walked, he began to think his way through Ariane’s idea. He tried it out. He imagined himself putting it into effect, standing at the window of the bedroom, while he and Grandmother slid down the Bolotomy River on their way to Rarotonga.
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He told her about Grandmother’s illness: pancreatic cancer. He told her about the trip that they had always talked about taking, and the way that he and my grandmother talked about it, planned it, and imagined it. ...
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Bitzer nodded again. They all nodded this way, just before they returned to their places at the bar. It was the nod that ended the encounter, but it was also a nod of admiration for my grandmother’s toughness. In the nod they saluted her bravery, without having to get into details over what she was being brave about, or having to start exploring the question of the value of bravery in the face of such a terrible certainty. They didn’t ask why she didn’t scream, why she didn’t seize the opportunity to damn her enemies, why she didn’t hire a muscular young man with clear blue eyes and a carefree smile to come in and rub her with olive oil—nor would it have occurred to them to ask, because they knew that she wouldn’t have done anything like that. She was a Brave Woman. She was a Good Woman. She was solid and sturdy. You could count on her. In fact, many of these men, and their women, knew firsthand that they could count on her. They had been the beneficiaries of my grandmother’s goodness. She did a lot of USO work during the Second World War, and when her own firstborn son was killed she threw herself into the work with redoubled vigor, making it her particular charge, a duty she assumed on her own, to lend her shoulder to the mothers, to help prop them up, to give them something of her strength and optimism. Sometimes, in the misery of their darkest nights, they may have thought Grandmother’s optimism was foolish or unrealistic, but they couldn’t accuse her of not knowing what they were going through, and when they thought of her own suffering and how well she bore it, they felt the same kind of mute admiration that their men now felt for her when they encountered my grandfather at Corinne’s. Corinne’s was a bar that women—and to the men at the bar women meant “wives”—would not go to, so the men carried their stories about my grandparents home with them, and they told them to their women, each in his own way, in dozens of variations. These were people who ordinarily spoke little, who passed whole evenings together in silence. My grandmother gave them something to talk about. For that, they were a little deeper in her debt. Bitzer had gone back to the bar. The courtesy call had been made. They were leaving Grandfather to his thoughts. Ariane walked in. It was her night off, but she had dropped in at Corinne’s anyway to see who was there, since she didn’t really have anywhere else to pass an evening. “Busman’s holiday?” asked Red. “What?” said Ariane. “Busman’s holiday,” said Red, levering the cap off a bottle. He set a beer in front of her. “The bus driver gets a vacation—so he takes a bus trip. Get it? Busman’s holiday.” “Oh, yeah,” said Ariane. “My father says that. I never got it before.” She looked into the mirror, saw my grandfather in his accustomed place, sitting alone, and said, “Give me a rum and Coke, Red, will you?” “Oh, sorry,” said Red, reaching for the beer he’d put in front of her. “No, no,” said Ariane. She put a hand on her beer. “I mean for John.” “Oh, sure,” said Red. “Sure.” Ariane put some money on the bar. Red waved her off. She pushed it toward him. She had never bought a man a drink before. She arrived at Grandfather’s table without his even noticing her. “The usual?” she asked, putting the drink in front of him. He looked up, surprised and confused. “I didn’t—” he began. “This one’s on me,” she said. She put it in front of him and sat down. “How’s she doing?” she asked. “Hanging on,” he said, automatically. He looked into his drink. This was the brief period, in the ritual performance of the duty of inquiring after Eleanor, when everyone kept his eyes down, confirming the fact that in the face of death there was nothing at all one could say. Instead, Ariane put her hand on my grandfather’s hand. “It must be hard,” she said. Her voice was low, but distinct—no mumbling, no embarrassment to muffle what she had to say. Grandfather looked at her. I would like to think that he didn’t see what all the rest of us saw when we looked at her, but how could that be? Even with his eyes filmed with grief, he would have to have seen some of the dark-eyed sexiness that could make a lusty young boy prone to a certain kind of manly wishful thinking. He can’t have failed to see it, but I think he must have been able to see beyond it. He let out a sigh. “The hardest part,” he said, slowly, because he had kept himself from saying anything like this for so long, and he wasn’t quite sure that he ought to say it now, couldn’t be sure that saying it wouldn’t crack his shell irreparably, “is—” He swallowed. Ariane saw the look in his eyes, that look of being near to tears that he wouldn’t allow himself to shed, and she squeezed his hand. “—not being able to do—anything. Nothing that will change—things. The outcome—you know what the outcome will be. It’s the inevitability that’s so hard. The certainty of it.” He looked at Ariane, with those smart gray eyes that always seemed to see through me when I had broken something I shouldn’t have touched, and he saw that she didn’t quite know what he meant. “I mean that I don’t know how to tell her what’s happening to her, really happening to her,” he said. “I’ve been stalling—stalling for time.” He chuckled. He shook his head. He was laughing at himself. Ariane didn’t know what to say, but as it turned out she didn’t have to say anything, because Grandfather suddenly began telling her everything (in the same low voice, I imagine, that he used to use with me, years earlier, when he would tell me a story before I fell asleep on nights when we slept aboard his boat, anchored in the clam flats, in the rocking silence, with the water lapping against the hull and the handle of a clam rake poking me in the ribs).
[to be continued]
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
-
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide. The Substack serialization of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here; What a Piece of Work I Am begins here.
-
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed. The Substack podcast reading of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here; What a Piece of Work I Am begins here.
-
You can listen to “My Mother Takes a Tumble” and “Do Clams Bite?” complete and uninterrupted as audiobooks through YouTube.
-
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
-
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of Little Follies, Herb ’n’ Lorna, Reservations Recommended, andWhere Do You Stop?
-
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document), The Origin Story (here on substack), Between the Lines (a video, here on Substack), and at Encyclopedia.com.
The serialization of The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy is supported by its readers. I sometimes earn affiliate fees when you click through the affiliate links in a post. EK
The illustration in the banner that opens each episode is from an illustration by Stewart Rouse that first appeared on the cover of the August 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions.
www.erickraft.com
www.babbingtonpress.com
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
ONE NIGHT, my grandfather was sitting at his usual place, the small round table in the back. It was not a pleasant night. He had come through the rain for his usual couple of drinks. Two or three of the “boys” at the bar had made their ritual trips back to his table to see how he was doing and ask how Eleanor was getting along.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
WHEN MY GRANDMOTHER FELL ILL, she and my grandfather talked more and more about a trip that they had always hoped to make, someday, when they had the time, when there wasn’t so much to do, when they had some extra money—someday. They wanted to go to Rarotonga, one of the Cook Islands, in the South Pacific, west of New Zealand.
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ARIANE AND I were in her kitchen. She was making lasagne, going about her work with the queer verve of a chef on a television cooking show, slicing and chopping and stirring with the cool indifference of a weary pro, but sniffing and tasting with the ecstatic delight of an obsessive gourmet.
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“TOOTSIE!” said Red. “Where the hell you been, girl? Want a drink?”
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29
“I SAID TO MYSELF, ‘Ariane, let’s face it. Things haven’t been going your way. You need a change. Time to travel another path.’ ”
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FROM The Films of Gregory Tschudin, by Andrew Cargill: A Little Mischief Anne Coffin (Deirdre Frost) is a college student who has returned to her home town for the summer and taken a job as a maid at a resort. She’s from a working-class family that is just scraping by. Sending her to school is a sacrifice.
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WHEN SHE TURNED THE CORNER and saw home, she knew what she was going to do. It made her shiver, and it made her smile.
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27
“I DID. I went away. Actually, I let him lead me away—down the corridor and out the door. And he watched me until I was off the grounds. I was—dazed. I felt ashamed, just as ashamed as I would have felt if I’d been guilty. And I felt—”
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IN MOVIES, there are always clues. A spy will walk into a deserted square in Bratislava and we, the viewers, will know—from the way the shadows fall, the stillness in the air, the unusual way that the pigeons are pecking at crumbs—that this is a setup, that he’s walking into a trap, but the clues in life are subtle, unreliable, and often misleading, so we rarely spot the setup or see the ambush coming.
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“THAT’S WHEN the son of a b***h hit me. He punched me. In the stomach.” She shuddered and drew a breath. “I lose my breath even now,” she said, “remembering it. ...
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“THEN I SURPRISED MYSELF again,” she said. “There isn’t any way around this—it sounds so square to say this, but I remembered that it wasn’t right. It was shameful, it was—”
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Guy got up and started pacing the room. “Here’s the way I see it,” he said. He was suddenly full of energy, ...
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25
“WHEN I TOLD HIM, he was—just—incredulous. That amazed me. Did he really think he had hidden the stuff so well? He just couldn’t believe that I’d found it. Then he was offended. That didn’t really surprise me. The guilty ones are always offended—or pretend to be offended.” “ ‘You’re accusing me? I can’t believe this. After all I’ve done for you, how could you suspect me of something like this?’ ” “You’ve got it. But try, ‘after all we’ve meant to each other.’ ” “Oh. Sure.” “But most of all, he was crestfallen. I didn’t realize this at the time, to my eventual dismay, but I had made him feel ashamed—but not for what he’d done. For being discovered. I had diminished him, made him feel small—” “—like a child on the edge of adolescence who dreams adult dreams and ventures into adult company and is greeted by the pet name his mother gave him in the crib—” “—I had taken the wind out of his sails—” “—taken the lead out of his pencil.”
GUY BEGAN GLANCING around the room, trying not to move his head, trying not to give away any hiding places that Ariane might not have discovered, but trying to determine what had been disturbed, where she had looked. “You found it?” he cried. “Yes,” she said. “I told you.” “What do you mean by that?” he asked, brightening. “You ‘found it.’ Just what did you find?” Ariane could tell what was going through his mind. He was beginning to think that perhaps she had only discovered the poorest of his hiding places. The thought struck her that for the time being, for this moment, right now, nothing else in the whole affair mattered so much to him as the fact that his hiding places hadn’t worked. “I mean that I found everything,” she said simply, without trying to put a face on it, without any effort to hide her disappointment in him, or what was beginning to feel like disgust. She lifted the lamp from his bedside table, reached under it, and pulled out a wad of tissue that held a pair of onyx cuff links. She dangled the tissue pouch in front of him. She tried not to sneer. “The cuff links, you mean,” he said. “You found the cuff links.” “Yes, I found the cuff links.” “Well—” She pulled the drawer out of the bedside table, completely out, and turned it toward him so that he could see the back end of it and know that she had found what was taped there, an envelope with small bills in it. “And you found some money,” he said. He seemed to be trying to look smug, and Ariane resented it. He was playing with her, as he would with a child, as if they were whiling away a rainy afternoon, playing “hot and cold” or “hide and seek.” “I mean,” she said, in a measured voice that she intended to end the notion of playing around, “that I found all of it. Everything.” “Prove it.” “Oh, come on, Guy.” “No, I mean it. You say you found ‘everything.’ I’d like to see you prove it.” She was stunned. She was also beginning to understand that he had been wounded. She could see the pain in his expression, and she saw an odd dispassion, a hollowness in his eyes—but still she didn’t see any danger. She should have: the shadows of the venetian blinds fell at a slant across the bed, making a set of sharp diagonals that disturbed the rumpled softness of the covers, and Guy had risen from the bed and was standing beside it, so that she was now looking up at him from below, at the dark hollows of his eyes, the stern set of his chin, the nasty, challenging twist of his mouth. This was not tranquility by design. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “This isn’t a game. I think we ought to talk about what—” “I don’t believe you,” said Guy. “I don’t believe you found anything more than some cuff links and a few bills.” A profound disbelief passed through her, leaving her feeling empty, hollow as the look in his eyes, as if it were impossible or useless to think, as if mechanical action were all she could manage, all that was required. “All right,” she said, and she began to go about the room, pulling out the bundles of cash she had found and the pieces of jewelry: the pearl bracelet, a ring, a pin, a wristwatch, and as she collected them he watched in silence. They amounted to no more than two dozen pieces in all. One pair of earrings was mismatched. She tossed each item onto the bed as she retrieved it. “There,” she said, when she was done. She couldn’t have disguised the contempt in her voice if she had tried.
[to be continued]
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
-
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide. The Substack serialization of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here; What a Piece of Work I Am begins here.
-
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed. The Substack podcast reading of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here; What a Piece of Work I Am begins here.
-
You can listen to “My Mother Takes a Tumble” and “Do Clams Bite?” complete and uninterrupted as audiobooks through YouTube.
-
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
-
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of Little Follies, Herb ’n’ Lorna, Reservations Recommended, andWhere Do You Stop?
-
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document), The Origin Story (here on substack), Between the Lines (a video, here on Substack), and at Encyclopedia.com.
The serialization of The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy is supported by its readers. I sometimes earn affiliate fees when you click through the affiliate links in a post. EK
The illustration in the banner that opens each episode is from an illustration by Stewart Rouse that first appeared on the cover of the August 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions.
www.erickraft.com
www.babbingtonpress.com
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
STILL BRITTLE AND BRIGHT, still in Guy’s arms, still in the parking lot where anyone might see them, Ariane said, “Tell me all about it.” She was surprised to realize that she was teasing and testing him, waiting for him to make a slip, to tell her some lie that she would recognize.
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“FOR ONE MAD MOMENT,” she said, “I thought I might just get rid of all the loot, such as it was, throw it all into the sea, bury it under the sand, but I knew that wouldn’t do—”
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DISAPPOINTED, she dropped into a chair in Guy’s room and lit a cigarette. She felt suddenly weary. She stretched herself, knitting her brows. She was stunned. Her illusions were shattered. What was she going to do? ...
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23
“IT WAS DISAPPOINTING, at the very least, to find out that Guy was so stupid and that his aims were so small, his goals so petty,” she said. ...
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“I WOULD STEAL a few minutes in each room, browsing, looking around to see what I could see, but only a few minutes in each room, because—” ...
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SHE SWUNG the door open and looked in. The light coming through the venetian blinds cast sharp shadows on the bedspread, shadows that slipped over the edge of the bed, fell onto the floor, and vanished. ...
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“I HADN’T been in any of the guest rooms since those nights when I had visited the place before it was finished. It was a queer feeling, to be in those rooms. It got to me.
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“YOU CAN JOT this down, too,” she said. “A person who will tell a small lie will tell a bigger one when the occasion calls for it.” “Got it,” I said.
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GUY SEEMED so interested in his work that Ariane decided work was the way to his heart.
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19
“I WISH I could capture the atmosphere of Sunrise Cove after Guy took charge,” she said. “It was as if we were in one of those upbeat movies that came out in the thirties, with aging child actors still playing kids, hanging around the soda fountain and saying ‘swell’ and ‘gee’ a lot.”
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18
“REMEMBER THIS,” she said, and she tapped me on the chest to make sure that I was listening. “Love, like other intoxicants, alters your perceptions. Got it?” “Got it.” ...
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17
“SO, HE TOOK ME OUT to dinner that night. I make that sound so grand. We went to a diner—” ...
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ARIANE STOPPED fumbling with the zipper and let her hands fall. “Oops,” she said. “Hey, it’s you,” said Guy, as if he’d just noticed. “Oh, yes,” said Ariane, spreading her hands, grimacing, shrugging her shoulders. “It’s me.”
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“THERE I WAS, standing there, in the locker room—” “—in the harsh light of the locker room, outlined against the deep shadows—” ...
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ARIANE STOOD at the kitchen door, looking out at the parking lot, holding the door for the last of the staff, Tony, just a boy, young and pimply, whose schoolboy crush was so obvious that sometimes it was enough to make her squeeze her eyes and laugh so that she wouldn’t cry. Tony wanted to dawdle.
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“GO AHEAD, Renée,” said Ariane. “I’ll finish up.” “Huh?” said Renée. “I know what has to be done,” Ariane assured her. “I’ve watched you. . . .”
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15
“WE ADJUSTED. He knew exactly what he wanted. He told us exactly what he wanted us to do. We did it. In less than a month, he had the place humming. ...
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“Let me introduce myself,” he said. He passed the loose-leaf binder and the unruly stack of papers that lay on it to Mr. Murray, without looking at him. Mr. Murray was taken by surprise. He grabbed for the folder, just a moment too late, after the handsome guy had let go of it, and it slipped from his hands, threatened to fall to the floor, clattering, making a mess of things, ...
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14
THE NEXT DAY, the staff was summoned for a meeting. Ariane was the first to arrive. She hesitated at the entrance to the dining room. At the far edge of the room, with their backs to the bay—the bay behind them as a backdrop, like a rear-projection scene in a low-budget movie—stood Mr. Murray, Renée, and someone new, a young man, tall, in a dark double-breasted suit. ...
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A HANDSOME STRANGER walked into the Tropicale Grill one night, and Renée showed him to one of Ariane’s tables. ...
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CURT BURGER, the owner of the Babbington hardware store, came in one night with his wife, Arlene. Renée showed them to one of Ariane’s tables. By the time they sat down, they were in an agitated state.
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“SO, I WANT TO SHOW YOU how a little insight can be dangerous. I watched Renée, and Renée watched me. I think she did a better job, because I didn’t know just when she was watching me, but I’m quite sure she knew when I was watching her.” A knowing smile came to her lips.
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THE FIRST EVENING that the Tropicale Grill at the Sunrise Cove Resort Motel was open for paying customers was the kind of evening that Ariane had imagined weeks before, when she had stood in the skeleton of the dining room and pictured it as it might be. ...
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“SO I STARTED out as a waitress,” she said. She crossed her legs at the ankles, stretched them out in front of her and leaned back against the back of the sofa. “But I had hopes of becoming the hostess, and I acted as if I was already being groomed for the job. Actually, I was being groomed for the job; I was doing the grooming. ...
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Ariane spun around and strode into the Sunrise Cove, head up, a new confidence about her, as if she were the older sister in the picture, not the ingenue. ...
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“I TALKED DENNY into driving me to the resort for my first day on the job. The place wasn’t really ready yet, and there were contractors and carpenters and electricians swarming all over the place plying their trades. A very handsome sign was going up out front. ...
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“Aren’t you at least interested in finding out what it might be worth to me to get you to stay?”
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“You’ve made up your mind. I see. Well, you must be right, then. Go ahead, go. Don’t let yourself listen to what I’ve got to say, because if you were to start to negotiate, then that ironclad determination you have to make a break, to get out of here at any cost, would be gone.”
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SHE HAD TOLD her family. Now she had to tell Porky White. She was sure that Porky would be upset when she announced that she was leaving the clam bar, and as the moment for telling him approached, she discovered, to her surprise, that she would be upset about it, too. ...
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SHE HESITATED, pacing up and down in the gravel at the edge of the roadway, and she suffered a failure of will. She decided not to bring the matter up, not to upset the harmony of a family evening, not to risk being turned down. ...
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“WHEN I GOT OUTSIDE, I remembered that I didn’t have a ride. I took my shoes off and pulled my hem up and walked home—” ...
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Ariane stood outside the room, in the echoing hallway, hesitating, listening to the men arguing, biting her lip, grimacing, wondering whether she should go ahead with what she had planned or turn around and leave. ...
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SHE STUMBLED off the planks and got some concrete muck on her shoe. She wiped at it with her handkerchief, but that didn’t do it, so she spit on the handkerchief, hiked her skirt up, and bent her leg up to get at the muck, in the process showing a lot of leg. Cornelius Murray, the manager of the resort, was watching from a window, enjoying the show, not only her legs, but her discomfiture. He smiled. ...
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“TINA TALKED me into letting her drive me to the place,” she said. “She thought I’d make a better entrance. So, she drove her car, and I sat in the back. I don’t know what the hell we thought we were supposed to look like. ...
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SHE SPRANG out of bed. Normally, when she got up, she had the annoying feeling that she was being watched. There was a reason for that feeling. It wasn’t always an illusion. ...
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“ONE MORNING,” she said, “not long after that visit, I woke up to find that the signs seemed right. I sat up in bed, pushed my curtains aside—”
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SHE BEGAN VISITING the resort almost daily, before she went to her job as a waitress at the clam bar. A couple of times she borrowed her girlfriend Tina’s car, a six-year-old Commander that still had a lot of life in it. In the car she felt invisible and anonymous. She could park on the town pier and observe the work without feeling that she was being observed herself. ...
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“PETER?” said Ariane. “Hmm?” I said. “Oh. Sorry, I got a little carried away with my thoughts there.” “You were somewhere else.” ...
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WHAT DENNY MEANT when he said that the resort seemed out of place was what a large chunk of the population of Babbington thought: that Babbington would be better off without the resort, which most of the people who lived in the older part of town called “the motel.” ...
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DENNY BEGAN TO SPEAK more directly and honestly than he had ever spoken to anyone before. He told her that he loved her and would always love her. He was amazed by the way he spoke. He used words that he had never used before: tender, forever, rapture, even marriage. Something had certainly happened to Denny there in the car, pushing himself on Ariane. ...
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AT THE DOCK, there was a crowd, and Ariane rewarded Denny for his honesty with a kiss, a good one. Then she patted him, like a child, and said, “That’s enough now.”
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“YOU KNOW,” I said, “if I had been there, if I had been there beside you instead of Denny, we would have had a lot to say, we would have had a lively conversation, we would have had a lot of laughs.” “Oh, Peter. Stop torturing yourself. You would have been as tongue-tied as Denny.” ...
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WHEN DENNIS, the young man everyone called “Denny,” went to Corinne’s that night, he didn’t intend to stay. He came to take Ariane away.
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“I FOUND THE BATHROOM,” she said. “I washed my face. I looked at myself in the mirror, and I saw how much I had changed. Of course, I was still gorgeous—but I had a hardness that I hadn’t had.” ...
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DURING THAT TIME in Ariane’s life, when she was working at Captain White’s and hanging around Corinne’s and living up to Tootsie Koochikov’s reputation, I stopped spending afternoons with her at her house—her parents’ house, that is—ending a practice that we had begun when I was eleven. I missed those afternoons. ...
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SHE TOOK THE CLAM HAT OFF and tossed it into a corner of the sofa, where it lay there watching us, wide-eyed, amused. ...
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“AFTER WORK,” she said, “most of the time, a few of us, the younger workers from Captain White’s, would go down the street, to a bar—” “Corinne’s.” “Right.”
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“TOOTSIE KOOCHIKOV. I allowed myself to be called that for years,” she said, “right on through high school, until one night when I discovered, to my surprise, that I had had enough of it. It was after I had graduated, when I was working at Captain White’s—that clam bar.” ...
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3
“SHE MUST HAVE BEEN quite rattled when you burst into the house complaining about your name,” I said. “Was she!” said Ariane. “I can imagine that scene.” “Can you?” she asked. There was a bit of a challenge in it. “Yes,” I said, accepting the challenge. ...
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IN ARIANE’S MOTHER’S DEFENSE, it must be said that when the time came to name her she was reacting, perhaps overreacting, to the trouble caused by the names she and her husband had given to Ariane’s older brothers. They were both named Ernie. ...
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IF “LODKOCHNIKOV” was an embarrassment for her, “Ariane” sometimes felt like a curse. When—in junior high school—she found out where the name came from, she could hardly believe that her mother would give her such a name, a name so rich in implications for a life. ...
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WHEN I ARRIVED at Ariane’s house, she greeted me with a wet kiss, quite a kiss—lascivious, shameless, dizzying. It was the very kiss that I had dreamed of when I was a boy, except for the fact that she tasted of scotch. ...
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FOR ABOUT A MONTH, in my version, I saw her nearly every night. Most of the time, she talked, and I listened. I took notes; she did not. I tried to get a word in now and then, and now and then she allowed me to, but most of the time she did the talking. She had a lot to tell me. ...
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I WENT AWAY to college, stayed away for graduate school, and then returned to teach molluscan biology, local history, folk etymology, and recreational mathematics at Babbington High. When I returned, Ariane was still in town, at the same place, down by the docks, but I didn’t see much of her. I just never seemed to have the time. Then one night her house burned down and Ariane was killed. ...
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MY BEST FRIEND was my imaginary friend, a boy named Rod, short for Rodney, friend of my own invention. I based him on a boy that I met by chance one day, a runaway boy who was passing through Babbington on his way to somewhere else, anywhere, nowhere, who-knows-where. ...
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Dedication
For Mad
Epigraphs
Let not the reader be scandalized by this gravity amid the frivolous; let him rather recall that there is a grandeur in all follies, an energy in all excess. — Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life” (translated by Jonathan Mayne)
The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to seaIn a beautiful pea-green boat; . . .They sailed away, for a year and a day,To the land where the bong-tree grows; . . .And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,They danced by the light of the moon,The moon,The moon,They danced by the light of the moon.— Edward Lear, “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat”
Each cell is an island:—the inhabitants, shipwrecked mariners, cast ashore upon it by the adverse blasts of fortune: partners in affliction, indebted to each other for whatever share they are permitted to enjoy of society, the greatest of all comforts.— Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon; or, the Inspection-house; Postscript, Part I
The soul selects her own society,Then shuts the door;On her divine majorityObtrude no more.— Emily Dickinson
Here I inhale profounder strengthAnd as I am, I speak and moveAnd things are as I think they areAnd say they are on the blue guitar.— Wallace Stevens, “The Man with the Blue Guitar”
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Happy New Year from me and the artist formerly known as Prince.
I’m taking a short break.
I’ll resume the serialization of The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy on Monday, January 8, 2024, with the first episode of What a Piece of Work I Am.
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BECAUSE THE UNIVERSE IS EXPANDING, and, as Quanto pointed out, most of everything is nothing, every day, every moment, more nothing separates the rest. With more and more Zwischenraum, the universe is becoming more and more transparent. When Raskol sprayed me with that beam of photons from the flashlight, some of them were reflected outward, arranged in a pattern imposed on them by the contours of my face. Many of them never made it out of the atmosphere, of course—they collided with molecules of this and that, got transmuted, caused transmutations—but the number of photons in that beam was enormous, and lots of them got away. ...
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ONE NIGHT, I was lying in the young bamboo at the foot of the hill, waiting, watching for an opportunity, letting my thoughts ramble to keep myself from growing impatient and giving myself away. ...
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The first night we played Night Watchman, Marvin was the watchman. There must have been thirty crawlers in my back yard, trying to get into the tower without being caught. Most of them weren’t very good at avoiding detection. ...
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RASKOL AND MARVIN AND I put to use the lessons we had learned from our earlier failure. When we were finished building Watchtower II, we had a solid base from which a dozen long uprights rose, tapering inward to support a smaller platform at the top. We made a ladder by nailing crosspieces to two of the uprights, and when, after climbing the ladder to the top, we found that the structure exhibited familiar tendencies toward collapse, we broke down and sought Guppa’s advice. He taught us the technique of triangular bracing. ...
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I THINK IT WAS THE BIGGEST gathering we had ever had in my house. It seemed as if everyone I knew was there—except Guppa and Mrs. Jones, of course. They had driven in to the city early in the morning, so that they’d be in the studio, with their demonstration waterwillow set up, well before “Fantastic Contraptions” went on the air. ...
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“LET’S MAKE A PARTY of it,” I said. “We can all get together to watch the show when they’re on—us, and Gumma, and the Joneses, and—” “No, I don’t think so, Peter,” said my father. ...
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I SPENT SOME TIME feeling sorry for myself. I had no Miss Rheingold, no Ariane, no intriguing science project to give my life direction and meaning. ...
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From under the counter he produced what at first I took for a pillow. It was covered with fuzzy gray material, and its shape closely resembled the fuzzy photographs of flying saucers that appeared in newspapers every week or so at that time. When I spotted the eyes, I realized that it was a stuffed-animal version of a clam.
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“Hold it, Porky,” I said. “Hold it!” “Huh?” “I don’t think we have to worry about a hamburger trend,” I said. “No?” he said. I could see the hope in his eyes. . ..
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“It started one afternoon last week, the very day I decided I’d better start keeping the sales records.” “You kept records only for last week?” “I’m a busy man here, Peter,” he said. ...
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I RODE MY BIKE to the Lodkochnikovs’ to tell Ariane that I wouldn’t be able to watch movies with her in the afternoons anymore, but no one was home there, so I rode on down to the waterfront to see how my investment was doing. I wasn’t in a particularly good mood when I walked through the door to Captain White’s. ...
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I WORKED HARD that night and all the following weekend. I drew diagrams, changed them, redrew them, made more changes, and redrew them again. I wrote, changed what I wrote, rewrote, made more changes, and wrote again. I didn’t seem to get anywhere. ...
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“Hey, Peter. Peter.” “Hm?” She was shaking me, and with each shake I was pressed for an instant closer to her, the skimpy pillow compressed between my head and her hip. “It’s the commercial,” she said. “What were you going to tell me?”
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30 “ISN’T IT INTERESTING the way all knowledge is interrelated?” I said. “Not now, Peter,” said Ariane. “Wait for the commercial.” I knew I was breaking Ariane’s rule by speaking to her during a movie, but I was out to impress her, and I was impatient. I had brought a volume of my encyclopedia with me that afternoon, Volume C (Cat paradox; Causality; Cavendish laboratory; Combination lock; Como conference; Complementarity; Compound nucleus, theory of; Copenhagen school of physics; Correspondence principle), hoping that she would appreciate the intellectual patina I was acquiring, but I’d arrived a little late, the movie had already begun, and she didn’t want to be diverted. ...
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I was annoyed by articles without cross-references. I doubted that one little article could be all there was to say on a subject. Could this really be the last word? Was there nothing else related to this topic? At first, I tried getting out of these dead ends by backing up. ...
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Opening the packages turned out to be a pleasure all its own, one I’ve never forgotten. Every package I’ve opened since has had a sweet association with the packages that held those books. ...
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ONE AFTERNOON, when I got home from school, I found a stack of cartons just inside the front door. Each of them was addressed to me. I rarely got mail of any kind—I was still a child, after all—and packages were rarer still, so the arrival of these packages would have been an unexpected treat if I hadn’t been expecting it, which I had been ever since the night when, sitting at the top of the stairs out of my parents’ sight, listening to the television show they were watching, I had heard them discussing the idea of buying me the encyclopedia I’d been lobbying for and, to my astonishment, deciding in favor of it. ...
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ARIANE WAS IN THE KITCHEN when I arrived for my next afternoon of television with her. “Butter that toast!” she said as soon as I came through the door. ...
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MISS RHEINGOLD SAT on the edge of her desk, holding the general science book open in front of her. Her habit of sitting on her desk and crossing and recrossing her legs had led most of the boys in the class—including me—to sit throughout general science in a rubbery slump with our eyes at the level of Miss Rheingold’s desk top so that if she recrossed her legs carelessly we wouldn’t miss the opportunity for some important extracurricular education. ...
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THE FIRST OF MY AFTERNOONS in that dark little room with Ariane came about by accident—or luck. ...
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25
EVERY AFTERNOON, as soon as she got home from work, Ariane began watching television. Nearly every afternoon I watched with her. For hours and hours I watched movies and commercials on the Lodkochnikovs’ television sets, but I can’t recall one of them, even though I have a good memory for such things and can remember quite vividly certain movies and some favorite shows, personalities, actors, and actresses that I saw on television at home. The reason for this blind spot is that the cinematic memories that must be there are entirely obscured by another memory, one so bright that it obliterates all the others as the light of the sun obliterates the feeble light of distant stars. I can’t recall the television programs because I’m blinded by the memory of Ariane.
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THEN THE LODKOCHNIKOVS got a television set, and the center of my attention shifted at a stroke—not to the television set, but to Ariane’s hip. ...
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GUPPA AND MRS. JONES were much more successful. She worked in her basement, and Guppa sometimes worked there with her, but they wouldn’t let anyone see what they were doing, because they knew that it’s best to keep the rough work out of sight and show nothing until you’re ready. ...
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ENTHUSIASM is useful in a crew of builders, but there can be too much of a good thing. An excess of enthusiasm becomes impatience, and impatience is dangerous in any endeavor that must be done right, for work like that seems to have its own idea of how much time it deserves to take, and it can turn on you if you rush it. ...
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WE WORKED ON THE TOWER each afternoon when the school day ended. All in all, the work took us a couple of weeks. The first week and nearly all of the second went into clearing bamboo from the site. Then we erected the watchtower in two days of frenzied work. (During those busy days I discovered what a pleasure it is to hear a hammer hit a nail squarely. I didn’t hit the nail heads squarely very often, but when I did I was rewarded with the solid sound of competence. I found that I could hear that sound and get the satisfaction that came with it more often if I used a lighter touch, and I’ve applied that principle to all forms of work throughout my later life.)
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FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS, our back yard was a hive of industry. Marvin and Raskol hit it off right from the start—something that, I suppose, could have been predicted from the fact that both of them could look at a perfectly good drawing of a lighthouse and see a watchtower—and the three of us launched into our work with an amazing burst of energy. It amazed me, and it sure amazed my father. ...
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WHEN WE ARRIVED at the Joneses’, Guppa wouldn’t let Marvin just lead him into the house. He insisted on ringing the doorbell, and he stood there at the front door with his hat in his hand, as if he’d come courting. . . .
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Suddenly something like a verbal explosion occurred. I think that what I had to say had built to such a level within me that it couldn’t be contained, there could be no more hemming, no more hawing, no more beating around the bush. It wanted out, and out it came, in a rushing burst: ...
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“Guppa,” I said. “Remember what you were telling me about trade-in value?” ...
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We stood there for a while. Guppa leaned on the handle of the mattock. I scuffed my shoes in the dirt and wiped my hands on my pants. The unspoken hung in the air around us. One of us had to say something. ...
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MATTERS CAME TO A HEAD on the Saturday afternoon that Raskol and Marvin had persuaded me to set aside for starting work on the lighthouse—that is, the watchtower. They knew I was fretting over the science paper, and they were convinced that building a watchtower would be beneficial. ...
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I WAS CONVINCED that Guppa and Mrs. Jones would be unbeatable on “Fantastic Contraptions.” All they had to do was add some windflowers to one of Guppa’s ideas, and they’d have a winner. From my point of view, the work was all but done, the prize all but won, once I brought them together. ...
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WHEN WE SAT DOWN to eat, my mother wrinkled her nose, leaned over her plate, sniffed at her food, gave it a puzzled look, and asked, “What is that smell?”
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“PETER, PETER, PETER,” said Porky as soon as I walked through the door of Captain White’s. “Your timing is perfect. Sit down, my friend, sit down, sit down. We’re going to have a taste test.”...
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“Hey, Peter,” said my father, waving the smoke away from his face, “where have you been?” “I was up in Scrub Oaks,” I said. ...
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WHEN I GOT HOME from Marvin’s, my father was out on the patio, cooking a chuck steak. For my father the barbecue season never stopped. There was a period, from November through February, I guess, when conditions kept him from grilling as much as he might have wanted to and when snow sometimes kept him from even reaching the grill, but these were only interruptions of his barbecuing, ...
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“Peter, I’ll bet you’ve never seen trained chickens before,” Mr. Jones began. “Dad,” said Marvin, in a tone that any kid I knew would have recognized immediately as meaning “Don’t embarrass me.” “Mr. Jones,” I said. “Can I ask you something?” ...
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“What is that?” I asked Marvin. “What’s your mother making for dinner?” “Huh? Oh—court bouillon. Redfish court bouillon.” ...
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MY FIRST IMPRESSIONS of Marvin’s family were of bustle and plumpness. There was a lot going on at Marvin’s house. He had two younger siblings, a sister and a brother, and they provided running, hopping, tussling, crawling, squealing, and giggling enough for many more children than two. Marvin’s mother was rushing around in the kitchen, making the clatter that arose from making dinner, humming and singing while she worked, calling out to the children in what seemed to be a foreign language, laughing at nearly everything Marvin said. ...
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16
FOR THE FIRST SEVERAL BLOCKS of my ride to Marvin’s, what I saw was familiar, but then I crossed a narrow concrete road and found myself in territory previously unknown to me. ...
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MARVIN LIVED in the northernmost section of Babbington, the section called Scrub Oaks, an area I had never seen before. I rode there on my bicycle, a Shackleton Superba. ...
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Matthew said, “I couldn’t get to sleep at night because I couldn’t stop thinking about the question. My mother told me to try thinking about something else, so I did, but whatever I tried thinking about would turn into thinking about the question. Every time.” ...
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IN THE HALL, I threw myself into the usual chaos of kids hurrying for their lockers before catching their buses for home, bumping against one another, rebounding, bumping into someone else, bouncing with a Brownian shuffle. ...
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“If most of us is empty space,” said Marvin, “then something small enough could travel through that empty space.” He paused, and in the pause he turned toward Nicky, just barely turned. It was so slight a movement that no one could have accused him of deliberately addressing his next remark to Nicky. Then he said, “It could go right through you.” ...
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Nicky turned toward me and rolled his eyes. “So I say to Miss Rheingold, ‘Can we answer a question with a question?’ “And she says, ‘Only if you answer the question that you use to answer the question.’ “So I say, ‘What question are those guys working on?’ Meaning you guys. ...
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WHEN THE GROUPS MET for the first time, a couple of days later, Miss Rheingold told us to spend the period discussing our questions. We didn’t have to come to any particular decisions at this first session, she explained. All we had to do was “make a start.” When those of us who had figured out that we were in the where-do-you-stop group brought our chairs into a circle around a table, we saw that we were only three. That couldn’t be right. Miss Rheingold had said that there would be four people in each group. ...
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I wanted to ask one more question before I left, so I stopped at Miss Rheingold’s desk, where she sat on the edge watching the class converge on the door, pass through it, and expand into the hall. “Venturi,” she muttered. “Miss Rheingold?” I said. She pressed a hand to her honeydew brow. “Peter,” she said. “I hope this isn’t another question about mousetraps.” ...
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The film ended. The fluorescent lights stuttered and flickered into life. “We just have time for a few questions,” said Miss Rheingold. Hands shot up all over the room. Miss Rheingold beamed with pleasure and satisfaction. “Yes, Spike,” she said. “How do they get those Ping-Pong balls to stay on the mousetraps like that?” ...
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THE MOVIE Miss Rheingold showed us was called Quanto the Minimum. It was developed, or at least sponsored, by the telephone company, and it featured a tiny cartoon character, Quanto the Minimum himself, who explored the constitution of matter as it was then understood. Try as I might, I’ve been unable to scare up a copy of this film to review for this book, so I will have to rely on memory to summarize it for you. ...
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I ARRIVED IN GENERAL SCIENCE the following Monday expecting the next step in the development of our questions and group work. I’m sure we all expected that. We expected continuity. Continuity was what we had been taught to expect, and we had learned the lesson, ...
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“Well,” I said, “let’s see.” Mentally I scanned my new experiences, looking for one that would appeal to Porky. It didn’t take long for me to spot exactly the one. “There’s a new science teacher,” I said. ...
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PORKY WAS SITTING in one of the wooden booths, flipping through some papers that I took to be bills of lading. I took them to be bills of lading not because I had any firsthand experience with bills of lading, but because I had encountered the term in my ramble through the unshelved books in the library, liked the sound of it, and welcomed an opportunity to use it, almost as much as I did splines, ...
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I SPENT MANY HOURS in the library before I admitted to myself that I wasn’t likely to find the answer to Miss Rheingold’s question in the books that were considered useful for students in the seventh grade. I had browsed pretty thoroughly, and I’d learned some interesting things along the way, but I didn’t feel any closer to the answer than I had been when I’d first slipped in through the boiler room window. ...
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My immediate problem, as I now see it, was that I had acquired over the years a number of overly simple ideas, ideas based on a view of the surface of things only, and they had become too firmly rooted in my mind—the solar-system model of the atom, for example, and the sectioned-map view of social boundaries, that sort of thing. ...
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In those days I was convinced that I was surrounded by opportunities for doing the wrong thing, and I knew from experience that I usually didn’t even notice I’d seized one of these opportunities until it was too late. The difference between the right thing and any of a million wrong things often seemed so tiny as to be nearly invisible. Anything might trip you up, and it was more likely to be a pebble than a boulder. I haven’t had much reason to alter this conviction in all the years since then. ...
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I BEGAN MY RESEARCH the very next weekend. I’ve always been conscientious about such things. Give me an assignment and I get right down to it. I was one of those children who ate the lima beans first and saved the mashed potatoes for last, as a reward. I postponed work on the lighthouse until I had at least made a good start toward answering the question. ...
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THAT NIGHT, I got on the phone right after dinner. It took hours, but by the end of the evening I had identified at least some of the members of every group. A competition had developed when kids decided that anyone who succeeded in figuring out all the members of the groups would get on the good side of Miss Rheingold. As a result, ...
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“WELL, PETER, how was it?” my father asked that evening, calling me from the bathroom where he had been soaking his hands free of gasoline and grease from the gas station where he worked. This procedure had fascinated me since I had first seen it as a child. It produced iridescent swirls on the surface of the water in the sink. My original thought had been that this was its purpose, and that mistaken notion still interfered with my attaining a conventional understanding of washing up. As far as I was concerned, it was still playing with water. ...
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One at a time we came to the front of the room, reached into the fishbowl, and drew a slip of paper. When I bring to mind the moment when I reached into the bowl to get my question, I experience it all again, not as memory, but as a repetition of the immediate data of experience. I am there. ...
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Having caught our attention, she delivered a brief talk about the value and importance of science and the adventure in learning that we were about to undertake. I’ve forgotten nearly all the details of this talk—in fact, as I attempt to reconstruct it now, it seems to be largely about legs, which I know can’t be correct—
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“What do you think, Sylvester?” asked Miss Rheingold, glancing again at the class list. “Biff,” said Biff. Behind me, Nicky Furman said, “Sylvester?” “All right,” said Miss Rheingold. “Biff.” Biff said, “Millions of miles?” ...
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BY THE TIME I reached general science, my last class that first day, I was in a state of high bafflement. I filed into the room with the others, found a seat, sat, took one look at the teacher, and sank into an enchanted gape. She was astonishing. She was blond, and she had, to use the terminology of the time, a gorgeous figure. I can’t be certain just what the other kids were thinking, but she inspired in me a number of questions. What was she doing here? Why was this amazing woman, who ought to be in the movies or competing in a beauty contest, teaching science in Babbington? Was she lost? ...
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Fourth, and possibly most bewildering of all, we were made to change classes. When our day’s bout with one subject had ended, we got up and left the room, and went to another, similar, room where we tussled with another, different, subject. What an enormous change this was. In the past, when we had spent nearly the entire school day in one room, we had drifted from one subject to the next, one blending slightly with the next, like the indistinct edges of objects depicted in a watercolor painting, but ...
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Third, there was imposed upon us a baffling new nomenclature. This frightening change made everything we were to study seem like an unfamiliar subject. Arithmetic had become “mathematics,” and the word provoked an immediate mental image for me: a tightly wound spring, straining, powerful, dangerous. ...
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WHEN SCHOOL OPENED, I entered the building through the front door with all the other students and immediately felt a great loss. The building was now available to just about anyone. Its hallways rang with the clatter and din of a vulgar horde—a vulgar horde composed largely of my friends, it’s true, but they seemed like invaders nonetheless. ...
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“We can wipe up the footprints with our shirts,” I said. “Yeah, but that’s only part of the problem,” said Raskol. “We’ve left our footsteps in the dust on the terrazzo. We’re going to have to put it back the way it was.” “What?” “We’re going to have to rearrange the dust,” he said. ...
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AS IT NEVER WOULD BE after classes started, the whole school was open to us when we prowled it in secret. From any point of view other than ours, I suppose, it was closed to us, but because all its parts were equally closed, once we had penetrated one barrier we had penetrated them all. We prowled everywhere, ...
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THAT’S HOW I came to be standing in a locker in the unfinished school building, in the heat of an August night, still and silent and happy and thrilled. The thrill of danger, the possibility of being caught, wasn’t the only thrill. Prowling through the unfinished school building had made me begin to feel a thrilling anticipation of seventh grade that in memory is so thoroughly mixed with the thrill of danger that I can’t quite tell them apart. ...
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I BEGAN THE PLANS for the lighthouse with that hopeful vigor we feel at the start of any project, when possibility is the driving force, the likelihood of success is at its highest, the project—in the mind—is perfect, pure, elegant, magnificent, clean, and right, and we seem to see, as if at the end of a tunnel, a shining day in the future when we will finish it and sign it. ...
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I HAD LEARNED that the best time to bring such things up was over dinner, preferably late in the meal. I knew, too, that I had to be careful not to give the whole plan away at once, since my father had noticed—and on occasion had pointed out to me—the fact that some of the projects I undertook didn’t turn out quite as I had advertised them before I began. ...
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THE THING AS I FOUND IT was, essentially, this: a motor driven by a spring that the operator wound with a large crank (see Figure 1). ...
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THEREFORE, IT IS NOT SURPRISING that when I found myself bored, when I didn’t know what to do with myself, when I was a little on edge and needed to find or devise a way to relax, or even when I was just looking for a way to pass the time, I sought inspiration in junk. Most of the time, I found it there. ...
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SO GUPPA BECAME a sharecropper. He staked out a stretch of land running along one side of our lot, from the back of the garage to the foot of the hill. Every day when the weather was suitable for gardening he came over after work, wearing one of the identical brown suits that he always wore at work, suits that my grandmother, Gumma, called Studebaker suits, carrying a canvas bag in which he had his gardening clothes, a pair of overalls that really made him look like a farmer. ...
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IT WAS MY FERVENT HOPE that my maternal grandfather, whom I called Guppa, a crackerjack Studebaker salesman and also something of an inventor, would someday appear on Flo and Freddie’s show. I think I must have gotten the idea the very first time I watched the show, but I can’t be sure about that; it’s hard to pin down the onset of an idea. I pestered poor Guppa about it endlessly. ...
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“Fantastic Contraptions” at first lay on the dusky line between the fading giveaway program and the coming competitive program, but over the course of its history it moved with the times toward out-and-out competition. In the first part of the show, amateur inventors would bring their creations onstage and explain and demonstrate them. ...
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I WAS STANDING IN A LOCKER in the Purlieu Street School on an August night, when a locker was a hot place to be. I was ten. I would be attending the Purlieu Street School in the fall, when I started seventh grade, if the building was finished in time. ...
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THINGS LEFT UNDONE—how they haunt us. At any rate, they haunt me. I’ve noticed that they don’t haunt everyone else. A great many people seem to be able to walk through their days without hearing at their heels the dogged shuffle of neglected duties, but I am not a member of that lighthearted crew. The things I ought to have done are there behind me always, each with a hook in me, ...
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Preface
SOMETIMES my memory seems to be mush, with shining moments scattered through it like chips of marble in wet cement or peas stirred into mashed potatoes. I’d like to be able to take a closer look at some of those moments, but whenever I reach for one I disturb the mush, and the moment I seek sometimes sinks out of sight. ...
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Dedication
For Mad
Epigraphs
Here am I, lying under a hayrick. ...
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Ike’s
Seated at the bar at Ike’s, we watched, fascinated, while an aging fellow (possibly only our age, come to think of it, but so bent by care and conscience that he seemed much older) tried to pick up a lovely little girl, shrink-wrapped in a tiny skirt. You can guess the type: ...
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“I — I’ve seen a lot of your writings.” Oh, this is wonderful. This is a fine thing. This is great. Get chummy. Maybe he’ll take you on as an apprentice. Invite him up to the apartment. Show him your own work on your own walls. You can drive each other nuts. ...
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HE HEARS A VOICE, close to him, then shuffling footsteps and someone sniffling, and he shifts farther back into the shadowy doorway. A man dressed in rags, bent, his hair wild, is making his way along the broken sidewalk across the street, at the edge of the zone of destruction. He’s surrounded by garbage bags. ...
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Everything’s changed now. I have to go away. I have to get out of this city. Don’t be ridiculous. You’re just being dramatic. This will never come out. You’re not the sort of person a witness remembers, remember? Those kids won’t remember you. Neither will the cabbie. ...
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IT TAKES A MOMENT for him to realize that he has hit the driver, that the man has stumbled backward, is leaning against the steel upright, is staggering, has dropped to his knees. Matthew steps out from hiding. ...
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Fury owns a part of him, an anger forty years old and more. He’s looking for another weapon, though he isn’t conscious of that, won’t allow himself to be conscious of that, is only half-aware that he grabs something, rejects it, grabs something else, a short length of reinforcing bar, bent at one end, hefts it, decides that it will do, and ...
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AT FIRST Matthew feels only astonishment, disbelief, something like the shock from a blow. As if he’d had the wind knocked out of him, for a moment he can’t seem to breathe. In another moment he’s sucking air into his lungs fiercely but can’t seem to get any oxygen from it. Then he droops, all his energy gone at once, and feels like a fool, that he’s been played for a fool and deserved it. ...
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OFF THEY GO. Matthew rides in a happy fog, mystified by the chatter of his chums, who seem to speak a dialect he doesn’t understand. He has the feeling that, if he made the effort, he could understand them, but he’s content to be out of it, quite happy to sit back and go along for the ride, holding Tracy in his lap, wearing a goofy smile, like a happy child. ...
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MOST OF THE GROUP gets into two BMWs that are double-parked on Boylston Street, in front of the restaurant. Matthew watches, hanging back, tempted just to drift away, down the street, home, but Tracy’s beside him, and she’s a stronger temptation. ...
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“SAY,” says one of the young men to the bartender, tapping him on the arm to take his attention away from the drink he’s mixing, “would you pack all of this up?” He waves his hand over the remains of their snacks — Matthew’s nachos and some ribs and a huge pick-up-stick tangle of fries. . ..
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“But he is kind of interesting on his own, I think,” says Matthew, pushing his true self back into the conversation. “I mean, isn’t everyone? Or, if not everyone, this guy anyway.” You’re making a mess of this, says BW. “There are surprising things as you go through his apartment,” says Matthew, a little desperately. ...
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“Help yourself,” says Matthew, prompted by BW, indicating his nachos. “God knows there’s enough here for a crowd.” ...
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“MACHO NACHOS?” A waiter has arrived at Matthew’s elbow, holding what looks like a tray that must, surely, hold several orders of nachos. “Oh,” Matthew says. “Yes.” The waiter smiles and places the entire platter in front of Matthew, on the bar. It is so large that it reaches beyond what, observing the informal boundaries civilization provides us in settings where we are forced to be side by side with our fellow humans, would be Matthew’s space. ...
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ONE OF THE handsome lads in the group of students is saying, “My father has this thing about getting the whole family together, right?” He pauses to take a pull at a bottle of Anderson’s Denver Beer, pauses again to savor that Denver cachet, and continues: “Like he thinks we all really want to be together, but circumstances keep us apart?” Pause. “Right.” This is well received. ...
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Let’s go on. Next on my list is your obsession. ...
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A GROUP of students arrives at the bar. Now look at that, Matthew thinks. That’s the sort of thing that makes me think there’s reason for hope.What Matthew finds heartening about them is the fact that they are a racially mixed group of students, quite thoroughly mixed, exhibiting skin tones ranging from his own sandy pink to the rich brown of a good strong cup of coffee, the step from one tone to the next quite a narrow one, so that, if they were to line themselves up properly, they would resemble the flexible plastic scale Matthew holds against his teeth to assess the success of his whitening efforts. ...
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IKE’S is a large, hard-edged room, formerly a firehouse, now a restaurant selling a version of fifties prosperity and complacency. The smiling face of the eponymous Ike is everywhere, in black-and-white photos and framed magazine covers on the walls, interspersed with artifacts of the era, ...
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FOR SOME TIME NOW, Matthew has had the mistaken idea that margaritas don’t make him drunk. That is why, sitting at the bar at Ike’s, he’s getting drunk on margaritas. He began the evening at the bar at the Alley View, where he had a frozen Bombay and, since it tasted so good, another. Now, sitting here, he’s trying to decide, first, whether or not to review this place, and second, whether or not to continue living. ...
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The entire cast and crew of the Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy will be vacationing “in an undisclosed location” from Saturday, July 29, 2023, through Sunday, August 6, 2023. The serialization will resume on Monday, August 7, 2023.
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The entire cast and crew of the Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy will be vacationing “in an undisclosed location” from Saturday, July 29, 2023, through Sunday, August 6, 2023. The serialization will resume on Monday, August 7, 2023.
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The entire cast and crew of the Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy will be vacationing “in an undisclosed location” from Saturday, July 29, 2023, through Sunday, August 6, 2023. The serialization will resume on Monday, August 7, 2023.
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The entire cast and crew of the Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy will be vacationing “in an undisclosed location” from Saturday, July 29, 2023, through Sunday, August 6, 2023. The serialization will resume on Monday, August 7, 2023.
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The entire cast and crew of the Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy will be vacationing “in an undisclosed location” from Saturday, July 29, 2023, through Sunday, August 6, 2023. The serialization will resume on Monday, August 7, 2023.
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Once upon a time, we knew a couple who seemed quite content in their life together, but read on. After fourteen years of marriage, they began a little game, something the husband discovered in his idle reading. The Romans, he learned, had a custom of marking each day as happy or unhappy by dropping a white or black pebble into an urn. To the husband this sounded like fun. ...
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THEY REACH THE CORNER in silence. Then Liz stops and turns on Matthew a look he takes for sadness. Actually it’s the look that people employ when they have to convey bad news to someone toward whom they feel bottomless enmity. “Listen, Matthew,” she says, “I guess I’m kind of on edge. You know? It’s an unsettling period for me. Exciting, but unsettling. I’m a nervous wreck, to tell you the truth. And then seeing you again — and everything.” ...
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Liz sits in silence, fuming. She looks around the room. Matthew sees defiance in her eyes, as if she were daring anyone to look at her, to register any acknowledgment of the little scene. In the mirror, he scans the room himself, to see if anyone is registering any acknowledgment. ...
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A waiter is suddenly at their side. “One of you wanted an order of bouillabaisse stir-fry?” he asks. “Oh, God. What jerks,” says Liz. Matthew has the fleeting impression that she’s about to cry. “We did order it, but I canceled the order,” says Matthew. The waiter stands looking at him with no expression. ...
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“I asked her for a spoon, and I told her to bring you some of this bouillabaisse stir-fry.” “Oh, you didn’t.” “I did. You’ll like it. You don’t like that stuff. Why should you have to eat something you don’t like?” ...
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FOR A WHILE Liz and Matthew sit in silence and eat. Matthew is eating something really delicious, a concoction of the chef, identified on the menu as “bouillabaisse stir-fry over angel-hair pasta.” He ordered it partly out of incredulity, but he’s finding, to his surprise, that the chef swims very well. ...
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MATTHEW LOOKS down at his glass. The drink does not quite cover the olive. “I should have ordered another martini,” he says. “Here, have some of mine,” says Liz. “I don’t want some of yours. I want one of my own. A full one.” “You know something, Matthew? You drink too much.” “This from the woman who passed out on my couch a couple of weeks ago?”...
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She glances around the room, to give the appearance that she has no intention of speaking further, but her glance falls on the angular beauty and she discovers that the angular beauty is looking at her, so she turns back to Matthew in self-defense. She finds him staring at her. He’s wondering whether he ought to tell her that she doesn’t play the game of waiting to be asked what she means as well as she used to when she smoked. ...
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Two fire trucks pull up outside the restaurant, lights flashing, but without sirens. Red light sweeps the length of the restaurant, again, again, again. The waif leads a beautiful young couple into the dining room. The woman is slender and extraordinary. She has the kind of cool beauty that has always attracted and intimidated Matthew. ...
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“This place hasn’t changed at all,” says Liz, looking into the mirror behind Matthew, using it to look around the room, then twisting on her chair to look into the lounge. “Not at all.” “I was so late getting here,” says Matthew, “I was sure you’d already be here.” “Oh, I’m sorry, Matthew. You’ve been waiting here. I’m sorry. I lost track of the time.” She puts her hand on his arm. “I found a condo.” ...
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He can’t see the new arrivals the moment they enter, because the door is hidden from him, but he can observe the reactions to their arrivals. Each brings a gust of cold air, and Matthew can see its effect on the people at the bar. As the draft advances, heads turn toward the door. There’s a delay, a rippling effect, like the effect of a breeze on a field of grass or, Matthew supposes, on a field of wheat, though he has never seen a field of wheat. ...
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He wants to order a drink, but he isn’t certain who might take his order. He suspects that the young woman walking past his table is connected with the restaurant in some official capacity, since she has been walking around since he arrived, but she isn’t dressed as a waiter, and she seems to have no idea what she should be doing with herself beyond walking around. ...
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“HI,” he says when he steps through the door, full of secret self-satisfaction. “I made a reservation for seven o’clock, but I’m afraid I got delayed.” He doesn’t sound like himself, and he likes it that way. ...
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He chooses a gray shirt with a spread collar, a gray silk tie embellished with what look like brush strokes of white here and there, as if applied by a hasty, impassioned artist. [. . .] He wears a charcoal-gray suit that fits him better than any other he owns, [. . .] I look good. I really do look good, and none of what I have on is what I would have worn when Liz lived with me, [. . .]
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He takes his martini into the bathroom. He shaves. It is, he tells himself, one of those days when his face seems to be aging well. The wrinkles around his eyes make it look as if he laughs a lot. His jaw has become stronger over the years, he thinks. His hairline has receded suddenly, in the last year or so, after having held steady for a decade and a half, following an early recession in his twenties, ...
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MATTHEW BUYS a bottle of champagne, in the hope that after dinner he’ll be able to get Liz to come home with him to drink it. He puts it into the refrigerator and takes two glasses from the cabinet and puts them on a table in his living room. Then he decides that the effect seems too calculated, shows his eagerness too much. ...
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It is Matthew’s habit at the beach to take long walks and think. The sound of the waves rolling in, the rhythm of that sound, makes him feel less confused. Perhaps it merely muffles or regularizes the sound of confusion, but the effect is the same: he can let his thoughts roam, sometimes quite productively, ...
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MATTHEW IS IN HIS OFFICE, standing at his window, bouncing on the balls of his feet, full of the success of his brick maker. He presented it this afternoon, and it was accepted for production, unanimously, with applause. He had, he allows himself to realize now, been fearing the presentation for weeks. ...
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Let’s try to forget the food and return to the operetta, the rivista frìvola, shall we? If you have been paying close attention, you will already have guessed that when entrées are served, diners are treated to the old synchronized-lifting-of-silver-plated-hemispherical-lids-from-dishes routine, second cousin to that most bizarre of sports, synchronized swimming. ...
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Ordinarily, we hate to dwell on, or even bring up, the sorry work of age upon our fellow diners, but we find that we must in sketching this scene for you, for the diners come in all ages and stages, and the differences count. At many tables are men whose pink pates show beneath longish strands of white hair, whose ruffs of fat hang over their white collars, dining in silence with women who scowl, who seem always to have scowled. ...
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Are we going soft? We have thought about this review for hours, and though we know what we ought to do, we cannot quite bring ourselves to do it. We ought to mock the vaulting pretentiousness of Café Zurich, its burlesque theatricality, the grotesque vulgarity of its patrons, and so on, and so on, and so on, but ...
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HE BEGINS WALKING back, stops across the street, hesitates, crosses the street, nearly rings the bell, but thinks about the possibility of Belinda’s returning, and the possibility that Leila would reject him anyway, that as far as it went was as far as she was willing to have it go, and he turns around and walks home. ...
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HE WALKS down the steps and across the sidewalk to the waiting cab, still savoring his nobility. He’s working awfully hard at ignoring BW, but he can hear his voice in the back of his mind, telling him that he has been a sap, that he had a ripe peach in his apartment, his for the plucking, virtually asking to be plucked, and he has put her in a cab and taken her home so that he can feel like a worthy character in a sentimental old movie. You sap! ...
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ON THE WAY to Belinda’s — Leila’s, that is — riding in the cab, Matthew hardly knows what to think of what he’s doing. I’m doing the right thing. The stupid thing, maybe. But I’m protecting myself. ...
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She lets her head rest on his shoulder, she puts both arms around him, down around the small of his back, and she presses her pelvis against him, but it’ s not passionate. It’s dancing. Matthew is so excited that it’s beginning to get embarrassing, but she’s just dancing. He presses her against him. Not really. I’m just squeezing her a little, just a little. He can’t detect any response. ...
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WHILE MATTHEW is changing, Leila wanders around the living room, reads his graffiti, inspects the demolition of his wall. When Matthew returns, he stands a moment in silence, watching her. I don’t know what to do with her. ...
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“WELL, that was a riot,” says Matthew once they’re inside his apartment. He sniffs. The odor is back. Damn. It’s in its rotten-banana phase. And there’s some other smell, too. What is that? He takes Leila’s coat, watching her nose. He sees nothing to suggest that she smells anything that offends her, no flaring of the nostrils, no wrinkling. “I’m going to make myself a drink,” he says. “Would you like something?” ...
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THEY ARE NOT FAR from Matthew’s apartment, driving along Huntington Avenue, when Matthew remembers the white mink. Thank God I didn’t leave it on the living room floor. . ..
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THEY RISE from their seats. Matthew’s astonished to find that he doesn’t feel in the least embarrassed. He doesn’t feel like a middle-aged man hiding a stain on his pants; he feels like a young scamp running out on the check. He laughs, in spite of everything, possibly at himself. The man he usually thinks of himself as would be mortified, but right now that man seems like a fool. Matthew even dares to draw attention to his predicament, tapping the menu against his front while he waits for Leila to slide out from behind the table, flaunting his coolness in the face of adversity. ...
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THE BLONDE on Matthew’s right scoots along the banquette as well as anyone can scoot on velvet. She leans toward Matthew and touches his arm. “She’s gorgeous,” she says. Matthew’s annoyed. This is a trespass, a violation of the notion of personal space, which may be the essential civilizing principle of modern urban life. ...
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“I’LL GO GET some paper towels in the ladies’ room,” says Leila. “Where do you suppose it is?” “Off the foyer? Just ask the maître d’.” “He scares me to death.” ...
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THE GRAY-HAIRED BUSMAN removes their soup bowls, and two waiters arrive. One delivers their salads and operates an enormous pepper grinder over them. The other places a small casket beside each plate. They bow and scrape away. “What’s that?” asks Leila. “It looks like a coffin,” says Matthew. . ..
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THEIR SOUP is served. “Mmm, this is delicious,” says Leila, sampling hers. Matthew hears the relief in her voice and realizes that she must have been worried that everything she would be required to eat in order to play sophisticate would be yucky. So young, so young, he thinks. In the context of her life, this is an adventure. She’s vulnerable here. She’s put herself in my hands. I’m her guide through unknown territory. She trusts me. ...
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“IF YOU LEAN IN CLOSE, I’ll tell you about the couple right next to us,” says Matthew. She leans not merely close to, but against him. Certainly it can’t have occurred to him, before he asked her to lean closer, that if she leaned this close, with their heads bowed and nearly touching, he would be looking right down the front of her dress. ...
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“WHAT DO YOU THINK of our fellow diners?” he asks when the waiter has gone. “I don’t know. I’m afraid to look. I don’t want to get caught.” “Oh! You have to know how. Here, turn a little so that you’re facing toward me more. . . .”
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LEILA looks into the menu she has been given. Open, it hides her from the other diners completely. Matthew could reach his hand down the front of her dress, run his hand over her breast, caress her, and no one would be able to tell. He tries to tell himself that he’s not actually thinking of trying to fondle Leila behind her menu. I’m not thinking about that. ...
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ON THE WAY to the table, Matthew takes a professional gander at the room, without being obvious about it, and notes that many tables are empty. Well, they’re probably reserved, he tells himself. Whether they have been reserved or not, there is no reason why you and Leila could not have been given one, BW insists. You were parked in the lounge, and you fell for it, permitted it. ...
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TOO MUCH TIME passes. Matthew begins to wonder why their table isn’t ready. He excuses himself and goes to speak to the maître d’. The maître d’ isn’t at his station. From somewhere nearby, Matthew hears an animated conversation, in hushed, tense tones. In the mirrors that line the room, he sees two men in an alcove to his left, lit by the glowing light of a cigarette machine, kept discreetly out of sight behind a grove of potted ficus trees. He can see only the backs of their heads, but he’s sure one is the maître d’, who seems to be trying to calm one of the waiters. ...
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Matthew turns toward Leila and she toward him, and both try not to giggle. “Do you have an ID or anything?” Matthew whispers. “No,” she says. “I never even thought of it. I probably could have gotten one. Are they going to ask for it?” “I haven’t the faintest idea,” says Matthew. “I don’t usually go out with underage women.” ...
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AT CAFÉ ZURICH they sweep through the revolving door and into the foyer, and the bowing and scraping begin almost at once. Showtime, says the voice of BW. ...
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ON FRIDAY, Matthew buys the white mink coat. In the evening, before leaving home, he opens the box, removes the coat, spreads it on the living room rug, fur side up, and considers the effect. Too — I don’t know — cold, somehow, he thinks. It seems to say the wrong thing. “Hooker,” for instance, says the voice of BW. ...
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Chapter 5 Café Zurich MATTHEW IS PROUD that he didn’t throw himself at Liz’s feet and beg her to come back. He feels that he can be patient now, wait for her to come to him, and now he believes that, eventually, she will come. I wouldn’t have been so — cool before, he tells himself. I’ve really changed. ...
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The food? Possibly. Most of what we eat here is stew of one sort or another, and that’s fine with us. Stew is the international dish of comfort and consolation.
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Superior Indian Cookery
Let us explore together this question: why are people at a certain stage of life — when they begin to feel like weary rowers who have gone too far, forgotten where they were going and why it was supposed to be worth the trip, when they begin to drift and mope and regret having departed the shore — drawn to ethnic restaurants? ...
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MATTHEW TIPTOES into the living room with a pillow for Liz. He slips it under her head. For a moment he stands beside the couch, looking at her. He thinks of caressing her while she sleeps, then feels ashamed of the thought and goes to bed. ...
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It happens this way. Belinda snaps the light off, turns toward Matthew. There’s fatigue in her eyes and a wobble in her walk. She puts her finger to her lips. On her way to Matthew’s side, she seems to lose her balance a couple of times. She squats beside his chair and has to grab it to steady herself. “I’d better go,” she says. ...
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HERE IS WHAT Matthew would like to have happen now. Belinda snaps the light off, turns toward Matthew. There’s mischief in her eyes and a wobble in her walk. She puts her finger to her lips. On her way to Matthew’s side, she seems about to lose her balance a couple of times. She giggles soundlessly, holding her finger to her lips. Matthew smiles. He’s intrigued. ...
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“THIS ISN’T at all what I would have expected, Matthew!” Liz exclaims, exactly as Matthew had hoped she would. He brought her into the living room in the dark. Under these conditions, the place never fails to impress a visitor. There’s so much glass that one seems to be floating, and the manifold illumination of the city, uneven and intriguing, picks out details at random and stipples the chrome and glass with color. ...
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ACROSS FROM the Public Garden, outside the Katherine Gibbs Secretarial School, they pass a young man leaning against an iron fence, sobbing like a child. He stands with his arm against the fence, resting his head on his arm, and sobs. ...
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“GOOD-BYE,” says Liz as they pass the hockey players. “It’s great to see you having such a good time.” One of them rises immediately. “Please to sit down,” he says, stepping aside from his chair unsteadily and gesticulating elaborately. “Oh, no, no. We have to go,” says Liz. “Good-bye. Good-bye. Do svedanya.” “Oh, no. Please don’t say ‘do svedanya,’ krasivaya zhenshchina.” “Da — krasivaya,” says another. “No ona tebe v materi godit’sa.”
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ONE OF THE WOMEN from the academic group comes to their table, holding two dishes of food. She’s a large woman, wearing layers of clothes, dressed sensibly for a hike in the White Mountains. “Would you like some of this food?” she asks. Matthew has been expecting her. He has seen her moving around the room, trying to give the group’s surplus food away. ...
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“DO YOU KNOW where the ladies’ room is?” asks Belinda. Liz looks at Matthew immediately, and they smile but somehow keep from laughing. A warmth spreads across Matthew’s back, through his stomach, and into his scrotum; it’s the physical manifestation of happy memories. He and Liz have laughed about the bathroom here many times, on many happy visits. ...
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THEIR FOOD ARRIVES, and they fall to with gusto. They’ve reached that point of intoxication when the best object of drinking has been achieved: their inhibitions have been lowered, their tongues have been loosened, a warm well-being has suffused them, a puckishness inhabits them. ...
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THE GRANDFATHER arrives to pour water for them. He has the same bemused look that Matthew remembers. On nights when the restaurant was quiet, nearly empty, he seemed puzzled, as if pondering the mysterious behavior of his absent customers. Where might they be on this night if they are not in my restaurant? What can they be up to? What are they doing that is keeping them away from us? ...
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“Could I please have some water,” calls the man in the nylon shorts without looking up from his work on the papers. Liz and Belinda respond by giggling like children at a family gathering, convulsed by the bizarre behavior of their intoxicated elders. Matthew sits upright and says, “Shhhh.” A gust of fear has disturbed his fun. ...
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Matthew has a twinkle in his eye. He sips his tequila. “I think he’s not just a nut,” he says. “I think he is a very singular nut.” He pauses and turns the twinkle toward Belinda, enjoying the idea that he and Belinda know something that Liz doesn’t. ...
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THE RESTAURANT is tiny and entirely below ground level. At the foot of the stairs is a cubicle for the cashier, a waist-high enclosure, and opposite it is an opening through which a narrow snapshot of the kitchen is visible. Matthew can’t help smiling when he passes this opening and hears the voices coming from it, striking exactly the note of frantic urgency that he remembers, a tone that used to make him wonder whether he and Liz visited only on nights of crisis. ...
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JUST BEHIND the fancy couple is a big man in an enormous parka, unzipped, his barrel chest bulging from it. On the wall behind him is a board on which the day’s specials are listed and described in several colors of chalk. The big man is speaking animatedly, gesticulating broadly, putting his whole body into an address to the others in his party. When he makes a point, he rises on his toes and bounces, and with each point he erases a little more chalk. ...
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PADDED with winter coats, most of the people lined up along the staircase that twists down into the restaurant occupy about twice their summer volume, but first in line is a lightly dressed couple of a type that Matthew and Liz used to snicker at. “Colonials to your left,” Matthew mutters. ...
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The Black Hole has no liquor license. He and Liz always used to stop at the liquor store across the street and get some beer before they went in. Now Matthew stops there, intending to get some beer, just as he would have in the good old days, but when he steps across the threshold the rush of old familiar feelings is strong, and it makes him realize that by bringing beer he’s likely to seem to be trying to re-create an evening from the past, to recapture something. ...
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SO he’s going to have dinner with Liz at the Black Hole. Showering, dressing, getting ready — it all feels comfortingly familiar. For a while, before they moved out of the city to Lincoln, he and Liz must have eaten at the Black Hole once a week. It was a time when they were eating out nearly every evening because they were both so busy. ...
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“Mrs. Barber?” says his secretary. There is a question in her voice, and Matthew focuses on that detail. She’s new, and she has never had any contact with Liz. Matthew can imagine her disbelief when the woman on the phone claimed to be his wife, a wife she never knew existed. “The former Mrs. Barber,” he says, in just the way he would have corrected any other small error, ...
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Chapter 4 Superior Indian Cookery MATTHEW IS AT WORK, in his office, two floors from the top of a two-year-old building in the section of Boston that was once the garment district and is now the financial district, where construction has been booming for the last several years. ...
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There are no chianti bottles here, but if there were, they would be broken, deliberately, just so. There are definitely no checkered tablecloths, but if there were, they would be artificially stained. We are dealing with a new order here, for new citizens of a new world, with inverted notions of trash and taste. . . .
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Dolce Far Niente Are we the last to notice the assimilationist trend among ethnic restaurants? In the days of our youth, we could tell one from another. Crystal, white linen, supercilious maître d’ — it’s French, naturellement; red and gold — Chinese; downstairs — Indian; and so on. ...
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WHEN BELINDA has gone, and Matthew’s in bed, he lies awake, wondering what he ought to do. Should he buy the coat for her? He could have it delivered to her. It could arrive with a clever note. “Because I loved you in it and loved you on it.” Not bad. . . .
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He wonders if she’s sick. She doesn’t drink cognac well. “In here,” she calls, from the bedroom. Only the lights of the city light the room. Belinda has spread the coat out on the bed, fur side up, and she’s lying on it, naked, stretching, enjoying the fur against her skin, almost writhing. For her the foreplay has already begun.
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“We weren’t starving,” says Belinda, “I know that. I know how much worse off everyone else in the world was or is or whatever. I know that life was basically pretty comfortable, but for a girl, then anyway, for a girl to go to school in clothes that everybody recognized weren’t hers — I mean, I knew they were looking at me, and they knew I was wearing what Elaine Toomey wore last year. It was horrible.” ...
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THE HOLE in Matthew’s living room wall now reaches from the window at the far end of the room to the window near his audio equipment, nearly half the length of the room. There is a distinct downward thermal gradient in its vicinity. Belinda hasn’t taken her coat off; she snuggles into it while she squats to inspect the hole. “Any leads?” she asks. “None,” says Matthew. “I was out here this morning for nearly an hour, sitting on the floor, hoping I’d smell it while the sun was coming up. I had a theory that the sun warms the cavity here and releases — well, whatever it is. Guess what? Not a thing. All I could smell was coffee. I’m sure the guys working on this think I’m nuts, and this morning I almost agreed with them.” ...
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“I haven’t seen a single cab,” says Matthew. “Maybe if we walk a bit.” “We could take the T.” “In that coat? Besides, I’m just not a subway person.” “Oh, come on. There’s a stop up here.” ...
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ON THE WAY OUT, Belinda pauses at the door, throws the collar of the coat up, spins around to look at the room again, the details of artificial decay, the peeling plaster, the water stain, the tipsy safe, the open wall, and says in her best Bette Davis voice, “What a dump!” Matthew thinks he may be falling in love.
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“Harold, you know what?” says Belinda. “What?” asks Harold. “Today is the official celebration of my birthday, and I would rather not hear the rest of this story.” “Why?” “Because it is not going to be a happy story, Harold, and as the birthday girl I would like to hear only happy stories today.” ...
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THE FOOD is absolutely wonderful. It ought to be enough to make the evening magnificent, and for a while it is. Eating is such a great pleasure that the four of them speak very little, and when they do they talk only about the food. Were it not for the persistent whining of the boy at the next table, they might be in paradise. When they have finished they lean back, contented, regarding one another with the generosity of spirit a full stomach brings. ...
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“Shall I take your orders?” he asks. “Let me ask you something first,” says Harold. He twitches on his seat with the pleasurable anticipation of being amusing. “Does the cuisine match the decor?” ...
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“What do you do, Harold?” Belinda asks, still the good sport. “Oh, nothing much,” Harold says. Belinda smiles, but she’s thinking, “Nothing much?” Why do you say that? Why are you acting like this? ...
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“We don’t eat out that often,” says Gwen, “but Harold keeps track of restaurants. He reads the reviews and so on. But I don’t think you’ve come across many places where someone would spend a hundred and forty dollars on lunch, have you?” ...
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Belinda is hurt. She has been working on Picture Frame for months, and she’s proud of having elevated it above the level of a game. She’s annoyed with herself for not having done it justice, and she can feel in her throat the possibility of tears if she tries to speak. She would be grateful if Matthew would say something, do something, anything to end this torture, change the subject, rescue her. He doesn’t, but the waiter does. ...
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“Why the name?” asks Harold. “Picture Frame?” “Ah!” says Belinda. “Well, when you start playing — ‘playing’ — I don’t believe I said that. Maybe it is a game. Anyway — when you start, you think you’re in someone’s apartment, and you work your way around in it, checking things out — ...
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“Oh, I know,” says Matthew. “I’ve been — well — playing something interesting.” He smiles at Belinda. “Playing?” “On my computer.” “A computer game,” says Harold. “Not a game,” says Belinda. “Not a game,” says Harold, shaking his head at Gwen as if she had mistaken whatever it is for a game. . ..
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“So how are things with Mr. Matthew?” asks Harold. “I haven’t seen much of you for the last couple of weeks.” Matthew is almost certain that he had an interminable conversation with Harold only a couple of days ago, but perhaps it was in fact weeks ago. “Have you been up to anything interesting?” Matthew can hear in his tone the expectation that Matthew will say no, just as he used to hear it in Vic’s. “No!” shouts the boy at the next table. Our quartet glances over there. ...
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DRINK ORDERS are placed, and Gwen makes a point of not ordering alcohol. “Nothing with alcohol for me,” she says. “Bring me anything, as long as it doesn’t have alcohol.” “Perrier, Ramlösa, Evian, Pellegrino, Poland Spring, Saratoga, Lethe?” asks the waiter. Belinda catches it, and only Belinda. She looks at the waiter and shows a surprised smile. He grins. ...
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A busgirl arrives at the table and deposits an earthenware vase, in which there is an arrangement of a single calla lily and a number of lengths of a skinny, twisted bread of a kind unfamiliar to all but one of our happy quartet. At the table next to them, the boy who spilled his water is now banging one of these loaves on the table. ...
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“WE’VE INVITED YOU AND BELINDA to join us,” says Harold when Matthew returns. He’s smiling, trying to look relaxed, and trying, really trying, not to look down the front of Belinda’s dress. He’s losing both struggles, Matthew notices. Droplets of sweat dot his upper lip, and his eyes keep darting to Belinda’s cleavage. ...
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THE RESTAURANT is in a building that used to be a service station for the trucks that were kept here. It seems a small and frightened thing, cowering in the presence of the towering. It has been decorated, inside and out, at great expense, to look like a ruin. ...
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DOLCE FAR NIENTE is in the area where Belinda works, an area of spanking-new office buildings housing young companies engaged in microelectronics, computer software, genetic engineering, and any number of things involving lasers, many of which are offensive. Matthew looks around. “This whole section of town is all so new,” he says. “What was here before — I mean, before all this?” ...
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“WHAT’S THE SURPRISE?” Matthew asks. Leila only winks. She’s not going to say anything about it. “Try that drink,” she says. “See if it’s any good.” He tries it. She’s been mixing martinis for him nearly half her life, ever since her father taught her how, and Matthew’s never had the heart to tell her that she uses too much vermouth. “Excellent!” he says. ...
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TRUDGING back up the steps to the house, Matthew wonders whether those radio quizzes still exist. He hasn’t heard one in years. Perhaps he would if he listened to talk radio or rock ’n’ roll stations, but he doesn’t listen to that sort of thing much anymore. ...
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He says, “It really is an unmistakable sound, the mixing of a martini. When I was a kid, radio stations used to have these sound quizzes. They’d play a sound, and if they called you up, you’d try to guess what it was. A toaster popping up, something like that. ...
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Chapter 3 Dolce Far Niente BECAUSE Belinda’s birthday fell in the middle of the week, when she and Matthew were both too busy to celebrate it, they agreed to celebrate this evening, Friday. When Matthew arrives at Belinda’s, he asks his cabdriver to wait and dashes up the stairs. The toothsome Leila lets him in. ...
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Flynn’s Olde Boston Eating & Drinking Establishment Sometimes, when a bit of undigested mutton awakens us at night, we lie in the dark, musing. You know the sort of thing. What is the point of life? What has become of our old pals? Do any olde Bostonians ever go to Flynn’s? Recently, we decided that we had to know the answer to at least one of these questions, so ...
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BY THE TIME Matthew has brought out cognac and liqueurs, he has the feeling that each of them has come to the independent conclusion that coming here was a bad idea, but none of them wants the evening to end on a wrong note, so they are all making a big effort to try to enjoy it. ...
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THEY MAKE THEIR WAY outside in four styles of wobble; only Jack walks with certain steps. The fierce wind, funneled by buildings, makes them hug themselves. Cabs are waiting at the door, since Flynn’s is a perfect spot to find fares to downtown hotels. Jack steps up to the first one, opens the door, motions Effie and Richard in, and calls out to Belinda and Matthew, “Come on. We can all fit. Belinda can sit on my lap. Come on, come on.” ...
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MATTHEW has had far, far too much to drink. The wise thing, as soon as Jack finishes his lobster, would be to say his good-nights, get into a cab with Belinda, and head for home, but he’s a drink or two beyond reason, and he seems to be having such fun, they all seem to be having such fun, they all seem so clever and talented, that Matthew doesn’t want the group to break up. He wants them to come back to his place. ...
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“And were you involved in the development after that?” asks Jack. “A little.” “A little!” Matthew is out of control. “She organized all the field testing. She really guided the development of the whole product. Don’t be so modest, Belinda.” ...
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RICHARD ASKS, “What do you do, Belinda?” Belinda says, “I work for Zizyph. Zizyph Software? It’s a computer software company.” She bursts out laughing. “Of course it’s a computer software company. That’s why it’s called Zizyph Software.” She laughs again and shrugs and looks at Matthew, and he realizes again how nervous she must be, meeting his pals. ...
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Matthew raises an eyebrow, grins his half grin. “I told you, I have to save some things for the authorized biography. But get this. One of the other kids — You won’t believe this. He wired home for money on the spot, from this whorehouse, and spent the next four days there. At Irma’s. I swear to God. ...
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At that time, Matthew wanted to be a theoretical physicist, but after a year in college he discovered that, although he probably understood physics better than all but a few thousand human beings, he would never enter the small circle of people who really understood, understood well enough to advance the science. ...
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“WHAT’S NEW in toys, Matthew?” asks Jack. Matthew wonders why that question must always sound like a joke. He’s sure Jack isn’t trying to be funny, doesn’t mean to seem to be trivializing Matthew’s work. He couldn’t mean to do that. Matthew feels quite certain that Jack has as much respect for Matthew as he has for himself. He recognizes in Matthew someone who has made the same compromises he has, someone who has ideals, or at least had ideals, but who has, partly by decision, partly by accident, partly because of need, stepped to one side of them — hasn’t exactly walked away from them, just stepped to one side of them. ...
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MATTHEW’S ATTENTION is drawn again to Grandma and the group of ten. They’re getting a little rowdy. He wonders how long they spent in the lounge. Grandma’s clutching a drink of some kind, with a napkin wrapped around the bottom of the glass. The others seem to be urging her to order a lobster regardless of the expense. ...
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EFFIE GOES ON, getting worked up. She sounds just the way she used to sound twenty years ago, when at some point in any discussion she was sure to begin talking about injustice of whatever kind she currently found most outrageous. Outrage was always there, the way a grudge is always there for some people, an undercurrent to every other emotion, even happiness, even lust. ...
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“Some of them just spend it. So what? It goes right back into the economy, doesn’t it? Some of them just stick it into the bank. So what? It’s available for loans. But some of them use it to start small businesses. Somebody in a ghetto where banks don’t want to open up starts a small bank. You know, on the scale of a check-cashing service, something like that. . . .”
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“EFFIE,” says Matthew, so loudly that he surprises himself and everyone else; they all turn toward him suddenly. “Matthew!” says Effie, just as loudly as he did. “What’s happening with that woman who spent her rent money for tuition?” “Oh. Didi.” She looks at Jack and at Belinda and says, by way of explanation, “I’m defending a woman who was being evicted from a housing project because she hadn’t paid her rent for two months. ...
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“This is the whole concept,” says Jack. “Anderson’s does no national advertising. It’s all regional, and it’s all based on the idea that most people think they’d be happier someplace else. If we shoot here, in Flynn’s, you can be sure the place will be full of young beautiful types, . . .”
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AT THE TABLE, they are greeted by a waitress who makes a show of bustling around, to establish right off the bat that she’s responsible for the feeding of dozens of people, not just this paltry sampling of humanity, and that she will not tolerate long periods of pondering and hesitation. A breezy “Hi, folks. Welcome to Flynn’s. All set for drinks here?” ...
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THE SECTION of Flynn’s in which people eat, as opposed to the part in which they drink and wait, is huge and rambling. There are several rooms, added one by one as the restaurant has grown over the last two hundred something years, linked by passages that turn at unpredictable places and rise and fall wherever the growing Flynn’s burst through the wall of an adjoining building. ...
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THE LOUNGE is getting more and more crowded. Matthew is amazed at how dark it is here. Everything is dark — the wood, the upholstery, the lighting. Most restaurants aren’t this dark anymore, he thinks. Does it have something to do with historical authenticity? More likely, he seems to hear BW say, they are afraid that in bright light we would notice the authentic antique grime. ...
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THE CONVERSATION splits, as conversations in foursomes often do, and Matthew finds himself talking to Richard. He never has much to say to Richard. He asks about the children, because he thinks people who have children are flattered to be asked about them, since they’re investing their hopes in their kids, but then the thought strikes him that perhaps this isn’t really so. ...
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“ALL SET for drinks here?” It’s the cocktail waitress again. She wears a tight little satin skirt, and Matthew decides, after a quick review of his mental notes, that she has the most beautifully shaped bottom he’s seen in weeks. ...
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“Matthew!” Effie calls when she sees him, as if she were at a high school picnic. “Hey, you look terrific. How’s the war-toy business?” This is one of their jokes; it’s the first thing she says when she sees him once a year or so. “Excellent!” he says. He’s ready for her. . ..
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THURSDAY EVENING, at eight o’clock, Matthew and Belinda are waiting in the lounge at Flynn’s. Matthew’s nervous. So is Belinda. She has never met any of the people she’s about to spend the evening with. In fact, she has never met any of Matthew’s friends; that is, she has never met anyone who is a friend of his alone, not a friend of Liz and Matthew, that former couple. ...
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Effie. Ah, Effie. Effie may have been a terrible teacher by every objective measure, too full of pep for her own good, so eager to give what she knew that it spilled out of her as if through a burst dike, making her seem disorganized, confused, and ill prepared in front of a class, but Matthew and Jack decided that she was the best natural teacher of all of them, and since she was also pretty in a flyaway sort of way, they took to her at once. ...
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He goes into the den to check the messages on his answering machine. The first is a nonmessage, or an antimessage: the machine’s go-ahead-and-talk whine, a silent hesitation at the other end of the line, the clunking of a handset hanging up, the dial tone, the whine again. Matthew surmises that this was the burglars calling to see if he was at home. ...
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There is no concierge on duty when Matthew reaches his building. He sets the bags down, gets his key out, opens the door. A sign on the desk reads “Concierge on Break.” This sign appears several times a day, whenever a concierge abandons the post. To Matthew, it seems an invitation to burglars. ...
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Matthew has been collecting the works of the Neat Graffitist for some time, memorizing them in the field and writing them down when he gets home. (He wouldn’t like to be seen copying them on the street.) His current theory is that the Graffitist is someone well educated who snapped at a period of high stress ...
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Chapter 2 Flynn’s Olde Boston Eating and Drinking Establishment MATTHEW’S TOTING a bag of groceries in each hand, those bags made of thin, improbably strong plastic. He carries groceries home successfully in these bags several times a week, but he always expects them to break. ...
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The Alley View Grill We really enjoy the Alley View Grill. Honest. We do. Whenever we get a late-night craving for goat-cheese pizza or a veal-and-pancetta burger with some tomato coulis, it’s almost the first place that comes to mind. ...
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HE HAS A DREAM in which he and Belinda are picnicking in a pretty spot, in a woods somewhere, their blanket spread out in a mossy glade, a brook flowing nearby, just the sort of idyllic spot one always hopes to find for a picnic. In the glade the sun is shining bright and strong, but woods and shadows surround them. Then, all at once, ...
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A WEEK AFTER Liz left, Matthew decided that he might as well go out and try his luck at finding solace between the legs of other women; at once the question arose, at first only hypothetically, whether he ought to use condoms. He was, at that time, afraid of getting herpes, but it seemed awfully timid to be afraid of herpes, and he didn’t want to admit to the fear. ...
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WHEN THEY ARRIVE at Matthew’s, Belinda goes into the living room, and Matthew goes into the kitchen to fix himself a drink. Belinda rarely wants one after dinner. “Matthew, what on earth happened here?” she asks. ...
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MATTHEW AND BELINDA leave the restaurant, walk to the end of the alley, and turn toward Matthew’s apartment, which is only two blocks away. Matthew says, “The most incredible thing happened when I was coming out of the men’s room. ...
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Matthew samples Belinda’s pork, the sauce, the aïoli (it is aïoli), the vegetables, the rice. While they’re having coffee, he consolidates his mental notes as he sometimes does, by reciting to Belinda important judgments he hopes to include in BW’s review. This postprandial draft is a risky business. ...
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BELINDA RETURNS to the table, the waiter arrives with the drinks, and, in a moment, the redhead returns to her table. All this traffic in a small space occasions some confusion, jostling, stepping aside, shuffling of chairs, asking to be excused. The waiter stands to one side, holding his tray, aloof from the fray, frowning through a thin smile. Belinda seems upset. She’s trying to smile, but her forehead’s furrowed, and her smile slips, now and then, down to a frown. ...
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WHEN BELINDA arrives in the ladies’ room, the redhead is standing at the sink, wiping her face with a wet paper towel, snarling at her reflection in the mirror and saying “B*h!” and “Ct!” Belinda scoots into a stall, locks the door, and pees as quietly as she can. . ..
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SEATED at the table to Matthew’s left is a trio of young women. One is very young, a girl, still in her teens, delicate and lovely, dressed in a boxy black dress. She has pale, pale blond hair, almost white, long, smooth, and even, with a black velvet bow in it. ...
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BELINDA’S STUDYING her menu. Matthew’s giving the appearance of studying his, but actually he’s studying the room. Since every dish on the menu is, according to Boston Biweekly dogma, supposed to be an equally good representative of the quality of the food, what he orders is never terribly important to the review. It’s more important that he be aware of the context. ...
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HE COULD HAVE said this: “When I was eleven or twelve, a rumor was spread about me, in school, that I never took a bath or a shower, never bathed. But rumor isn’t really the right word. Not everyone believes a rumor. Everyone believed this. ...
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“YOUR TABLE is ready, sir,” says the wrestler. “Good. Fine. Good,” says Matthew. As they walk off he mutters to Belinda, “Is it just my imagination, or has sir become a sarcastic remark?” ...
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THOUGH THE ROOM IS CROWDED with people who are all gesticulating animatedly, he doesn’t spill a drop in carrying the drinks to the outskirts of the crowd, where Belinda’s standing in front of an arrangement of enormous obscene flowers, bizarre-looking things with penile elements and great leaves shaped like escutcheons of pubic hair. ...
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WHEN HE WAS YOUNG, Matthew developed an affection for the martini well before he ever drank one, an affection that came in part from watching William Powell and Myrna Loy down them in the Thin Man movies and in part from his careful study of Esquire, the text from which he hoped to learn sophistication. The martini seemed to be an essential item among the equipment of a sophisticated adult. ...
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THE ALLEY VIEW GRILL is on an alley. This isn’t Matthew’s first visit; he has already been there for lunch, to look the place over. That’s his usual procedure: visit for lunch to get a general idea of the place and decide whether it’s worth reviewing. If it is, he makes a mental list of things to look for at dinner. No notes. ...
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SNOW has begun to fall, a pretty sight in the warm yellow light that spills from Belinda’s windows. It’s a charming place, two floors of a town house on Marlborough Street, a very desirable location, very pretty in the snow, and it should seem inviting, yet Matthew hesitates before ringing the bell. Why? ...
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OUTSIDE, Matthew sees Robert and his friend walking ahead of him, still talking and waving their arms. A short, heavy woman in a green coat is walking toward them. She looks like a gumdrop. As she approaches them, Matthew sees that she’s saying something, almost shouting. They stop and put their hands on their hips; for a moment, they are a pantomime of homosexual umbrage. The gumdrop woman is really shouting now. They shout back, and the exchange escalates in volume ...
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IN THE LOBBY, one of his neighbors, a man of thirty-five or so, someone he knows only as Robert, is screaming at the girl behind the desk. (This girl is not a full-time professional concierge. She’s a student. In fact, she’s the prettiest of the girls who live down the hall from Matthew.) Robert’s dressed almost entirely in black, including a black fur coat and black-and-white patent-leather saddle shoes. His date is standing behind him, with his arms folded, trying to appear uninterested, but his eyes betray him — they’re afire with the thrill of watching Robert make a scene. ...
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IN THE HALL, when he presses the elevator button nothing happens. He’s not surprised. Among the “world-class luxury amenities” in the building are elevators that haven’t worked right for months. Every morning two representatives of the elevator manufacturer arrive, disable one of the elevators, and begin leafing through an enormous repair manual. ...
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MATTHEW ARRIVES HOME from work in a terrible mood. Christmas is coming, and it makes him nervous, even more nervous than it makes most people, because it’s the time of year when all his ideas are put to the test. He’s vice-president for new product development at Manning & Rafter Toys, where he is sometimes referred to, even to his face, as Vice-President for Sensible Toys. ...
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MATTHEW never takes notes in a restaurant. That’s one of his cardinal rules: Never take notes. He’s worried that if he were seen taking notes he’d be identified as a reviewer, and it’s important to him that he not be identified. He’s also a little worried that if he were identified as a reviewer there would be some kind of scene, a row. ...
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I HADN’T FOUND Matthew, but I had developed a feeling for the kind of life he might be living there in Boston and I think that, as a result, I understood him better. Of course, there was still much more I wanted to know. I wanted to know how he spent his time, day to day, minute to minute. I would stand in my workroom looking out into the fog on the bay and ask myself, “What will become of him? What is he doing right now? ...
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MY BODY-SURFING scare had reminded me of an episode in my childhood friendship with Matthew, one that I would much rather have forgotten. In the following days, he kept popping into my thoughts like an advertising jingle. Almost against my will, I found myself wondering about him, and then trying to construct a likely life for him, based on the boy I had known: a dour little fellow, pale and fretful, convinced that most people are contemptible, that most things will turn out badly. ...
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AND THEN, well, I’ll let May say it: And then, well, Lorna died too. At least neither of them had to go through that dreadful Alzheimer’s business. I mean, what a damned injustice it is for someone who’s been an absolute delight to have to become all sort of baffled. ...
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“WELL,” said Lorna when they had finished. “Well, well, well.” There was a twinkle in her eye, and she hopped up from the table with all of her old energy. On the sideboard was her old papier-mâché duck. She pried the duck apart, and from it she produced the very box that Mark and Margot and Martha had seen in Punta Cachazuda. ...
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Martha was waiting for Mark when he returned. She met him at the door, looking impish. She gave him a hug and the quickest of kisses. She had a Scotch and soda ready for him, she made poached salmon for dinner, and after dinner she made love to him with the reckless passion he had expected from Margot a week earlier. ...
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WITH THE MARRIAGE of Mark and Margot, the trio seemed to have found a solution to their Situation, a conventional, traditional solution. Martha was maid of honor at the wedding, and after Margot and Mark left the reception, they didn’t see Martha for months. Naïvely, simplemindedly, all three imagined that their Situation had been left behind in their crazy past, part of a complicated courtship that they would recall with laughter in the years to come. ...
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When her cancer was diagnosed, Lorna told no one, but something about her manner, a finality in the way she began to handle her affairs, in her visits to old friends, convinced Ella that something was fatally wrong, and because cancer was what Ella feared most, she guessed, correctly, that that was it. ...
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In the years that followed, the Punta Cachazudans tried to confine their secret to the town, to protect their art and industry from an uncertain reception outside, but there was in them that urge to tell, and now and then one or another gave in to it, and the secret spread somewhat, underground, whispered or mumbled. ...
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THE CLASSES were a success from the start, though Herb and Lorna tried to keep them from growing too quickly by swearing the students to secrecy. The secret was a hard one to keep, as hard as the original secret discovery of one’s own sexuality, that secret we’re immediately eager to spill, the biggest and best secret that we ever have held in common, the secret that joins us. ...
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“Hello-wo-wo!” It was Andrea Cogliano. She was tapping at the front door. Lorna went to let her and Frank in, and Herb folded the paper and put it aside. Andrea came out to the patio in the middle of an explanation for their being late. “ — and would you believe we left the house twenty minutes ago?” she was saying. She bent over to give Herb a kiss on the cheek and squeeze his knee. ...
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THE NEXT EVENING was one of those when the sunset would be visible between the other houses, and Herb and Lorna were sitting on their patio, waiting for Frank and Andrea Cogliano to come over to watch the sun set and drink some old-fashioneds. The Coglianos were late, and the sky began to redden without them. ...
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“Well,” said Herb, “since I’m the oldest — ” Margot and Martha and Mark snickered. Herb gave them a quizzical look. “It’s nothing,” Mark said. “It just has to do with our announcement. I’ll explain in a minute.” ...
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MARK AND MARGOT AND MARTHA were again the catalytic agents. . . . The situation for the trio had not improved. Separately, they had come to the conclusion that there was no future for them as a trio, that some kind of choice must be made, some choice that would leave a pair and a singleton. ...
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The primary pursuit of most Punta Cachazudans was to discover and employ new methods of killing time. They passed the hours with games of cards and shuffleboard, shell gathering and fishing, gossiping and arguing, but the most popular way to keep busy was to learn something new. ...
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The Bagnell-built house that Herb and Lorna chose was a significant one in the history of Punta Cachazuda. It was the first one built beyond the limit of the plan that Humboldt Bagnell himself had drawn on a roll of shelf paper and pinned to the wall of his garage. It was the first house in a new territory, a new beginning in a literal as well as a figurative sense, ...
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PUNTA CACHAZUDA lies on the west coast of Florida, the Gulf Coast, where the beach sand is as white and fine as confectioner’s sugar, and the sunsets make a person pause and muse. There would have been no Punta Cachazuda at all had it not been for the effect of one of those thought-provoking sunsets on Humboldt Bagnell. One evening, years before Herb and Lorna arrived, ...
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They spent the next two weeks stocking the trailer. Herb had, of course, outfitted the trailer with gadgets of many sorts. Some were practical, like the two refrigerators. A larger one held their stores, and a smaller one held things needed every day, like cream for coffee, and food for the day, transferred from the larger. With careful planning — and Lorna provided the careful planning — there would be no need to open the larger one more than once every other day. ...
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THEY EARNED THE MONEY, and they had a great time doing it. More important than the money, and more satisfying, was the work they did during the intense months that they spent earning it, a time when the whole house seemed to sing, when, in fact, it did sing, with the record player in the living room going all the time, playing their old favorite songs over and over and over again, turned up high to play over the sound of their work. ...
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“Well, when I got called, I figured that if I sold some goods to the other boys while I was in France, I could keep sending money to my mother. I had to get some goods to sell, so Uncle Ben and I came to Chacallit, that time when you and I met.” ...
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“I got into it because it was a way to make money, that’s all,” said Herb. “You know how my family needed money in those days. I was just a boy really, and my father was a bankrupt. Uncle Ben got into the business somehow, God knows how. He was always onto one scheme or another, Uncle Ben. I remember when he showed me the first one — a shirt stud. I didn’t even know what a shirt stud was. ...
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LATER, IN BED, in the pleasant lassitude after love, it all came out, slowly. If we had overheard, if we had been, say, Dudley, outside, beneath their windows, eavesdropping, we wouldn’t have been able to catch it all, just a snatch of mumbled revelation, a bit of whispered confession, the occasional bold declaration, a giggle, a chuckle, with interstices of silence, of ignorance, where we would have been forced to imagine, ...
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Lorna turned from the sink to look at Herb, and even in the rude light of the circular fluorescent fixture Herb could see that her elusive loveliness had returned. For some time fear and fretfulness had poisoned Lorna’s system like allergens, had made the skin under her eyes puff and redden, had made her forehead break out, had made her cheeks pale and her jaw slack. Now, instantly, she seemed cleansed, cured.
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After Mark left, Lorna began moving around her kitchen, following her accustomed patterns, clearing the dishes, washing them. Herb went through the house in his accustomed pattern, turning lights off, turning the radio off, locking the doors. Everything they did was familiar, habitual. But tonight there was something odd about all this homely activity. ...
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In the back of Mark’s mind, he knew — or at least he had some kind of hunch — that Herb and Lorna were the people he wanted to — needed to — talk to, and so he visited them often. As Studebaker’s fortunes fell, Herb spent less and less time at the showroom and more and more time at home, tinkering, so the chances were good that he would be at home whenever Mark dropped by. ...
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OVER THE NEXT FEW YEARS, while Herb and Lorna’s financial problems deepened, Mark saw them fairly often. Sometimes he would see them at my house when they were visiting. More often, though, Mark walked to their house specifically to visit them. The Glynns lived near Herb and Lorna, so Mark often headed for No Bridge Road after seeing Margot and Martha or after finding that the girls weren’t at home when he called. ...
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Mark was sitting on the living room sofa with his right arm around Margot and his left arm around Martha, when Herb and Lorna, who had come in through the kitchen, suddenly appeared in the archway between their dining room and their living room. His first impulse was to jump up and thank them, he felt such a rush of gratitude. ...
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In Which Herb and Lorna Are Saved by the Art of Love: THEN I THREW A PARTY at Herb and Lorna’s house, and at that party Mark Dorset fell in love with the Glynn twins, and, therefore, everything turned out all right, eventually. ...
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IN THOSE DIFFICULT YEARS, Studebaker’s declining years, Herb and Lorna had much to worry about, and worrying changed them. I didn’t notice the change; during those years I passed from childhood into adolescence, and I was far too interested in the ways that I was changing to notice what was happening to them. ...
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“I finished some pieces anyway,” said Lorna, “but they weren’t very good, and while I was working I began to see that there was another problem. I wasn’t going to be able to bring myself to sell them. My face would get flushed and my hands would start shaking whenever I even imagined selling them. Where on earth would I find people to buy them? Not ‘people.’ Women. It would have to be women. Can you imagine me showing them to men? ...
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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. ...
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When the Spotters bought, the price of Studebaker stock was low, Studebaker sales were low, and the company had debts of more than fifty million dollars. When the Lark was released, the picture began to change. Larks sold. Studebaker stock rose. The company moved into the black. The Spotters did well. They did so well that, secretly, each began buying more stock on his own. ...
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On one of the Club evenings, divorced from Lorna’s cautious skepticism, Herb succumbed to the Piper failing. He let himself be convinced that the Spotters’ buying a few shares of stock was an undertaking free of risk, since they would only invest money that they had already lost. That was the essence of the argument advanced by Bob Schoop, who proposed the venture. ...
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In Which Herb and Lorna Come to the Brink of Despair AFTER A POSTWAR SLUMP, the demand for slide rules began to pick up, and Edwin Berwick asked Lorna to return to work. At about the time when she began her new duties as supervisor of the cursor department at Hargrove Slide Rules, technology took another step toward the slide rule’s eventual obsolescence when the first programmable computer — that is, the first computer that could store a program in its memory — became operational: UNIVAC 1.
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Every fall, during those years when Bert and Ella and I had lived with Herb and Lorna, all five of us would drive upstate to buy firewood. Herb had constructed a small trailer just for hauling wood, and he and Bert, with the help and advice of Lorna and Ella, would get this hitched to the car the night before, so that we could leave before dawn the next day. ...
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WHEN Bert and Ella and I were settled in a little house of our own, Herb and Lorna were alone at last, truly private for the first time ever. On their first night alone, Herb began bustling around as soon as he got home from work, laying a fire in the fireplace, plumping the pillows on the sofa, humming “Lake Serenity Serenade,” while he worked.
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Herb sold what he had on hand, but he had no way at all to sell any new designs. His Uncle Ben had been dead for eleven years. Since Herb wasn’t about to risk trying to make a coarse-goods connection of his own in Chacallit, his new designs never went any further than sketches, and the sketches never went any farther than the bottom of the metal box that he kept under his workbench. ...
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Lorna returned to Chacallit and visited her Uncle Luther. She was able to sell him everything she had on hand, but Luther was seventy-three now, ill, and nearly blind. He hadn’t been active in the coarse-goods business for nearly thirteen years. He squinted through an enormous magnifying glass at the pieces Lorna had brought, and he told her that he didn’t consider these anywhere near the quality of her best work. ...
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Herb kept a metal box on the shelf under his workbench in the cellar. It was painted green, with a white skull and crossbones painted on the top. Once, he opened this box for me, and explained, with firm seriousness, that I must never open it myself because the jars and tins and bottles in it held acids and other chemicals that could burn me, even kill me.
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Nor did I see that there was tension in the house. I was happy there. I supposed that everyone else was, and supposing it to be so, I saw it as so. I would never have imagined that, one night, Herb lay in bed, awake, imagining how Bert and Ella must feel, at night, lying in bed in the room down the hall, inhibited by the fact of their living in his house, forced to be so quiet, so contained, constrained to whisper, so tense and awkward. He realized that the feelings he ascribed to them were those he felt himself.
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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.
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FOR THE NEXT FIVE YEARS, Bert and Ella and I lived with Herb and Lorna. The automobile business entered a boom period right after the war. Business was brisk at Babbington Studebaker, and Herb was able to get Bert a job there, in the service department. He and Bert left for work together every morning and came home together every night. My mother and grandmother stayed at home, kept house, and took care of me. ...
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ELLA AND BERT were married in a month. They had no money, and Bert had no job. They couldn’t afford a place of their own, so they were going to have to live either with Bert’s parents or with Ella’s. “Oh, Mother,” said Ella, “I couldn’t live there. I’d feel so funny if we did. I’d always be thinking about — about Buster. It is a nice place. They have lots of room — it’s a big house — three bedrooms. But, oh, I couldn’t do it. ...
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My God, she thought, what if he’s fallen in love with Ella? When she had sent Ella to Dudley’s, she hadn’t fully considered what might result, she had just had an inspired idea for pulling Ella up from the dumps she was down in. Since then, she had begun to wonder whether she had done the right thing. ...
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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. ...
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“Ella,” said Lorna, “have you spoken to Dudley recently?” There was concern in her voice. “No,” said Ella. “I haven’t. Why do you ask?” “Oh, I don’t know,” said Lorna. She stepped into the room and walked to the window. She stood there a moment, looking across at Dudley’s living room window. She sighed. “He seems awfully down in the dumps to me. I wondered what you thought.” ...
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LORNA WAS LESS SUCCESSFUL in cheering Ella up. She had been able to lead May to what she needed, the pleasure of society, but Ella needed Buster, and that was something no one could supply. Ella spent hours lying on her bed, her hands clasped behind her head, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. When she was up, she walked through the house in silence. ...
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THE NEXT NIGHT, at Whitey’s, Lorna told May about her soap carvings, and then she went on to tell her all the rest, the whole story of her work in coarse goods. They were facing each other, sitting in a wooden booth, one of several along the wall opposite the bar. They became more and more animated as Lorna’s story progressed and May consumed Manhattans. At last Lorna said, “I’ll bet you think I’m making this up.” She leaned across the table and looked hard at May. “Don’t you?” she asked. ...
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May turned to look at her, just for a moment. Lorna put a smile on her face. “It ishopeless,” she said. She laughed. “It’s a hopeless situation, but you don’t have to feel miserable about it. Maybe we should feel miserable about it, but I don’t — not any more.” “Oh?” said May. “Did you meet a man in Baltimore?” “No!” said Lorna. She grinned in the dark. “I — found something to — keep me going. ...
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MAY CASTLE met Lorna’s train at the Babbington station. It was the last week of January. Snow was falling in fat, wet, heavy clumps. On the ground, the flakes turned to slush. May and Lorna greeted each other quickly, hugged briefly on the platform, and then rushed across the parking lot to May’s Chrysler, threw Lorna’s luggage onto the back seat, and climbed in. “Whew!” said May. “What a night! Horrible! Just horrible! What a night to have to go through what you’re going to have to go through.” ...
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Ella got out of bed and pulled her robe on. She stood in the hall for a moment, listening. She heard her father’s voice, but it seemed to come from farther away than the dining room, and he was saying very little, not much more than “yes” and “I understand.” He came back to the hall. “What is it, Daddy?” she whispered. ...
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Lorna was enjoying herself, seated at the center of a group of calculating women, working on a soap carving — it depicted the woman who had requested it in the passionate embrace of Gary Cooper — when Herb’s call came through. She and Herb decided that she should arrange to return home at once and that Herb should wake Ella and tell her the awful news. ...
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BUSTER LEROY DROWNED when his ship, a destroyer escort, was torpedoed in the North Atlantic. The news came one Wednesday evening, while Herb was in the dining room at home, playing Piper Poker with the Spotters Club, some spotters who had begun getting together every Wednesday evening. ...
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IN MARYLAND, she allowed herself to acknowledge her secret talent. At night, when the women who performed the calculations were at their leisure, they entertained themselves with cards and songs and talk. One evening, not long after the group was assembled, one of the women said, “You know what we are, don’t you? Doing what we do? We’re a bunch of calculating women!” They took the name. ...
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In The Analytical Engine, Jeremy Bernstein outlines the project that Lorna described to Herb and Ella: IN 1943, the Moore School and the Aberdeen Proving Ground, in Maryland, were conducting a joint project involving the computation of artillery firing tables for the Army. The Moore School contingent . . . used a Bush analog computer and employed a hundred women to do hand computations as a necessary adjunct to the machine operations . . . .
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“You know,” Edwin interrupted, “a few months ago I built my daughter a sandbox. I had to figure out how much sand to get for it. Simple problem. Nothing to it. But a question popped into my head: how many grains of sand do I need?
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BEFORE THE WAR, the best slide rules had come from Germany. Now the need for slide rules — for calculating artillery trajectories, plotting courses, calculating wind drift, figuring time to target, and the like — was great and pressing. The production of slide rules became a defense industry, and domestic slide rule manufacturers scrambled to meet the nation’s computational needs. ...
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IN DECEMBER, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Buster Leroy enlisted in the navy. Everyone tried to convince him that he could do his duty just as well in the Coast Guard, but among young men in Babbington and many another seacoast town, the Coast Guard was considered a refuge, easy duty. If you were willing to put yourself to the test, you joined the navy. ...
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ELLA AND BUSTER AND BERT were great chums throughout their last years in high school. Ella was in love with both of the boys, and they were both in love with her, and they seemed quite content to have things stay just as they were. Herb and Lorna even thought that there was probably some safety in this arrangement, since Ella wasn’t likely to go to bed with either of them as long as she loved both of them, and no one, not Herb or Lorna or Ella or Bert or Buster, even considered her going to bed with both of them. ...
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“Lorna,” whispered Herb. “Lorna, are you all right?” He stood at the end of the hall. “Oh, Herb,” she said. “I’ve had a wonderful idea. Look at these — oh — ” She wished she could tell him, right then, tell him that there was something about her that made her extraordinary. ...
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That night, Lorna lay awake recalling the evening. When she closed her eyes she saw Buster’s face, his grin, his wink. She couldn’t get to sleep. She got out of bed. Herb was sleeping soundly. She put her robe on and walked down the hall. The bookcase that led to Mrs. Stolz’s room was closed. The door to Ella’s room was open. She was asleep, hugging her pillow. ...
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EVERYONE was relieved when Ella fell in love with the Leroy brothers, no one more than Lorna. Ella brought the boys home one day after school, and surprised Lorna and Mrs. Stolz, who were in the kitchen. “Oh, my,” said Lorna. “Oh, my.” She wiped her hands on her apron. They were the handsomest boys she had ever seen, a pair of tall, sandy-haired guys with wide smiles and shining eyes. ...
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“Well, we wouldn’t want to interrupt them,” said Herb. As soon as the words left him, they sounded to him like part of an off-color joke, and he reddened in the dark. “I mean — ” he began, and he realized that he’d only make things worse by explaining himself, so he just stopped. ...
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Herb and Lorna and Mrs. Stolz sat in uneasy silence for a few minutes, and then Herb said, with great calm, “She probably won’t be long. She’ll be back in a while.” A couple of minutes passed. “It could take as long as an hour, I suppose,” said Lorna. “Really?” said Herb. “Do you think it’ll take that long? To learn the parts of the frog?” ...
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Dudley began helping Ella with her schoolwork. He was more intelligent and better informed than any of her teachers. He did a better job of explaining what she was required to know, and he did more than that: he took her beyond what the school taught her in every subject. Ella thought that Dudley was fascinating (“dreamy”) and extraordinary (“a man in a million”), and she fell in love with him. ...
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IN THE SPRING of Ella’s sixteenth year (Herb’s forty-first, Lorna’s thirty-ninth), when Ella began to look more like a pretty young woman than a pretty young girl, Dudley Beaker, a bachelor for whom this was the spring of his twenty-eighth year, bought the house next door. Dudley was, for the neighborhood into which he had moved, something of an exotic. ...
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After a while, not even Herb really had any objection to Mrs. Stolz’s living with them. The ménage was a happy one, and he wouldn’t have done anything to disturb it. Within the first year, he had the den in habitable shape; Mrs. Stolz moved in, and Ella was able to sleep in the room that Herb and Lorna had intended for her. It took Herb another eight years to finish the den completely, but finally he did finish it, ...
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Except for Lorna’s work in the cellar, Mrs. Stolz found that Lorna behaved as if she were as normal as anyone else. Mrs. Stolz considered this a miracle. Every night since her return, she had fallen to her knees beside her bed and prayed for Lorna’s sanity, and it seemed to her that her prayers had been answered — at least there were no screaming fits or mad scenes. Mrs. Stolz tried not to give herself credit for Lorna’s relative sanity, but she had to admit to herself that it was, most likely, her calming presence, her maturity, her regular habits and set ways, that kept Lorna on an even keel.
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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. ...
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Mrs. Stolz was settled in her favorite chair, wrapped snugly in her old robe, eating, in small, luxurious bites, a chocolate cream from a box on the table beside her. A copy of Life was open in her lap, but she had stopped reading to watch the raindrops run down the window pane, and she was thinking how pleasant it was to be in such cozy quarters, in a place as snug as her old robe, a place that gave her so much comfort but asked so little of her, when Lorna and Herb knocked at her door.
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That night Lorna and Herb lay awake in the dark, each thinking about the house, trying to remember it precisely, imagining life there, and trying to be still about it, in order not to wake the other, but neither was breathing like a person asleep, and finally the thought of crocuses coming up in the little lawn in the spring became so vivid in Lorna’s mind’s eye that she giggled from the pleasure of it. ...
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In the western part of Babbington, the part they had first entered on that rainy night when they arrived from Chacallit, they found a house that suited them. It was on an unnamed street off Bay Way, the road that led from Main Street to the bay. At the corner of this unnamed street was a sign, erected by the Babbington Department of Public Works, a sign with a temporary look, not the job of a practiced sign painter. It said CAUTION NO BRIDGE. ...
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A coolness, a distance, had developed between May and Garth that made life at May’s less than pleasant. Lorna and Herb were always, awkwardly, in the middle, listening to the confidences of one or the other, trying to offer the right advice, trying to bring back the happiness that had been in the house not so long ago. ...
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IN TIME, prosperity, at least relative prosperity, returned. The new management at Studebaker strengthened the company by eliminating weaknesses. They gave up on their unprofitable line of small, economical cars named for Knute Rockne, the football coach at Notre Dame, and sold the Peirce-Arrow company, which Studebaker had owned since 1928. By 1935, Studebakers were selling well again, and the company was turning a profit. ...
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ON THE FIRST of July in 1933, Albert Erskine, who had been president of Studebaker when it went into bankruptcy, killed himself. The news sent a shudder through Garth, who imagined, unrealistically, that he might have felt driven to such an act if Herb hadn’t halted his downward slide. Herb and Garth heard the news about Erskine while they were in Boston, picking up a supply of coarse goods from Uncle Ben. ...
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Lorna and Herb sat up with May and listened to the whole horrible tale. “This is the end,” May said. “It really is. I can’t do anything for him, he won’t let me do anything for him, and he won’t do anything for himself. There’s nothing that can be done, nothing.” ...
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May was determined not to give up on Garth, but one frightening visit nearly drove her away from him. She had tried romance as a lure before and failed, but she had run out of ideas and so tried again, hoping that something, anything — a difference in the weather or the phase of the moon — would change her luck. She brought candles and wine and a good dinner to the cottage. She brought her filmiest nightgown. She managed to get Garth out of Nosy’s and into the cottage, and ...
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THE YEARS that followed were difficult ones. The Studebaker Motor Company began clawing its way back. The Babbington dealership reopened, for three days a week, with a staff of two: Herb and Old Randolph. Herb was working on straight commission. Garth Castle did not come back. He lived at the beach, avoiding the company of anyone who made him feel that he ought to shake off this setback, pick himself up, dust himself off, get a grip on himself, pull himself together, get back to work — especially May.
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AND THEN along came serious trouble: the stock market crash, bank holidays, business failures, unemployment, bread lines, declining Studebaker sales. Garth began letting people go: a mechanic, a salesman, the bookkeeper, two more salesmen, two more mechanics, the janitor, another salesman, until only he and Herb and Old Randolph were left. Old Randolph kept busy keeping old cars running, and Garth filled his time keeping the salesroom and the display cars tidy. Herb pursued potential buyers with undiminished fervor, but fewer and fewer bought. ...
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BECAUSE they were doing so well, they turned away from coarse goods, though their respective uncles tried nearly identical arguments to make them change their minds. “HERB, HERB,” said Ben, “you’re making the biggest mistake of your life. You are a mechanical genius, Herb. Will you just listen to me for a minute, please? ...
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FOR A WHILE, the nation, the Studebaker Corporation, and Herb and Lorna were doing well. Herb sold Studebakers with the zeal of a fanatic. Because he loved selling for itself, it was a far stronger affection than the money he made could have inspired; it was the kind of affection that people develop for leisure activities, for following a basketball team, tending a garden, or trying to turn a lawn into the lush carpet pictured on bags of grass seed. Added to his love of selling was his fondness for Studebakers, which grew and grew. ...
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As Proust probably says somewhere:
How surprising we find it that, numbered among the many attendants of Love, we do not always find Understanding, the pervasive understanding which we suppose ought to be a prominent member of the procession of Venus. We suppose, and certainly it seems to us perfectly reasonable so to suppose, that love begets, among the many offspring that we suppose it to beget, Understanding, and, ...
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Herb ran the tips of his fingers over May’s breasts. I shouldn’t do this. I shouldn’t do this. But I want to see her move, I want to see what she does. I want to see how she does it. But Lorna — what will I say to Lorna?May pushed him, nudging him onto his back. “You just lie back,” she said. “I want to do something to you.” I knew it. He flopped onto his back, ready, eager. This is going to be great. Fascinating.
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Lorna had seen May walk off into the darkness. She had seen Herb watch May go. From the way he watched her go, Lorna thought she could tell what he was thinking. When, just a while later, she saw him walk off, as if he had no other object than to see what the sky looked like from outside the circle of firelight, Lorna was sure she knew what he was up to. He was a little drunk, she knew, and might have forgotten his fetters. She felt a jab of jealousy and fear, and something that surprised her: curiosity. ...
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WHEN GARTH turned thirty, May threw a birthday party for him on the beach. Guests arrived in a festive little flotilla, their boats decked out in bright bunting and paper streamers.
Oh, it was a perfect day, just a perfect day, perfect. Clear and hot, with a light breeze, just enough to keep one from sweating unattractively. We swam, of course, and we played some ball game or other — baseball, I suppose — and we played badminton, and we played tag. That was quite a lot of fun, tag. Delicious, really. You see we’d been drinking all day, and so there was a lot of hugging and squeezing and — well — fondling involved, ...
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The beach was a wonderful place. It offered the pleasures of sea and sand and bay and the entertainments of people at their ease who are dependent on themselves and one another for their amusements. The clammies welcomed the vacationers, since they were open-handed and their pockets were deep. They liked to have a good time and did. ...
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AT MAY AND GARTH’S WEDDING, Herb was best man, Lorna was matron of honor, and Ella was flower girl. As a wedding gift, Garth gave May a cottage on the beach. At that time, the narrow barrier beach across Bolotomy Bay from Babbington was only sparsely developed. Strung along the bay side were a few shacks, shelters for clamdiggers, where they could get out of the weather when the weather was foul, stay close to their work when the clamming was good, or hide out among their fellows when the door was locked at home. ...
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They drank their drinks and made plans for the wedding, and, very late, they went to their beds. Herb made such tender love to Lorna that she thought the proposal-and-acceptance scene must have touched him, and she smiled in the dark at his sentimentality. There was, however, another reason for his tenderness. ...
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ONE RAINY EVENING not long after, Garth and May and Herb and Lorna were settled in front of a fire in May’s living room, and Herb was telling the story of the arrival at the showroom, that morning, of Miss Decker. “She took me by surprise,” said Herb. “She was the last person any of us ever expected to buy a car. We used to joke about it.”
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On the Babbingtonians’ final day in Chacallit, Richard and Lena served a buffet supper for everyone: Lester and Millie Piper, Luther Huber, Bertha and Richard Reuter, Clara and Harold Russell, Garth and May, Herb and Lorna. Bertha was nervous. She was dressed in something she had made herself, without benefit of a pattern, after studying an illustration in a magazine. It was meant to be daring, but it had been an act of desperation and it looked it. Over the course of the Babbingtonians’ visit, Bertha had come to feel like a lumpy bumpkin, and she blamed this feeling on Lorna. Bertha was envious, horribly envious. ...
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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). ...
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HERB SOLD quite a few Studebakers. The work he had put into making himself known and respected began paying off. He began capitalizing on the store of knowledge he’d accumulated about Babbingtonians. He also had the Piper talent in such abundance that he became, in an important sense, his own best customer.
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ELLA WAS ADORABLE from birth. She had the robust good health and pink plumpness that one sees in rubber baby dolls, a resilient firmness that real flesh doesn’t ordinarily exhibit, the rubber-doll bounce of bouncing babyhood. Herb was hugely proud of her. At work, he recounted each of her little triumphs. Several times. ...
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LORNA PROFITED from the move in an unexpected and wonderful way. She found a lifelong friend: May Castle (then May Hopper).
Oh, good! It’s time I stepped in. Well, there I was, all alone in the handsomesthouse in Babbington, because, you see, my parents were dead, poor things. They had died in Paris, well, just outside Paris, in a train wreck, a disaster, really. Hundreds killed. And they left me absolutely everything — well nearly everything — including the house, of course, and I had the entire place to myself. Well, nearly to myself. I had a wretched aunt living with me, ...
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Chapter 10 In Which Herb and Lorna’s Daughter Is Born
WHEN DR. STICKLER gave them the news that Lorna was pregnant, Herb and Lorna felt, immediately, that this made everything just perfect — not that either wanted things to remain forever as they were, but each felt that for now, with a baby on the way, everything was perfect. But then Herb began to worry. He worried that Lorna might not want a child now, while they were living with the Mikszaths, while he was trying to make a start at Babbington Studebaker. ...
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Garth provided the solution. One day, when Herb was between trips, Garth asked him to meet him after work. They drove to the rattiest section of the ratty wharf area of Babbington. In Seafood and Sex, his study of life in “a small coastal town somewhere in America,” T. Wallaston (Stretch) Mitgang, the pioneering psychohistoricosociologist, wrote:
The waterfront area — that is, the area near the working waterfront, the poorest area of town, the messiest, the rattiest — is its true social frontier, a miniature of the social frontier of American society at large. Here are tiny clusters of representatives of ethnic and racial groups who haven’t yet made their way downtown (or haven’t been permitted to) and who may never make their way (or be permitted to make their way) to one of the shady streets of comfortable houses along the pleasant canals away from the sound and smell of men and women at work, unless it is to make a delivery, mow a lawn, or wash a floor. To spend time in this part of town, with its diversity of colors, tongues, religions, pasts, plans, and dreams, is to see that the melting pot, with its suggestion of a homogenized mush, is the wrong metaphor. Better would be something like a stewpot. If we are concocting an American social dish, this is where it’s cooking, and it’s something like a hearty stew or chowder, with chewy bits in every spoonful, not all of them familiar.
Garth took Herb to a place that Herb had heard of but never visited before: Corinne’s. There were two parts to Corinne’s. In plain sight, almost at the end of Lower (that’s Lower Bolotomy Road, remember), was a fish house with the name Corinne’s on a painted sign that ran along the ridge of the roof, and behind the fish house, concealed in a warehouse, was the other Corinne’s, the one sometimes referred to in speech as Corinne’s Warehouse, a name delivered with a wink, a raised eyebrow, and a sly elongation of the first syllable of the second word. This was the speakeasy and whorehouse. When they entered the warehouse, Herb found himself in a chaos of crates and boxes and pallets and skids and barrels. Garth followed what seemed to be a familiar pathway through this chaos, and Herb tagged along. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, Garth stopped and stood perfectly still for a moment, listening. Satisfied that there were no following footsteps, he pushed the side of a large crate, and it swung inward. Garth motioned Herb into the cabinet he had revealed, and then followed Herb inside and pulled the door closed behind them. From his pocket he took a small silver penknife engraved with his initials, and he pushed it through a knothole on the opposite side of the crate. In a moment, that side of the crate swung open, and a small, bent old man in a brown suit welcomed Garth and Herb. As they passed him, Garth held out his hand, and the old man dropped Garth’s penknife into it. Herb tried very hard not to notice who else was in the place. He understood that Garth’s gesture in bringing him here was a statement of trust, and he wanted to show that it wasn’t misplaced. “Herb,” said Garth, “I’m going to tell you something that you have to keep under your hat.” Herb nodded, just once. “Good,” said Garth. “I’ll come right to the point. I’m going to leave the company, and I want you to come with me. Some important people — I can’t say who just yet — have gotten together to buy a Studebaker distributorship, and they want me to manage it. Herb, how would you like to sell Studebakers?” “Here in Babbington?” asked Herb. “Well, yes,” said Garth. “I know it might seem a little — well — boring to be in Babbington all the time, but you could really build a future here, Herb, and — ” Herb raised his glass and nodded, and Garth smiled. “Good,” he said. “Good.”
In Topical Guide 311, Mark Dorset considers Books: Seafood and Sex; Secrecy: Concealment, Camouflage; Secrecy: Secret Societies; Secrecy: Code Words, Passwords, Signs and signals; and Sex: Houses of Prostitution: Corinne’s from this episode.
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
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You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
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Herb’s table was much longer than the old one. At the head, in place of the sliding door, was a cylinder with an opening in one side of approximately the same dimensions as the opening behind the old door. A crank allowed the doorman to turn this cylinder. As the opening rotated past the opening to the clam bin, the cylinder filled with clams, and, as the opening rotated over the table, the clams tumbled from the cylinder onto the table. The doorman could vary the rate of rotation to suit the pace of the cullers. The table was slanted so that the clams would be inclined to slide toward the far end. Herb and Swifty had carved the surface to create a system of valleys, through which the clams could be urged, by the cullers, to go. From the largest valley, at the head of the table, the clams might, with the assistance of the first group of cullers, pass into either of two smaller valleys, and then, from each of those, with the assistance of the next rank of cullers, into either of two still smaller valleys. The cullers used this system of branching valleys to sort the clams into their four sizes: undersize (that is, too small to sell legally), littleneck, cherrystone, and chowder clam. The system had the great virtue of allowing the use of apprentice cullers at the head of the line, since they merely had to distinguish the relatively smaller clams from the relatively larger clams. The more seasoned cullers who were stationed farther along made the subtler distinctions, and they did it with little wasted motion, merely nudging the clams a little to guide each into the proper valley. Toward the end, the table fanned out, and the valleys diverged, each ending above a crate, into which the clams tumbled fairly gently. When Garth Castle saw the new table in operation, he was astonished as much by the fact that Herb had undertaken its design and construction for pleasure as he was by the results. Here was someone out of the ordinary. He was impressed, too, by the ease with which Herb had gotten Swifty to build the table, working after hours, and by the cooperation he got from the cullers, who were generally considered to be a hidebound lot, resistant to change, second only to the clammies themselves in stubbornness. Here was a leader. Garth offered Herb the foremanship of the culling section. Herb asked instead that Garth arrange for him to move into sales. And, as if it were an afterthought, he asked that Garth set aside for his exclusive use the area of the workshop where he had developed the culling table, so that he could tinker. It was there, in an hour or two after work, any afternoon when he could spare the time, that Herb developed the prototypes of the Watchcase Wonders. Herb’s moving into sales had a painful consequence, though: he had to be away from Babbington, and Lorna, for days (and sometimes for weeks) at a time. As soon as he had experienced the first of these separations, he began racking his brain for a way to get out of traveling. He had wanted the job for only one reason: to earn himself a reputation. He had imagined that a year or so traveling for Babbington Clam wouldn’t be so bad, but he’d found instead that to be without Lorna was to be in an almost constant state of need. When he was away he seemed to lack everything. No matter what he ate or how much he ate, he was hungry; when he woke in the night and his mouth was dry, the water he drank didn’t quench his thirst any more than do those glasses of water we drink in our dreams; boredom and loneliness sent him to bed early, but he never seemed to get enough sleep; and, without Lorna, he sometimes felt cold, especially at the tips of his fingers and across his shoulders, even in the warmest weather. “How, how?” he asked himself, again and again, when he lay awake on lonely nights in half-empty beds in faraway places. How could he get out of this misery he’d brought himself? He couldn’t quit so soon; he’d appear unreliable, disloyal, fickle. He couldn’t use the truth as a reason. Love and loneliness weren’t suitable reasons for a man to abandon a job that was a step up, especially not when he was performing so brilliantly that he’d attracted the attention of everyone who had the power to improve his future.
In Topical Guide 310, Mark Dorset considers Sorting: Techniques, Algorithms, Devices from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
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You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
-
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
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A CURIOUS KIND of cottage industry sprang up in the sunny room behind the Mikszaths’. During the day, while Herb was away, Lorna would work for a couple of hours at a little folding work table that Herb built for her. Building the table had been a labor of love, two loves: love of Lorna and love of tinkering. Along the back of the table, in tiers, were small bins that held all of Lorna’s tools and supplies, and this entire section pivoted when the table was collapsed, so that nothing would spill, since the bins were always level, whether the table was open for work or folded to stand against the wall. During the day, while Herb was away, Lorna would unfold the table and spend three or four hours at work. She would begin by spending a little while working on innocent carvings, delicate rose blossoms or sinewy horse heads that would be used for expensive sets of links and studs but that served primarily as decoys. She spent most of her time on the exacting work of carving the intricately articulated figures that went into the animated coarse goods that were becoming known as “Watchcase Wonders” and were, though Lorna didn’t know it, making Luther a wealthy man. It would have been impossible for Herb to find time or a place to work on his designs if it hadn’t been for his meeting Garth Castle. Garth was at the time a young man to watch at Babbington Clam. He was tall, wiry, and handsome, and though he was only three years older than Herb, he had about him an air of worldly sophistication that made him seem much older. This air was only an air — Garth had been born in Hargrove, the next town, and had never traveled farther from Hargrove than New Jersey. To give himself the air, he drew on his imagination and his careful observation of men who seemed to him to be truly worldly and sophisticated. Some actually were; others were merely successful at business, and that only on a local scale. Garth wanted to be, in Babbington, a New York gentleman, or what he took to be a New York gentleman. He behaved as he supposed one would if he were, for reasons unknown but probably just a little bit scandalous, rusticating in Babbington. He succeeded admirably. Success in this pretense brought Garth confidence and a relaxed style, and in time he appeared so at ease in the role he’d written for himself that he seemed to many Babbingtonians to be a man making the best of having been banished to Babbington, a man who’d risen above being resigned to his lot and was now — and with what grace! — actually enjoying it. He was a model for every ambitious young man in town. Herb attracted Garth’s attention by designing a new culling table. Formerly, the culling table had been nothing more than a large wooden table, about waist height, covered with a sheet of zinc, placed in front of an opening in the bin into which the clams were dumped like so many lumps of coal. Cullers stood alongside the table, and one of them, the “doorman,” slid a small wooden door upward, releasing clams from the bin. When the table was covered with clams, the doorman, with great difficulty, slid the door down again, and the cullers began work. Each sorted the clams that came immediately to hand, tossing them according to size, without looking backward, into crates arranged along the walls behind the cullers. This method had many faults: the doorman’s job was difficult and frustrating; the cullers often interfered with one another, straying across poorly defined boundaries in their zeal to cull; and, though the cullers were (after much training and practice) very good at getting the clams into the crates without looking, and even knew from the sound of the clams clattering against their crated fellows how nearly full a crate was, clams often collided in midair and ricocheted into the wrong crates, and the concussion of one clam against another, in the air or in the crate, occasionally cracked or crushed them. Herb was intrigued by the problems the table presented. He began lingering in the carpentry shed after work to put in some time on an idea he had for an entirely new kind of culling table. He worked alongside one of the carpenters, Andrew “Swifty” Switt, to build it. When it was finished, he and Switt installed it one night in place of the old table.
In Topical Guide 309, Mark Dorset considers Life: As an Imitation of Art and Art: As an Inspiration for Life from this episode.
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You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
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You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
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You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
AND SO they decided to move. Lorna wanted to tell Mrs. Mikszath herself, when they were alone. She invited her for coffee, sat her down, and fussed over her, putting a pillow behind the small of her back, insisting that she kick off her shoes and put her feet on the ottoman, buttering a roll for her, putting a third lump of sugar in her coffee. And then, when she thought that the pillow and ottoman and buttered roll and extra sugar had provided enough of a cushion, she delivered the blow: “Mrs. Mikszath,” she said, looking into her cup, “Herb and I are going to move. ...
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
They astonished each other. Lying in the dark, later, when each thought the other had fallen asleep, Herb asked himself the question Lorna had feared: Where on earth did she get those ideas? He couldn’t help wondering whether Lorna had had more experience than that provided by Andy Proctor, the hero of Chacallit. He knew about the back-seat session with Andy because Lorna had told him one evening, the same evening when he told her about Alice Mills. It had been one of those “damned confessional evenings that lovers insist on torturing themselves with,” according to May:
Gad! Why do they do it? I mean — why don’t they have the sense to keep quiet about things that they ought to keep quiet about? Well — it was an evening when they went rowing on the bay in the moonlight. A favorite thing of theirs to do, of course, since it reminded them of the night the ballroom burned. But of course it reminded Lorna of that night in a rowboat with Luther too. So! She was of two minds on such occasions, as you can well imagine. Oh, anyway, Herb kicked things off. Why is it that men need to confess things? Clear the air! Get things out in the open! Lay my cards on the table! Get this off my chest! Brrrr! I get chills when I hear words like that. “May, I want to get something out in the open.” No thank you! Good night! Perhaps it’s just boasting, do you think? Well. Anyway, Herb told her about Whatever-her-name-was, that girl who fell in love with him while he was in France — Alice Mills. And then he told her about that strange couple — the ones he met at that gas station — you remember them. Oh, you know. Herb assumed the woman was Whoosis’s daughter, but she turned out to be his wife? Arthur and Tessie Norris. Well, Herb told Lorna all that. Lorna told Herb that he didn’t have to go into all of this for her sake, but he insisted. He said — and he honestly believed what he was saying — that he hoped that as the years went by Lorna would learn everything about him there was to know, since he thought it was important for a married couple not to hide anything from each other. Oooh. A ghastly idea. Ghastly. Well, Lorna — poor thing — felt she had to give something in return for all this honesty, so she gave him Andy. So to speak. Now what do you suppose happened? I’ll tell you what I suppose. What always happens. They both wound up thinking, Well, there must be more. Nobody would confess everything, so there must be more. Honesty is very dangerous.
As time passed, Herb and Lorna began, little by little, to invite imagination into the big pine bed. Though Herb wondered about the sources of Lorna’s inspired lovemaking, he never recognized what should have been obvious, that some of the ideas had been his. Nor did he recognize Lorna’s inventiveness. Jealousy made him suppose that her ideas must come from other experiences.
In Topical Guide 308, Mark Dorset considers Ideas: Their Origins: Reciprocal “Inspiration” from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
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You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
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You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
-
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
A MONTH OR TWO LATER, while on a visit to Chacallit, Lorna accepted Luther’s invitation to visit the mill one morning to “say hello to the girls in Links,” and to see “some of the new products we’re going to be making in ivory.” She knew what he must have in mind, and she was curious to see what the unknown designer of animated coarse goods had been up to lately. “Lorna,” said Luther, holding the prototype enclosed in his hand, “what I’m going to show you is a work of genius. I want you to appreciate that, and I want you to consider very carefully whether you shouldn’t be adding your talent to it.” He put the case in Lorna’s hands, pressed them together around it, gave them a squeeze, and said, in a hushed and reverent voice, “I’m going to leave you to contemplate it on your own.” He left the office, and Lorna, bursting with curiosity, opened the lid. She watched the couple for a long time. She found, while she watched, that she began wishing that she could show them to Herb. She wished that what they were doing could be put to trial in the big pine bed. She sighed and closed the lid. It wasn’t likely. She was a restrained lover, restrained by the fear that she might give herself away, by being ashamed of the work she did, and by the generations-old Huber conviction that it was safest not to appear extraordinary. Now and then she dared to surprise Herb with something, but only something small. She was usually careful, very careful.
“HERB,” she whispered that night, when they had retired to her old room in her parents’ house, “I think I’d like to do a little work for my Uncle Luther now and then.” “What do you mean?” asked Herb. “Well,” she said, beginning an explanation that she had practiced during her walk up Ackerman Hill from the mill, “when I saw the work that he’s getting from the people he has carving for him, I realized something. This is going to sound very immodest, but I have to say it. I realized that I was the best carver Chacallit has ever seen. Everyone who was working there in the carving section knew it.” “Uh-huh,” said Herb. “And you know what else I realized?” she asked, rolling onto her side and bringing her lips close to Herb’s ear. “What?” he asked. “I realized how much I liked the work. I really liked doing something that I could do so well. It made me feel — it made me feel — ” She stopped, unable to say what she had felt. “I know,” said Herb. He turned to face her. “I know what you mean. It made you feel — better — better than anybody else.” “That’s right!” whispered Lorna. “It’s hard to admit, but it’s nice, a nice feeling, to feel that you’re the best at something.” “Yes,” said Lorna. “Yes it is.” “But how could you manage to work for your uncle? You don’t want to move back here, do you?” In a rush, Lorna explained the plan. She would do everything by mail. From time to time, Luther would ship her some materials and a list of the subjects she was to carve — tiny roses, leaves, animals, and the like. She would set herself up with a place to work. She wouldn’t need nearly as much space as she would need for, say, a sewing machine. She would work during the day, while Herb was at work. She wouldn’t work too much — he didn’t have to worry about that, and no one would even know that she was working. He didn’t have to worry that it would look as if he couldn’t support her. Now and then she would get a package from Chacallit — nothing unusual about that. And now and then she’d send a package to Chacallit — nothing unusual about that, either! “Oh, Herb,” she said, “you wouldn’t mind, would you?” “Will you promise me one thing?” he asked. “What?” “I want you to spend the money on yourself.” “I — ” “Promise?” “Promise.” She nuzzled him and, silently because they were in her parents’ house, pressed herself against him. She remembered the little couple she had seen that afternoon. Do I dare? she wondered. Herb drew a deep breath, slowly. He thought about the routine he had devised for the little couple. Should I try? he wondered. It’s really just a matter of arranging myself in a slightly different way, she told herself. It’s a delicate matter, he reminded himself. It can’t seem like something I’ve thought out or — even worse — something that I’ve done before. I can’t let him think that it’s something I learned from someone else. It has to be just a little touch here, a little turn this way, like that — It has to be just sort of like going for a stroll, when you’re enjoying the walk and not paying too much attention to where you’re going and then you look up and find you’re in a part of town where you’ve never been before. Oh, my, she thought. I would never have thought it would be so easy. Or so, so — She doesn’t seem startled or — upset. It’s — — wonderful. — wonderful.
In Topical Guide 307, Mark Dorset considers Art: Media: Ivory from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
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You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Chapter 9
In Which Herb Becomes a Studebaker Salesman
“THIS IS — this is — astonishing, Herb,” said Ben, on the first of Herb’s visits. In his hand he held one of Herb’s prototypes. This one, the first Herb had created since his marriage to Lorna, represented something quite new. It set a style that would define the course of development for animated coarse goods for nearly two decades. Inside a silver case, very much like the case of a pocket watch, a tiny couple was couched. Slowly, very slowly, Ben twisted the stem and observed the couple’s performance. What the couple did as Ben turned the stem was affectionate, inventive, clever, difficult, and surprising. Herb had spent countless hours developing the routine, doodling on scraps of paper, constructing mechanisms in his imagination, building tiny frameworks of wire and bewildering assemblies of gears and shafts and pulleys and belts in moments stolen from work at the clam-packing plant. Ben looked up from his examination of the couple in the watchcase and grinned. “This is very — um — creative, Herb,” he said. “Very creative.” He glanced at Herb and then turned his attention back to the couple. “I wonder where you get your ideas.” Herb colored, and he chuckled to try to hide his embarrassment. Ideas came to him from his imagination, from his dreams and daydreams, from that never-ending lust that a man feels for the girls of his youth, and from observations of women around Babbington. He might notice in a woman a certain way of walking, say a certain swing of the hips, and see it as a manifestation of the woman’s peculiar style, just as one might recognize in the use of a certain blue or a certain recognizable brush stroke a manifestation of a painter’s style, or recognize in the frequent use of a certain grammatical technique a certain manner of thought that underlies a writer’s style. While Herb observed the woman’s walk, he made some inferences about her style, and he asked himself some interesting questions: How would that style show up in the woman’s lovemaking? How would it affect her movements in bed? Such pleasant speculations occupied Herb for many hours every day; they were the salacious equivalent of the kind of speculation that helped make him such a superb salesman: I know certain things about this person. From them, what can I decide about his attitudes, his desires? What can I predict about his resistance to my selling?“You must be enjoying married life,” Ben said, without looking at Herb. Herb looked at his hands and said nothing. He was enjoying married life, and he was enjoying sex with Lorna, but something was missing. He was a restrained lover in the big pine bed in the room behind the Mikszaths’, less imaginative, less daring, than he was in his gear-and-pulley work. When Herb was at work on his coupling mechanisms, he couldn’t help wondering whether some of the techniques and alignments he developed were entirely original, whether he had invented anything that had never had an in-the-flesh trial in all the history of mankind. Sometimes he wondered whether some of his inventions were humanly possible. Always he wondered how they would feel. Many struck him as too far removed from the simple and obvious ever to be widely accepted, and many struck him as unacceptable for home use. And sometimes he was afraid that, because these were the products of his imagination and his desires, they might be things that only he could enjoy, things he ought to be ashamed of, and this feeling applied not only to the things that might have been too bold but to those that might have been too sentimental or too silly. “Dut, dut, dut,” Herb said, as a way of avoiding having to explain to Ben any part of all that he thought and felt. “What?” asked Ben. “Oh, nothing,” said Herb. “It’s just something our landlord says. What do you think you can give me for this couple, Uncle Ben? I want to get Lorna a coat for her birthday.”
In Topical Guide 306, Mark Dorset considers Erotic Jewelry: The “Watchcase Wonder”; Language: “Body Language” and “Kinesics”; and Style from this episode.
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
-
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
LIKE AN ARTIST who finds, to his excitement and terror, that he’s come up with an idea so large and consuming that he may have to spend the rest of his life trying to realize it, who wakes in the night terrified and thrilled, having seen in his dreams a vision of his busy future, Herb saw how much work he was going to have to do before he made even the smallest of public steps in selling, because his move into selling would create the first impression of him as a salesman, an impression that had to be the right one if the enterprise was to prosper. So he studied and listened and watched, and, in his mind, he practiced selling, while he was lying awake in bed or daydreaming at the culling table where most of his mind was free, while he was fixing or making some little thing, or while he was relaxing in the tub at night while Lorna read to him. He practiced selling to the people he knew, using what he knew about them. What he imagined himself selling — because it was the most difficult thing he could imagine selling, something the burglar hadn’t even disturbed — was Lorna’s duck. If Lorna suspected that perhaps Herb had lost interest in selling, lost his ambition or shifted the object of his ambition to some position in the clam-packing plant, she was nonetheless determined that he should follow his inclination, do whatever it was he thought best. The future she had envisioned when she’d closed her eyes that night on Lake Serenity had been a future with Herb, not a future with Herb in a specific place or with Herb doing a specific kind of work or supporting a specific way, level, or style of living. If she had to, she would provide the things that Herb’s clam-plant salary couldn’t. After the burglary, without telling Herb, she approached Joseph the Jeweler, who had a shop downtown, about working on an as-needed basis, repairing ivory pieces, restoring cameos, and doing engraving. She got a little work, and when her skill and talent became clear, she got a great deal more. She was able to stay as busy as she wanted, and she brought in money that made a big difference in the way she and Herb were able to live. Herb noticed; he noticed every dollar she brought into the household (even the dollars that she tried to hide by spending them on meat of better quality or out-of-season vegetables, things she hoped Herb wouldn’t notice or wouldn’t think of as expenses), and he counted those dollars as debits against his future earnings. Every now and then, however, when an Occasion was approaching, he’d feel that paying Lorna back in the future wasn’t good enough, that it wasn’t fair of him to make Lorna wait to have the things he wanted her to have or do the things he wanted her to be able to do, and at those times he would suggest a trip to Boston to visit his uncle Benjamin.
In Topical Guide 305, Mark Dorset considers Projects: Ambitious and Goals: Attainable and Unattainable from this episode.
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
-
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
HERB’S WORK at the clam-packing plant was noticed from the start; he seemed to have a talent for culling, and he was so dexterous that he came to be regarded with the kind of awe and envy that athletes inspire when they perform feats so far beyond the capabilities of the average person that they seem by performing them to be enlarging the aspirations of the species, to be outlining a new bulge along the frontier of human endeavor. Herb enjoyed his growing reputation, and he was surprised to find how content he was to do this work, this work that required so little of him. He hid his true ambitions well, so well that Lorna hardly saw any evidence of them herself. She saw him reading the Reporter every day, but never looking at the help-wanted ads, and she wondered whether he really meant what he said when he told her that he’d been inspired by what Dan Whitley had told him that very first night when they arrived in Babbington: that it’s amazing how much you learn about a person from an obituary, amazing how much you didn’t know or didn’t notice when the person was alive. From that, Herb had gone on to the realization that in a small town the key to selling, or any kind of advancement, was information, information that an outsider had to make a special effort to acquire. Much later, when he and Lorna were retired in Punta Cachazuda, he put the idea this way: “You’ve heard people say, ‘It’s not what you know that counts; it’s who you know.’ Well, that’s not quite right. I found that it’s what you know about who you know that counts.” Herb was finding out a great deal about the people of Babbington, but the more he found out, the more he found there was to find out. He began keeping notes, on cards. His affection for tinkering, for fixing things, improving things, served him as well in Babbington as it had in Quelquepart-sur-Marne; he was always ready to do anyone a favor of the tinkering type, and an unanticipated reward of his doing these little favors was that he obtained, incidentally, close-up glimpses into the lives of many Babbingtonians. His very first repair job in Babbington was his work on the Mikszaths’ sagging front door. When he had made the door as good as it once had been, he went on to make it better: he added a secret lock, a spring-loaded bolt, that could be opened by pushing an ordinary-looking nail that projected slightly from the door frame, just to the right of the doorknob. This arrangement allowed Miklos, for whom the effects of his stroke and of arthritis made manipulating a key nearly impossible, to lock and unlock the door on his own. When Herb demonstrated his ingenious handiwork to the Mikszaths and Lorna, the women, moved by the generosity of thought that underlay Herb’s work, hugged him in turn. Mrs. Mikszath blinked away her tears; Lorna let hers run down her cheeks. Miklos locked and unlocked the door again and again. He turned to Herb, and the strength of his emotion was clear on his gaunt face. He clapped one gnarled hand on Herb’s shoulder and squeezed it as well as he could. He swallowed hard. “Dut, dut, dut,” he said. “Aw, don’t say that, Miklos,” said Herb. “It was fun for me. I like doing this sort of thing.” Mrs. Mikszath could not be prevented from telling the story of Herb’s work on her front door. She broadcast the news of Herb’s generosity and tinkering talent far and wide, and she described in precise detail just how the ingenious lock worked. A welcome consequence of her advertising was Herb’s being called upon to fix and improve things all over town; an unwelcome one was the visit of a burglar, who, after overhearing Mrs. Mikszath’s precise description from the other side of the vegetable counter at the Main Street Market one morning, found himself irresistibly tempted to make use of the knowledge. Several days later he crept into the house in the middle of the day, when it was empty, and made off with everything he could find that was of any value — some silverware and china and knickknacks of the Mikszaths’ and a sack full of Herb and Lorna’s wedding gifts.
In Topical Guide 304, Mark Dorset considers Information: Gathering, Exploiting and Salesmanship: Techniques from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
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You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
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You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
HERB AND LORNA moved in the next day, but, while they were unpacking, Herb began to feel that he’d been unfair, that he’d forced Lorna to share, or at least to try to share, his enthusiasm for the apartment. He began to feel that he should have left the apartment hunting to her, that she should have been the one to choose the place where she would live, and that, if she had been the one to choose, she would never have chosen a place like this, would certainly never have chosen any place where she had to walk through her landlords’ home and home life to get to her own. “I know it isn’t as private as you’d like,” said Herb. “It doesn’t matter,” said Lorna. “I love it here.” “It’s going to be awkward walking through their place every time we come and go,” said Herb. “I don’t mind,” said Lorna. “It isn’t too late to change our minds,” said Herb. He came to her and took her face in his hands. “I’ll tell them that we really have to have a larger place, and that I talked you into taking this place, and it wasn’t fair to you — ” “Dut, dut, dut,” said Lorna. She wrapped herself around Herb and kissed him quiet. “Ignite me, please,” she whispered. When they got back to unpacking, Herb watched with amusement and surprise while Lorna unpacked with great care a lurid papier-mâché duck and tried placing it in several locations around the room before settling on a window sill in the kitchen as just the right spot for it. “Lorna,” said Herb, “where did you get — ” “Don’t say anything nasty about it,” said Lorna. “I know it’s not beautiful, but it’s important to me.” She held the duck in front of her with both hands, elevated it, rotated it, examined it. “I’ve had it since I was a little girl.” She paused. “A very little girl,” she added distractedly, struck by an appreciation of all the time, so much time, that had passed since she’d thought that the duck was beautiful and that it stood for Uncle Luther’s love. How much more it meant now. And yet, how much uglier and smaller it seemed, now, here, removed from childhood and Chacallit, distant in time, space, and understanding. “This,” she said, meaning all that, “is a very old duck.”
THEIR STAY in the one-room apartment at the Mikszaths’ would, Herb and Lorna agreed, be temporary, and it would do just fine for a while, till they found something bigger, something better, while they were learning their way around Babbington, while Herb was establishing himself. It would be just fine until they found someplace that they really liked. They stayed for five years. During those five years, Mr. Mikszath, who had been the victim of a stroke, never said anything but “Dut, dut, dut.” Herb and Lorna learned to interpret his pointing, his sketching in the air, his twisted facial expressions, and the various emphases he put on his “duts,” and they made his vocabulary of “duts,” grimaces, and gestures a part of theirs. Mrs. Mikszath’s affection for them grew and grew, but she also developed a romantic interest in Herb. She began wearing makeup, elaborate costume jewelry, and gauzy, nearly transparent, blouses. Her remarks took on the style of double-entendres, even when they were not so intended, so warmly burned the fire in her heart. Once a week, at least, she would come to their door in the evening, soon after Herb had returned home, with a tray on which she’d laid out dinner for two, insisting, always, that she’d made too much for Miklos and herself, or that this was a dish she’d eaten as girl — full of memories, they had to try it — or that Miklos couldn’t eat because his stomach was “stormy.” Whatever she brought was provided in his-and-hers sizes: a large plate for Herb, almost a platter, and coffee in a mug; a small plate for Lorna, and coffee in a tiny cup, an heirloom, a precious cup of the thinnest, finest china, offered as an apology for the way she felt about Herb, an acknowledgment of Lorna’s femininity, and a reminder of her own.
In Topical Guide 303, Mark Dorset considers Language: Idiolect; Language: Structure (Morphemes, Phonemes, Syllables, Monosyllables); Language: Words Meaningful and Meaningless; Word Play; Semantic Satiation; and Scatting from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
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You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
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-
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
-
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
“REMEMBER,” said Herb, “you have to wear the blindfold.” “All right,” said Lorna. Actually, she liked the idea of wearing a blindfold, liked the mystery, looked forward to the surprise, loved Herb’s obvious delight over the apartment he’d found, took pleasure from his pleasure, and took pleasure from the fact (and there was no doubt, could be no doubt, that it was a fact) that he wanted to please her, wanted her to be as happy with the place he’d found as he was. She tied the blindfold, Herb’s scarf, around her head, and arranged it so that she couldn’t see. “You’re smiling,” said Herb. “I’m happy,” said Lorna. “This reminds me of closing my eyes when we were out on the lake the night we burned the ballroom.” “Here we are,” said Herb. He stopped the car, leaped out, ran around to Lorna’s door, and helped her out. He led her to the door of the house. He didn’t have to knock. Mrs. Mixup — so she called herself, giving in to the inability or unwillingness of the people she met to pronounce Mikszath — had been watching for their arrival. She opened the door silently, and silently Herb led Lorna along the hallway, through the first door, through the second, narrower, hallway, and through the second door, which he closed behind them. “And now,” he said, working at the knot Lorna had made in his scarf, “we can take the blindfold off.” He pulled it away, and Lorna gasped. For a terrible moment, Herb thought that he’d failed completely to see the place through Lorna’s eyes, thought that her gasp was a sign of revulsion, but that passed, passed as quickly as it had come. She clapped her hands, she whirled around, she moved from one part of the room to another, drawing deep breaths, beaming. “It’s so bright!” she said. “And it’s so — tiny.” “It is small,” said Herb, uncertain again. “Not small,” said Lorna. “Tiny. It’s wonderful. It’s like playing house, just like playing house. And look! Roses outside the window!” “You like it,” said Herb. “I love it,” said Lorna. She ran to him and threw her arms around his neck. “There is a drawback,” said Herb. “What?” asked Lorna. Herb reached behind him and opened the door. In the dark, narrow hallway, Lorna saw a bony white-haired woman, wiping her hands on an apron, and, behind her, a bent man who bobbed slightly and moved his mouth but said nothing. Herb grimaced and shifted his eyes from Lorna’s. “I’d like you to meet the Mikszaths,” he said. “Why, hello,” said Lorna. “Such a lovely girl,” said Mrs. Mikszath. She rushed forward and took Lorna’s hands. “A lovely girl, isn’t she, Miklos?” “Dut, dut, dut,” said Miklos. “I think I should show you — um — the entrance,” said Herb. He took Lorna by the hand and led her into the narrow hallway. The Mikszaths retreated before them, backing toward the front door. “Lovely,” said Mrs. Mikszath, again and again. “Dut, dut, dut,” said Mr. Mikszath.
In Topical Guide 302, Mark Dorset considers Flowers from this episode.
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
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You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
THE APARTMENT. Well, the apartment might not have seemed much better than the job. Herb found it while he was walking along Bolotomy Road, on his way to the area in the southernmost part of Babbington, along the bay, where, he had learned, most of the messier work was done. He intended to wander through the area and see what the businesses looked like, see whether there were any jobs to be had. He had already fixed his mind on the notion of demonstrating to Babbington a rise from obscurity by dint of labor, so that he would be admired and trusted, and he had decided to take any small, mean job at the scruffiest of the plants. Bolotomy Road began at the heart of Babbington, the only intersection lit by streetlamps on the dark night when Lorna and Herb arrived in town: the intersection that Babbingtonians of long standing always referred to as “Bolotomy and Main,” though in fact only the northerly reach of the road that intersected Main Street there was officially called Bolotomy Road. The part of it that ran to the south, toward the bay, had been renamed Bella Vista Boulevard, a name that the progressive faction of the town council had advocated as a step toward attracting touring motorists to Babbington. Bella Vista Boulevard was one of the shibboleths that identified newcomers; it was ignored by all Babbingtonians whose residence in Babbington predated the change or who wished to appear to have been living in Babbington before the change. Old-timers always referred to Bella Vista Boulevard as Lower Bolotomy and Bolotomy Road as Upper Bolotomy, or simply as Lower and Upper. Along Lower, as he walked south from Bolotomy and Main, Herb passed a couple of blocks of shops, shops that didn’t require the visibility of Main Street locations (or didn’t desire that visibility — it was in this stretch, about twenty-five years after Lorna and Herb came to Babbington, that Head Cheese, Babbington’s first psyche-delicatessen, opened, displacing a candy-and-tobacco store called Maxie’s). Farther along, he passed large, handsome frame houses, most of them painted white, many the homes of professional people — doctors, lawyers, accountants — some of whom had offices in their homes and hung their shingles on metal brackets that projected from the sides of their front porches. He continued walking, past blocks of smaller houses, into a stretch where the houses were very small, not much larger than cabins, and tumbled together, like sugar cubes spilled from a box. The little houses were separated by narrow strips of sand in which, here and there, hardy patches of crabgrass grew, and in odd corners there was the happy surprise of a wild rose. In the window of one of these houses was a sign:
APT TO LET
Herb couldn’t imagine where the apartment could be. The house presented such a tiny, pinched face to the street that it seemed too small to house the landlord, let alone a tenant. Curious, he knocked. In a moment, the door opened a few inches. A gaunt, bent man with sunken eyes looked out. “Hello,” said Herb. “I saw the sign. ‘Apt to let.’ ” He smiled. The eyes looked Herb up and down. The man’s tongue popped out one side of his mouth, as if acting on its own initiative, and waggled. The man’s mouth moved as if in speech, but no sound came from it other than something like “Dut, dut, dut.” The man’s head nodded, and the door closed. Herb wasn’t sure whether he’d been told to wait or to go away. He waited. In a moment the door opened again, fully this time. Standing in the doorway was a short, scrawny woman. She had wild hair; it looked as if she’d given each of the phrenological regions of her scalp a hairdo of its own. She looked at Herb for a moment without saying anything or altering her blank expression. Then, suddenly, she burst into a frenzy of welcome. “Come in! Come in!” she cried. She reached out and grabbed Herb’s sleeve and began tugging at him. She bared her few teeth in a smile. “I’d be happy to show you the apartment. Happy.” Herb let himself be drawn inside, and she closed the door behind him at once. Herb followed her down a narrow hallway that ran along one side of the boxy little house. On his left was an outer wall. It was covered with wallpaper that must once have been bright and pretty, a pattern of wild roses, but was now so darkened and stained that the roses barely showed. On his right were curtains, improvised from old bedspreads, worn and soiled, that provided the only separation between the hallway and the living quarters beyond. These bedspreads didn’t quite meet. Through the spaces between them, Herb saw a dark sitting room and a dingy kitchen. In the kitchen, seated at a small table, was the man who had come to the door when he first knocked, now bent over a copy of the Babbington Reporter, straining to read in the dim light, rocking slightly while he read and repeating to himself, “Dut, dut, dut.” At the end of the makeshift hallway was a door, and beyond the door was another very narrow hallway, without any light at all, and at the end of that was another door. The shrunken woman opened the second door, and the effect was as if she had opened a door to the sun. Herb stepped inside a small room, almost a perfect cube, a box of yellow light. It was a tiny room, but it had been scrubbed and polished and whitewashed, and there were windows all around it. In one corner was a rudimentary kitchen; in another was a living room (two upholstered chairs arranged on either side of a wobbly table); in the third was a bed — crudely built, the honey color of old pine, enormous and inviting; in the fourth corner was a bathtub on ball-and-claw feet. “Is there — uh — ?” asked Herb. “Uhh?” asked the white-haired woman. “Uhh — ” said Herb. “Uhh?” she asked again. “Uh, that is — ” “Ahhh!” said the woman. “Ohhh, yes, yes, right out here.” She opened a door beside the tub, and, to Herb’s relief, disclosed a flush toilet.
In Topical Guide 301, Mark Dorset considers Shibboleths from this episode.
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You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
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You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
IN THE DAYS that followed, Herb looked for work, and Lorna looked for a place to live. As it happened, Lorna found a job, and Herb found an apartment. The job that Lorna found, through a conversation with a woman in a drug store, was a job for Herb. It wasn’t much of a job. It was a job as a culler in the Babbington Clam packing plant. Cullers picked through the clams, sorting them by size and quality. Cullers’ work was boring work. It didn’t pay much. The woman who suggested it to Lorna was a clammy’s wife; she had thought of culling as work for Lorna, work to bring in money until her husband got a job, work that would assure her that some money would always be coming in, even when her husband was out of work, work to help make ends meet, work to earn her some mad money, perhaps, but not a breadwinner’s work, not work for bringing home the bacon. Herb took the job at once. He and Lorna didn’t need money right away; they had put together enough to keep them for a while. Herb knew, though, from his selling experience, how important, persistent, and difficult to alter a first impression is, and for that reason he wanted to get to work right away, and the meaner the job, the more it suited him. The first impression that people have of you, even when it is a mistaken one (and I’d be willing to bet that three first impressions out of four are mistaken), becomes a part of your past as perceived (or misperceived) by those who have formed the impression (or misimpression), a part of that past that pursues you forever, that dogged giant who’s always on your heels. Bob Mintner, in his overpriced videocassette series You Could Make a Million If You Would Stop Acting Like a Jerk, says, on the subject of the first impression:
You can NEVER overcome the first impression. If you get off on the WRONG FOOT, you can NEVER get back in step. You may think that tomorrow, if you wear a new jacket and tie, change your hairstyle, sprinkle your remarks with some of the latest “SNAPPY” expressions, and put a new SPRING in your step, people will see you in a NEW LIGHT, that they’ll say, “Say, I’ve been ALL WRONG about Fred! Why, it’s as if I’m seeing him for the FIRST TIME.” Well, FORGET it. You’re WRONG. They may look at you, but they won’t SEE you. The man they are going to see is the man who matches the IDEA THEY FORMED OF YOU when they FIRST MET YOU. Compared to you, that guy is a GIANT! The only thing you can do if you’ve gotten off on the wrong foot is pack your bags, get out of town, change your name, and start ALL OVER AGAIN.
“What I want to do, Lorna,” said Herb, “is make a good first impression. I want to impress on people the idea that I’m ready to work. I want them to think of me as a hard and willing worker. Later on, I can find a good selling job, I’m sure of that. When I do, I’ll have a reputation around town. People won’t think of me as a guy who came into town as a salesman. They’ll think of me as a guy who came to Babbington with nothing but ambition and a willingness to work and who, by God, worked himself up from a job culling in the clam plant to a good job as a salesman. I’ll be a Babbington success story, a local hero, and people will be happy to buy from me.” Lorna wasn’t sure whether to laugh or not. She saw that there was wisdom behind Herb’s idea, but even so it sounded like a laughable scheme. “Where did you get those ideas?” she asked. “Well,” said Herb, “I thought of the details myself, but I got the basic idea from one of the books in Professor Clapp’s Five-Foot Shelf.” “What one was that?” “Sixty-six Steps up the Stairway to Success — Starting at the Bottom.”
In Topical Guide 300, Mark Dorset considers Literature: Self-Improvement and Self-Help from this episode.
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
-
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
AFTER LORNA AND HERB were settled in their room at the River Sound, they went out for a walk. Through the rain and the dark, they walked in the direction in which Lorna supposed the ocean to be. They walked along River Sound Road, then along Bolotomy Road, until they reached the Municipal Dock. Storm-driven waves pounded the dock, and spray washed over the bulkheads. Lorna cried, “The ocean!” It was not — it was only Bolotomy Bay — but Lorna felt exactly the surge of excitement she had imagined she would feel when she first saw the ocean. She ran to the edge of the dock. Clinging to a piling, she leaned out over the dark water and let the spray splatter her. She licked the water from her lips and tasted the salt. She ran to Herb and hugged him. “Let’s go back to the hotel and see if we can burn it down,” she said.
AT THAT TIME, the economic foundation of Babbington still rested on the bottom of Bolotomy Bay, on the bay’s clam beds. The clamming industry and related industries — boat building and repair, the manufacture of clamming equipment, clam processing, clam by-products, tartar sauce preparation and packaging, and so on — employed most of the men of Babbington and nearly all of the women who worked. The Babbington Clam Council, an industry group, was a powerful force in local politics, and clamming-related fraternal orders — notably the Mercenarians, the Order of Littlenecks, and the Secret and Mystical Fraternity of Fun-Loving Baymen — were important in the social life of the town. A casual stroll along Main Street, like the casual stroll that Lorna and Herb took on their first full day in town, provided ample evidence of the importance of the bay and the clam. At first glance, Main Street, Babbington, looked much like Main Street in any other small town of that time; the street was lined with banks, lunch counters, a hardware store, a five-and-ten, a movie house, groceries, shoe stores, clothing shops, and such, and above the shops were offices occupied by insurance companies, the Babbington Reporter, lawyers, dentists, a gypsy reader, and other professionals — the assortment of enterprises that one would expect on Main Street just about anywhere. A closer look, however, discovered signs of the dominance of clam fishery: the clam-digging equipment displayed in the window of Babbington Diggers’ Gear, the “Stages in the Life of a Clam” exhibit in a window of the local office of Continental Clam, the “treading booties” offered in the window of the Superior Shoe Shop, the clam chowder, clam broth, clams casino, baked stuffed clams, clam fritters, clam cakes, fried clams, steamed clams, clams on the half shell, and “clamburger” on the menu at Louise’s Lunch, and so on. They walked the length of Main Street. They stopped across the street from Continental Clam to watch some schoolchildren on a field trip make their way from panel to panel in the stages in the life of a clam. The children seemed fascinated by one panel in particular. Lorna took Herb by the arm and pulled him across the street. They stood behind the children and looked over their heads. Large blue letters at the top of the display announced:
FERTILIZATION TAKES PLACE OUTSIDE THE SHELL!
A diorama depicted a submarine orgy. Several female clams were discharging puffs that reminded Lorna of her father’s pipe smoke.
FEMALE RELEASES A HUNDRED MILLION EGGS AT ONCE!
Several male clams were releasing thin whitish streams in random directions.
MORE THAN TWO BILLION SPERM PER EJACULATION!
The children were giggling. One girl noticed Herb and Lorna’s reflection in the window. She turned and looked at Lorna and blushed. Lorna smiled and, quite aware of the implications of what she was doing, winked at the girl. She squeezed Herb’s arm tighter, and when they walked away she stopped after a couple of steps, put both arms around Herb, hugged him, and kissed him. She hoped the girl was watching, and she hoped she’d get the message Lorna meant to send: it’s a lot more fun than that.
In Topical Guide 299, Mark Dorset considers Clams: Life Cycle of; and Clams: Sex Life of from this episode.
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
-
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Dan inspected Herb. Behind Dan, a door opened, and a squat man in coveralls emerged from it. Herb smiled and nodded at him. “You related to the Feasters?” Dan asked. “No,” said Herb. “The name’s Piper, Herb Piper. I don’t have any relatives here — I don’t even know anyone here.” He extended his hand. Neither Dan nor Speedy made a move to shake it. “The wife?” asked Dan. “No, no. We just came to Babbington because — ” Herb had been about to describe the method that Lorna had used to choose Babbington as a place for them to live, but he thought better of it. It would, he knew, seem ridiculous, and, worse than that, it might seem insulting. After all, wouldn’t he be saying that he and Lorna had come to Babbington because they knew that they could be happy wherever they went, that their love, their benevolent giant, would follow them anywhere? You can’t say that to a person, Herb thought, say that this place, the place where he lives, seems to you only as good as any other place — no better, no worse.“Because what?” asked Dan. There was a new chill in his voice. “Well, because we heard nice things about it,” Herb lied. He certainly didn’t want to begin his life in Babbington by offending the civic pride of, or arousing the suspicions of, the police. “That is, my wife did,” he said, his mind racing. “See, my wife is from Chacallit, upstate, not far from Albany, and — um — when she was a little girl some people from Babbington were passing through, and — ” “That would be the Sutphens, I’ll bet,” said Speedy, folding his arms across his chest. “The Sutphens!” said Herb, eager to establish some link between Lorna and himself and the town. “It probably was! Yes, it probably was. The Sutphens.” “Went to Canada,” said Speedy. Herb nodded enthusiastically. “Fled to Canada,” said Dan. “Probably passed through this place your wife’s from — Whatchamacallit — ” “Chacallit.” “Right. Wilfred and Elizabeth Sutphen. Wilfred was accused of embezzling, went to trial, wasn’t convicted.” “Not guilty,” said Herb, nodding again. “Not convicted,” said Dan. “Uh-huh,” said Herb, who was beginning to wonder how long it would take to drive to West Burke, Vermont. “Nobody ever found the money,” said Speedy. “I read where Wilfred died just a few weeks ago,” said Dan. “Fell off a horse in front of a truck,” said Speedy. “I remember the headline on his obit,” said Dan. He held his hands in front of him with his thumbs and index fingers spread and drew them apart to suggest a banner headline. “ ‘Former Babbingtonian Dies in Wolf Snout, Manitoba,’ it said. And then under that, smaller, it said, ‘Wilfred Sutphen, 58, Alleged Embezzler.’ ” “Well,” said Herb, “I’m sure it was somebody else, then, not the Sutphens, but whoever it was, these people made the town sound so wonderful that my wife fell in love with the place.” “She fell in love with it without even seeing it?” asked Speedy. He didn’t look like a man convinced. Herb asked himself why he hadn’t just told the truth. He was backing farther and farther into a corner. This was not getting off on the right foot. “She — ” said Herb. He sighed. He didn’t know what to say next. The door opened. Lorna walked in. “Lorna!” he said. “Lorna. I — was just trying to explain to — um, Officer — um — and Mr. Speedy how it was that we decided to settle here in Babbington, why it had to be this town and no other. Not as if we just picked out any old town on a map — and they were wondering how it was that you fell in love with the place without ever having seen it.” “I saw it in my mind’s eye,” said Lorna, “in my imagination. The little seacoast town. The neat houses.” She stopped. Dan and Speedy wore looks that said they expected more. “The — uh, church steeples,” offered Herb. “The — red and yellow leaves on the trees in the fall.” “Schoolchildren on their way to — school,” said Lorna. “The glowing streetlamps,” said Herb. Lorna held her hands up as if calling for silence and half closed her eyes. “The night, the glowing streetlamps, the people asleep in their cozy beds, in their neat houses, safe and warm, while trusty guardians keep watch through the night.” She smiled. She wore the look of an enchanted child, envisioning her Shangri-La. Dan and Speedy smiled back. They looked enchanted themselves. “And after all these years, here you are at last,” Dan said. Lorna smiled her answer. “Well, I hope you won’t be disappointed,” said Speedy. “A lot of times, you find out that things aren’t everything you were hoping they’d be, you know? You get an idea all worked up in your mind about how something is going to be and then, brother, are you in for a surprise. Take right now, for instance. I’ll bet you didn’t imagine that when you got to Babbington, you’d be caught in a rainstorm like this, did you?” Lorna couldn’t resist. “Oh, I did,” she said, breathless, her eyes shining. “I imagined it just like this.” “What?” said Speedy, his eyes widening. “Howling wind, driving rain, and you all wet and shivering — that’s the way you imagined it?” “Yes,” said Lorna, still the enchanted girl. “And you fell in love with it?” A nod full of charm, those bright eyes. “Boy, oh boy, love is a crazy thing,” said Dan, grinning and shaking his head. “A woman can fall in love with the—” He caught himself. Confused, he looked at Lorna. He found no help in her smile. To change the subject, he asked, “Where — um — where did you imagine you two were going to stay?” Lorna closed her eyes. “A small hotel — ” she said. “Mm-hm,” said Dan. “Yeah,” said Speedy. “ — where salesmen stay sometimes — ” “Mm.” “Yep.” “ — with a small dining room — ” “Gosh.” “Brother.” “ — not far from here.” “That’s got to be the River Sound Hotel!” said Dan. His eyes were wide. “Couldn’t be anyplace else,” said Speedy. “That’s it, plain as day.” “Amazing,” said Dan. He let his mouth hang open.
In Topical Guide 298, Mark Dorset considers Babbington from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
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You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
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-
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
-
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
IT TOOK MORE than two months for Herb to dispose of the coarse goods Ben gave him, develop eleven new couples (and how he yearned for Lorna while he worked, how much his imagination was enlarged by thinking of her), sell his list of Five-Foot-Shelf customers, sell his old Studebaker Four, and buy a new-to-him Studebaker Series 19 “Light Six.” Lorna carved coarse goods for Luther while she waited for Herb’s return, and together, though apart, they accumulated a nice little nest egg.
AT HERB AND LORNA’S WEDDING, Lester Piper appeared to have regained all of his old spark. He so charmed Richard Huber that Richard spent hours trying to persuade Lester to leave what he supposed was a fairly good position in Boston and move to Chacallit, where the air was clear and the rushing waters of the Whatsit were mellifluous and pure, and to try breathing some life into his sales department. To Richard Huber’s surprise (but much more to the surprise of Millie and Ben Piper), Lester accepted. There was some talk in Chacallit when Lester and Millie arrived and put up with the Hubers until they found a place of their own, and there was some resentment when Lester assumed his duties, but in a few months even the people who had resented him most when he arrived had to admit that Lester Piper was the best salesman they’d ever seen.
HERB AND LORNA arrived in Babbington on a cold and rainy Sunday night. The town looked deserted. Main Street was nearly dark; the only light came from night lights in a few shops, from the streetlamps at the intersection of Bolotomy and Main, from the police station, and from a garage across the street from the police station. Of these, the first that Lorna and Herb saw, coming into town from the west, were those at the police station and the garage. “Well,” said Herb, “it’s not quite what I’d imagined.” “How can you tell?” asked Lorna. “I can’t see a thing.” “That’s what I mean. I had imagined a clear night, a moon, moonlight on the ocean, something like that.” “Sounds like the night we burned the ballroom,” said Lorna. “There’s something,” said Herb. “Looks like a police station up ahead.” “I’ll take your word for it,” said Lorna. “And a service station. Speedy’s Reliable Service.” Herb pulled into Speedy’s and dashed through the rain into the station. There, at an oak desk, bent over a copy of the Babbington Reporter, was Officer Dan Whitley, youngest son of the renowned scoundrel and noted angler Andy Whitley, the mayor of Babbington at that time. After a moment or two spent standing, patiently, just inside the door, clearing his throat and shuffling his feet now and then, Herb decided that Dan was asleep. He retreated soundlessly to the door, opened it, backed out into the rain, and reentered, this time with a heavy tread and loud exclamations. “Whoo!” he exclaimed. “It’s not a fit night out for man or beast!” He stamped his feet and shook the rainwater from his hat. Dan, startled, sat up straight, shook himself awake, and rubbed his eyes. “Say, I didn’t startle you, did I?” asked Herb. “Me?” asked Dan. “Heck no. You just kind of surprised me. I was pretty intent on what I was reading here, that’s all.” “What’s that?” asked Herb. “Obits,” said Dan. “Uh-oh,” said Herb. “Nobody close to you, I hope.” “Hm? Oh, no. Not anybody special. Well, there is a cousin in here today, kind of a distant one, though. Couple of other people I knew enough to say hello to. I read ’em all, though. Don’t matter to me who they are. It’s kind of a study with me, a study of human nature. You find out a lot about people this way. ’Course, you have to know how to read between the lines sometimes, but it’s funny how much you don’t know about somebody till he’s dead.” Herb and Dan spent a moment in silent contemplation of that idea, and then Dan looked at Herb as if realizing for the first time that Herb was someone he didn’t know at all, not even to say hello to. “Say,” Dan said, “what’re you doing out on a night like this? You in some kind of trouble?” “No,” said Herb, “no trouble. My wife and I — ” “Lost?” “No, I — ” “Passing through? Want some gas?” A toilet flushed somewhere behind Dan, and he jerked his thumb in the direction of the sound. “Speedy’ll be right out,” he said. “I’d pump you some myself, but I’m on duty.” “That’s okay. I don’t need gas,” said Herb. “Just directions.” “Said you weren’t lost,” Dan pointed out. He narrowed his eyes. “No. Yes. That’s right, I’m not. Lost. I — we — we’re going to settle here.” “Here? In Babbington?” “Yes, in Babbington.”
In Topical Guide 297, Mark Dorset considers Studebakers; Disappointment: Expectations Unrealized; and Obituaries from this episode.
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You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
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IN BOSTON, Herb told his uncle Ben what he had in mind. “Here’s what I have in mind, Uncle Ben,” he said. “I’ll make eleven more prototypes. That’ll give you a dozen models. Okay?” “Okay,” said Ben. “I’ll work out an arrangement with the people in Chacallit so that you get a certain percentage of the sales.” “I need money now, Uncle Ben.” “Maybe I can get them to advance you some money. I’ll have to see.” “Why don’t I just sell you the designs, Uncle Ben? Outright. Then you make whatever deal you want with the manufacturer. How about that?” (Herb felt a little ashamed of himself for what he was doing, because he thought that he might be taking advantage of his uncle Ben. An outright sale of the designs seemed to Herb the only prudent course to take. It would have seemed so to his cautious mother, too. A bird in the hand certainly seems to be worth two in the bush. But, as it turned out, Herb was, at the very moment when he was feeling guilty about taking advantage of Ben, doing a foolish Piper thing. He was convincing himself that the coarse-goods trade was a poor financial risk. He was talking himself into taking sure money instead of the royalties that might have made him rich.) “Well, I’d be taking a risk,” said Ben. “Oh, right,” said Herb. “You’re right. I understand that — ” “I wouldn’t be able to give you too much for them,” said Ben, “on account of the risk.” “I understand,” said Herb. “I know you’re taking a risk.” “How much did you think you’d want?” asked Ben. “Three thousand dollars,” said Herb. “Oh,” said Ben. He was genuinely disappointed. He had hoped that he’d be able to let Herb have everything he wanted, that he would be able to be both generous uncle and good businessman. “It’s more than I can put out,” he said. “I’ve got an idea, though. I can give you half of it in cash and half of it in goods.” “What kind of goods?” “Coarse goods.” “Aw, Uncle Ben,” said Herb. “It’s the best I can do, Herb,” said Ben. “I mean it.” “All right,” said Herb. He paused. “Uncle Ben, you have to promise me something. You have to promise me never to tell anyone about this.” “Hell, you shouldn’t be ashamed of this, Herb. There’s lots of people who do worse things than — ” “Uncle Ben, you have to promise.” “All right, I promise.” “And I mean never.” “Never.”
WHEN LORNA arrived at Luther’s office, he greeted her with a thin smile. “This is an unexpected pleasure,” he said. “Uncle Luther,” said Lorna, “I’ll do it.” “Do what?” asked Luther, smiling unctuously. “You know what,” said Lorna. “Why, you don’t mean — ” said Luther, raising an eyebrow to complete his question. “Yes, I do, and you know it.” “Now must be never, then.” “I guess it must.” “What changed your mind, my dear?” “Herb and I are going to leave Chacallit, and we’ll need money to get ourselves settled.” “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.” “Uncle Luther, let’s talk about my terms.” “Terms?” “I’ll work for two months.” “Two months?” “That’s all. I want your word that you’ll never tell anyone about this and that you’ll never ask me to work on coarse goods again.” “Does this mean that your young man doesn’t know about your craft?” “He doesn’t know anything at all about it, and I want you to promise that he’ll never know anything from you, directly or indirectly. No accidental slips. No hints. No winks. Nothing.” “He will never know from me, dear,” said Luther, raising his hand. “I wonder, though, whether deception is a good beginning for a marriage.” Lorna went right on. “I want twenty-five percent more than John Caldwell’s getting now,” she said. “You can tell people I’m getting less, if you want, but that’s what you’re going to have to pay me.” “My, my, isn’t it amazing the way time changes people. It seems as if it was only yesterday when you came into this office full of righteous indignation, waving a pamphlet from the Women’s Socialist League or something like that — ” “The Women’s Trade Union League.” “Oh. The Women’s Trade Union League. You were quite taken with what they had to say back then. Wasn’t it ‘equal pay for equal work’?” “It was.” “Well, what happened to that idea?” “Why, Uncle Luther,” said Lorna, “You know very well that John’s work was never the equal of mine.” She turned and walked out of the office, leaving the door open behind her. When she was halfway along the corridor, she heard its satisfying slam.
In Topical Guide 296, Mark Dorset considers Promises, Exacting a Promise; Secrets; Decisions: Irreversible, Slamming Door as Metaphor for; and Fortune Cookie Wisdom from this episode.
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You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
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“CHACALLIT is about one hundred seventy-eight and a half miles from Boston,” said Lorna, looking up from the map that she had spread out on the kitchen table. “ ‘About’?” said Herb. He poked her. She bumped him with her hip. “About,” she said. “Here. Let’s try something.” From a drawer, she took a ball of string. She stretched a length of it from Boston to Chacallit. She held the Boston end in place, and with her pencil at the other end, she scribed an arc. Then she held the Chacallit end in place, put her pencil at the Boston end, and scribed another arc. “What have we got?” asked Herb. Together, they bent over the map. “Well, we’ve got West Burke, Vermont,” said Lorna, pointing out the northern intersection of the arcs, “or,” turning to the southern intersection, “Babbington, New York. On Long Island.” She looked at Herb. He looked at her. “I like the ocean,” he said. “I’ve never seen it,” said Lorna, beaming. Separately, each of them knew that they’d need money to move, and, separately, each of them knew how to get it, and neither of them wanted the other to know how it would be gotten, so each of them concocted a lie, and the lies, like the arcs Lorna drew to find a place to go, overlapped and intersected, and they concealed truths that overlapped and intersected too. “I have some money — ” Lorna began. “So do I,” said Herb. “But my uncle Luther is — holding it,” said Lorna. “My uncle Ben has mine,” said Herb. “I — I invested it — that is, he invested it for me,” said Lorna. “I lent it to Uncle Ben to help him out, but I’m sure he can pay me back now,” said Herb. “It will take a little while for me to get it,” said Lorna. “I’ll have to go home and explain to Uncle Ben,” said Herb. “It could take — a while.”
In Topical Guide 295, Mark Dorset considers Places: Real and Fictional; and Maps: Real and Fictional from this episode.
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You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Chapter 8
In Which Herb and Lorna Move to Babbington, New York
THE FIRE at the Serenity Ballroom was caused, an investigation disclosed, not by Herb and Lorna’s ardor but by a kitchen accident. According to May Castle, Lorna considered the burning of the ballroom the symbolic end of her girlhood, the end of her life as a child:
Oh, yes, it was the burning point of her life. Oh! I didn’t mean that, not at all. I meant to say “turning point,” I honestly did. Stop. Rewind. Start again. That night was the turning point of her life, you see. And everything just happened all at once. Here she was engaged, and she’d just made love to this wonderful man — the man she was destined to live her life with — and, oh, I don’t know, she may have had her first orgasm. Well! Then, to top it off, there was this perfectly spectacular fire! It was quite a night. It doesn’t surprise me a bit that she decided right then that she and Chacallit were fini.
“CLOSE YOUR EYES, Herb,” said Lorna, “and I’ll tell you about our future.” She and Herb had driven to the top of Ackerman Hill, or as far as the road went, and they had stopped in the turnaround there. Herb had his arm around Lorna’s shoulders, and she reclined against him. He closed his eyes. “All right,” he said. “Now imagine this,” said Lorna. “Six months have passed. We’ve been married for four. Four months ago, my father gave you a job in the sales department, and there was some talk, which you and he and I ignored as well as we could. From your very first day on the job, though, you impressed everyone, and now even the people who resented you most when you arrived have to admit that you’re the best salesman they’ve ever seen.” Herb gave her a little squeeze. “They still talk about you behind your back, but now they usually say something like, ‘You know, I hate to admit it, but that Herb Piper is one heck of a salesman.’ My father is very proud of you. So am I. I’ve stopped working at the mill, because you don’t want my old friends to think that you can’t support me. My father approves, since he never wanted me to work at the mill in the first place. I spend all day at home. My mother won’t let me cook, since that’s her job. However, I am permitted to wash the dishes. Every day my mother asks me if my marriage is happy and whether there’s anything I need to ask her about. “You and I are still living on the third floor, and we have to whisper when we talk in bed at night. We eat dinner with my parents every evening, and after dinner we all sit together in the parlor, except on weekends, when you and I go out. Every time we go out, we run into Andy Proctor. You and Andy have become great pals. Every time he greets you he pounds you on the back, and every time he greets me he winks. “My mother and father celebrate our six-month anniversary by opening a bottle of champagne. My father announces that you’ve earned another promotion. We’re all delighted. Then he clears his throat and tells us how very happy he and my mother are about the way things have turned out. He makes a joke about the misunderstanding when they first met you. My mother laughs. We all laugh. He says something sentimental. We all shed some tears. We eat dinner. We sit in the parlor. The clock ticks. My father nods in his chair. You and I go upstairs. We slip into bed. We are very quiet. In the dark, I whisper in your ear, ‘Herb, let’s get out of here.’ ” She sat upright, took Herb’s face in her hands, and said, “Herb, why wait? Let’s get out of here now.” “Okay,” said Herb.
In Topical Guide 294, Mark Dorset considers Privacy; Secrecy; Fiction, Autobiographical: Its Secrets, Its Motives; and Family: Escaping from this episode.
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You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
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Lorna, holding Herb’s hand to steady herself, stepped into the rowboat. The first notes drifted out over the lake, just as Herb pushed off from the dock, and — what luck! — “Lake Serenity Serenade” turned out to be lilting and beautiful, and the sax section of the Triple-A Orchestra outdid itself. It was a great stroke of luck, one of those happy accidents we discredit when we hear an account of their happening to someone else, although they figure so prominently in our dreams and daydreams and are sometimes our only reason for hope. In Time and Free Will, his essay on the immediate data of consciousness, Henri Bergson remarked that joy and passion are “very like a turning of our states of consciousness toward the future. As if their weight were diminished by this attraction, our ideas and sensations succeed one another with greater rapidity; our movements no longer cost us the same effort.” That is precisely what Herb, in his joy and passion, experienced, though he didn’t give it a thought. He just found the rowing remarkably easy. The water seemed as insubstantial as the moonlight that played upon it. Herb took long, languid strokes. When he lifted the oars, silver droplets fell from the blades, leaving silver circles on the surface, circles that widened in the wake of the little boat. The boat glided on, as easily as if it were floating above the lake, through the clear air of the Whatsit Valley. Lorna reclined in the stern and looked at the stars. She let her fingers brush the surface of the water on either side of the boat. They left rippling wakes of their own. Herb couldn’t see where he was going. He had his back to the bow; he saw only Lorna. He was quite content. He saw her smiling, and he was delighted to see her smiling. This was a smile of contentment, of serene joy. “Lorna,” he whispered, “close your eyes.” Still smiling, she closed her eyes. Herb went on rowing. “Imagine that you see your future,” said Herb. “Tell me what you see.” Lorna drew a breath, and the air she inhaled thrilled her. For a moment, she could hardly believe that she was breathing ordinary air, the effect was so intoxicating. She had imagined her future so well that she seemed to have taken a breath from that time, and her smile widened because she’d tasted her future and found that she liked it. Herb was rowing toward the future; the past was in their wake. “It must be good,” said Herb, watching her. “It is,” said Lorna. “Close your eyes, and I’ll tell you what I see.” “If I close my eyes, I won’t be able to see where I’m going.” Airy laughter, almost giggles; silvery, moonlit laughter. “Of course I can’t see where I’m going,” said Herb. He swallowed and dared to say, very softly, “But I can see my future.” Then he closed his eyes. “I closed my eyes,” he said. “I see you,” said Lorna. Herb drew a long breath and found it so intoxicating that he gripped the oars tighter to steady himself. “Does that mean what I hope it means?” he asked. “I hope so,” she said. “Do you want to know about my plans?” Herb asked. “Of course I do,” said Lorna. “But it won’t make any difference what they are; it’s you I love, Herb, not your plans. Do you want to know mine?” “Wouldn’t make any difference to me either,” said Herb. Lorna sat up suddenly. “Are we engaged?” she asked. “I hope so,” said Herb. The crowd inside the ballroom called for an encore of “Lake Serenity Serenade” and got it, and during the encore Herb and Lorna made love. It was, compared to what either had tasted so far, a feast. All the senses were invited, and there was no reason this time to leave the mind, the heart, or the imagination out of the fun; there was something for all of them — some rocking rowboat, rocking, rocking, beneath their tentative caresses, balsam scenting the air, moaning saxophones, Lorna leaning over Herb, running her hands over his chest, imagining modeling him in clay, tugging, pushing, kneading at his skin as if it were clay, pushing him backward and pulling his pants down, laughing, the rowboat rocking, rocking, rocking, whooops, rocking, grabbing for the gunwales, ouch, ooh, a splinter, thin sliver in the palm of Lorna’s hand, Herb’s slow, cautious extraction, drawing the sliver out so slowly that the sweet pain made Lorna run her hand between her legs, salty taste of Lorna’s blood, fluttering tickle of Herb’s tongue in Lorna’s palm, Lorna stretching out, her slow undressing, moonlight turning her to ivory, Herb imagining her in ivory, articulated here, here, here, here, wavelets lapping the sides of the boat, distant voices, laughter, a call, a shriek, stars twinkling in the night sky and bouncing in the water, Lorna’s foot dangling in the water, Lorna twisting around and settling onto Herb, wiggling to feel Herb in her, the long curved edges of the gunwales pressed into Herb’s calves, his feet dangling in the water, the wavelets tickling the soles of his feet, and at the moment of his coming the tickling becoming too much to bear, his laughing, laughing, laughing, their collapsing into the boat like fish landed after a struggle, flopping over the seats, bruising themselves on the edges and corners and oarlocks, and laughing, laughing, and subsiding, and lying with their arms around each other, just looking out over the water, the flickering water, silver with moonlight, but now, oddly, gold here and there, and even red, and — Lorna lifted herself on one elbow and looked back toward the ballroom. It was in flames. They hurried into their clothes and began rowing back, sitting side by side, pulling at the oars, keeping their course by keeping their fire-formed shadows in the boat, and Lorna, who was so giddy with the promise of the future they had tasted that she couldn’t resist her happiness, even though she worried about the fire, turned toward Herb and asked, “You don’t think we did it, do you?”
In Topical Guide 293, Mark Dorset considers Moonlight; Fire: As a Metaphor for Passion; and Passion: Fire as a Metaphor for from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
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You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
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“This is an honor!” said Bump. He grabbed Herb’s hand in both of his and began pumping it. “An honor!” He raised Herb’s arm in the air and said, turning to the crowd, “This is Herb Piper!” There wasn’t much of a reaction to this announcement: puzzled looks, some mumbled speculation. “Herb Piper!” Bump said again, a look of incredulity on his face. “The guy from Boston who fixed those goddamned cup handles,” he said. He turned to Herb. “Boy,” he said, in an apologetic tone, “sic transit gloria mundi, huh?” But the others remembered, now, and they began to draw nearer in a circle around Herb. “Shake the hand that shook the hand of Black Jack Pershing himself,” said Bump, waving Herb’s arm above the others, who pressed in for the chance to do so. “I — uh — knew you’d want to meet him,” said Andy, tugging at Bump’s sleeve. “I didn’t actually shake hands with — ” Herb began. Good sense made him stop. He shrugged and let the claim stand. He reached for the hands extended toward him. A couple of hours later, after they had chatted with Lorna’s friends and danced and eaten pieces of lemon cake, Lorna whispered to Herb the suggestion that they rent a boat and row around on the lake in the moonlight for a while. They excused themselves, left the crowd that had gathered at their table, skirted the dance floor, and left by the door that led onto the porch. Adelaide Hooper and her sister Priscilla watched them go. When they were gone, Addy sighed and gave Priss a look that Priss understood at once. It was a look they had exchanged often, ever since they had become interested in boys. “Don’t you wish — ?” asked Addy. “Oh, don’t I,” said Priss. “Hey, wish what?” asked Zack Mitchell. He gave Addy a squeeze. “You’re not wishing you were her, are you?” “No, it isn’t that,” said Addy. “I just wish we were more like them. They’re so — well — they kind of understand each other.” “We don’t?” asked Zack. Addy sighed and frowned. “Did you see the way he looked at her when he came back into the hall with Andy Proctor and all those other guys? Just a little grin, but she knew what he meant by it. Priss and I can do that, but you and I — well — I wish we — I wish we — understood each other like that.” “And the way they dance together,” said Priss. “Come on,” said Zack. “They don’t dance well at all.” “I know,” said Priss, “but they — oh, I know this doesn’t seem to make sense, but they don’t dance well the same way — the way they don’t dance well is just right for them.” “I know just what you mean,” said Addy. “Well, I don’t,” said Zack. He went outside for a pull at his flask. Arnold Abbot Adler, leader of the resident dance band at the Serenity Ballroom, Arnold Abbot Adler’s Triple-A Orchestra, stepped to the edge of the bandstand and said, “Now, folks, we’d like to try something a little different, something that the boys and I have been working on for a long time, something we call ‘Lake Serenity Serenade.’ ”
In Topical Guide 292, Mark Dorset considers Partnership; Teamwork; Collaboration; Concord from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
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You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
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You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
WHEN HERB AND LORNA walked into the ballroom, everyone fell silent, and everyone turned to stare. Herb had no difficulty identifying the particular young man. Andy Proctor hopped up from the table where he was sitting with a group of friends and admirers (a couple of whom were, to be accurate, neither friends nor admirers but young men and women who were broke and out of work and entertained hopes that Andy would get them work at Proctor’s Products, lend them money, or at least pick up the tab for the evening). He bounded to the door to greet Herb and Lorna, producing exactly the effect he’d hoped for: a ripple of admiration for his big-heartedness ran around the room, and Andrew was a hero for the second time. (Elsa Burch, who had been inclined to think of him as an egotistical braggart, developed a fondness for him on the spot. Four months later they were engaged; they married the following spring. They lived together in Chacallit all their lives. Their youngest son still lives in Chacallit today. He owns the gay bar, 24-Karat Studs.) “So you’re the better man,” Andy said when Lorna introduced Herb. “What do you say we step outside?” Outside, Andy leaned against the railing on the open porch that reached out over Lake Serenity. Moonlight flickered on the rippling water. He reached into his jacket pocket and produced a small sterling flask manufactured by Proctor’s Products. The flask was a little outside the usual catalog of the company, but it was doing very well for them; Andy had suggested adding it to the line, and the suggestion had confirmed for his father the wisdom of grooming the boy for a future at the helm. “Drink, Herb?” Andy asked. He smiled a cheerless smile, a challenging, bellicose smile. “I will. Yes. Thanks,” said Herb. He wiped his palms on his jacket and accepted the flask. Other young men began drifting out of the ballroom and taking positions along the railing. Most made some attempt to appear to be talking among themselves, but it was clear to Herb that they had come outside not for a drink or a smoke, but to see what would happen between him and Andy. “Thanks,” Herb said, returning the flask and the smile. “Don’t mention it,” said Andy. The smile again. He drank. “You enjoying yourself in Chacallit?” he asked. “Yes,” said Herb. “Yes, I am. It’s a nice place.” He leaned on the railing, looking out over the lake, wishing he could think of something snappy to say. “Hey, Bump,” Andy called out. “Come over here and meet somebody.” Herb turned from the lake and saw that the invitation to “Bump” had drawn not only a large sandy-haired fellow — Bump, he supposed — but all the other young men on the porch, who drifted in his direction behind Bump. “Hello there,” said Bump. He gave Herb a nod. No smile. “This is Herb Piper,” said Andy. He smiled at Bump — the same humorless, antagonistic smile. “Herb Piper,” said Bump, pronouncing the name as if he thought it should be familiar to him. “Herb Piper,” he said again. His expression (pursed lips, twisted mouth, eyebrows drawn together) suggested that he was searching his memory for some information about Herb Piper that ought to be there. “I think I must have known a Herb Piper. You don’t look familiar, but the name sounds familiar. Ever live in Albany?” “No,” said Herb. “Baltimore?” “No.” “Didn’t work for the B & O, did you?” “No,” said Herb. “I’ve lived in Boston all along.” “Boston? Herb Piper. Herb Piper. Were you in France?” “Yes. I was in France.” “Where?” “Quelquepart-sur-Marne.” “Holy jumping Jesus!” exclaimed Bump. “Are you the guy from Boston? The one who fixed the cup handles?” “Yes,” said Herb. “That’s me.”
In Topical Guide 291, Mark Dorset considers Real Places, Fictional Places and Fiction: Responding to: Suspension of Disbelief from this episode.
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
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You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
“IT’S A WONDERFUL NIGHT, isn’t it?” said Lorna. “It’s one of those nights when sweet scents are in the air.” “That might be my hair tonic,” said Herb. They were in Herb’s car, heading for the Serenity Ballroom. Herb wound his window down. “I might’ve put too much on.” “Herrrrrb — ” said Lorna, drawing his name out in a way that meant, “Don’t be silly!” (This “Herrrrrb — ” would in years to come become one of Lorna’s most frequently uttered remarks.) “I wish I’d had time to get a new suit before I left home,” said Herb. “Well, I had time, but I didn’t take the time.” “I’m glad you didn’t,” said Lorna. “You mean you like this suit? I got this before the war, long before the war.” He was suddenly struck by the fact that a great deal of time had passed during which ordinary things like buying a new suit hadn’t even crossed his mind, and by the idea that his suit and the new awareness he had of his suit, marked two points — the moment when he’d chosen the suit and the moment just passed when he’d been reminded of that moment — between which lay a huge bubble of time: all the time he’d been in the war, all the time it had taken him to begin to recognize love, all the time it had taken him to realize that he loved Lorna. “This is a very old suit,” said Herb, meaning all that. “I didn’t mean that I like the suit,” said Lorna. “I meant that I’m glad you didn’t take the time to get a new one. I’m glad I didn’t have to wait any longer for you to come back. That’s what I meant.” Herb looked at her and smiled, but the smile faded quickly. “Does that mean you don’t like the suit?” he asked. “No, it doesn’t,” said Lorna. “I think you look just fine. Your suit is fine. Your shirt is fine. Your tie is beautiful.” “Beautiful?” said Herb. He looked at Lorna with his face twisted in a worried grimace. “It’s wrong, isn’t it? It’s too loud. Calls attention to itself. I should’ve worn something different. Brown. A brown tie.” Lorna burst out laughing. “Herb,” she said. “It wouldn’t make any difference what you wore. All the girls I knew in school, everyone I worked with in the mill, all the boys I’ve ever danced with, everyone who knows my family, anybody who’s ever known me, would have something to say about it anyway.” “You mean they’ll be looking for something wrong with me.” “I’m afraid so. They’ll all want to know what it is about you that makes you more — well — ” “Yes?” “More interesting or more — ” “Desirable?” “All right. More desirable.” She assumed the air of an outraged matron, mother of one of the young men of Chacallit; “I ask you,” she said, “what makes him more desirable than the young men right here in Chacallit?” “Uh-oh,” said Herb. “I have the feeling that there’s one young man in particular.” “I’m afraid there has been,” said Lorna. “Will he be there tonight?” “I suppose so.” “How will I recognize him?” “He’s tall and good-looking — ” “Mmm.” “ — with dark, wavy hair and a strong jaw and big hands–” “Oh boy.” “ — and he usually has a circle of admirers around him.” “I should have worn a brown tie.”
In Topical Guide 290, Mark Dorset considers Smell; Odor; Aroma; Scent; Insecurity: Personal Appearance: Clothing and Insecurity: Rival in Love from this episode.
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
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You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
LORNA WAS SURPRISED and suspicious when, on the day after her reunion with Herb, Luther asked her to come to his office at the mill, but her curiosity was aroused by Luther’s conciliatory attitude. She agreed to go because she wanted to find out what Luther wanted from her. “Lorna!” said Luther, rising from his desk and rushing to greet her. “How are you?” He took her hands in his and looked her up and down. “No need to answer, my dear, I think you’ve never looked prettier. You’re glowing! Positively glowing.” Lorna turned away. She knew that what Luther said was true, and she didn’t want him to begin speculating about why her cheeks had that rosy glow, why she was so quick to smile. She didn’t want him to have anything to do with Herb; if it could have been arranged, she would have kept him from knowing anything about Herb at all. “It’s the springtime, Uncle Luther,” she said. She gave him a knowing look. “Surely you’ve noticed that girls glow in the spring.” “So I have,” said Luther. He set his jaw and narrowed his eyes. “Well, that’s enough of that, wouldn’t you say?” Lorna suggested. “Yes,” said Luther. “That is enough of that. Sit down, Lorna. I want to show you something.” He waved her toward the leather wing chair in front of his desk. He settled himself in his own chair, paused for dramatic effect, and lifted the top from a small box on his blotter. From the box he produced Herb’s animated couple. He held the object out for Lorna to examine. “Why, Uncle Luther!” she exclaimed. “Spring seems to be advancing in your cheeks, Lorna,” said Luther. “We’ll be in high summer in a moment.” “Who made this?” Lorna asked. She took the gadget from Luther. “That’s not important,” he said. “Turn the little wheel at the side.” Lorna gave the wheel a turn. “Oh, my,” she said. There was admiration in her voice, and Luther was encouraged. “Who carved these figures?” she asked. “Originally? Gerald Hirsch, I’d say,” said Luther. “You’re probably right,” said Lorna. “They look like his work. Who on earth performed the — ahhh, modifications?” “To tell you the truth,” said Luther, “I don’t know. Nobody with any talent in that line.” He smiled and brought the tips of his thumbs and index fingers together. “Clumsy work,” he said, “but a brilliant idea, and a fine, fine job mechanically. Don’t you think so?” “Yes,” she said. She twisted the wheel again, slowly, while she observed the little copulating couple from various angles. They enchanted her. In part, they won her over with their fluid agility and their cunning construction, but most of all, a small gesture won her: a gesture that Herb had supplied by shaping one tiny pulley with an eccentricity, the slightest little bump, like the lobe on a cam, so that at one point in the performance the man brushed his lips against the woman’s cheek. It was a tiny gesture, one that Lorna had to see several times before she could be sure that it wasn’t accidental, that it wasn’t caused by the way she held the figures or the way she turned the wheel. When she satisfied herself that it happened every time, with the precision of all the other gestures and exertions that composed the performance, when she was certain that it was intentional, that whoever had made the little couple perform had considered this sign of affection an essential part of the performance, she was charmed. “Interested?” asked Luther. Lorna looked at him, but a moment passed before what he had said registered. “In what?” she asked then, taken aback. “In returning to carving,” Luther said. “None of the others could do this kind of thing the way it should be done. Trumbull, maybe. But not as well as you. Aren’t you intrigued? Think what you could do with movable joints. Imagine — ” “No, Uncle Luther,” said Lorna. “I’m through with all that. Forever.”
In Topical Guide 289, Mark Dorset considers Foreshadowing: The Payoff from this episode.
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You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
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You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
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You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
WHEN HERB AND BEN checked in at the Chacallit House, Ben, full of eagerness and confidence, certain of success, sure of the value of what he had to offer, went off to see Luther at once. Herb, who was not as confident, not at all certain of success in his undertaking, hesitated. He hadn’t told Lorna that he was coming. He’d tried to write, but he hadn’t been able to find a way to say the things that he wanted to say. He unpacked. He took a bath. He shaved. He dressed, considered the effect in the mirror, didn’t like what he saw, changed, and didn’t like what he saw any better than he had before. Doubts breed rapidly, and they breed fastest in front of a mirror. Herb sighed and let his shoulders fall. He went off to see Lorna reluctantly. What he had to offer her seemed of little value. He stopped his old Studebaker in front of the house, and he sat for a moment, with both hands on the wheel, trying to think of something to say to Lorna — no, not something — the thing, that remarkable thing that would tell her everything he felt — the word, the phrase, the sentence, the declaration that she would never forget, that she would, years from now, tell their children, their grandchildren. “I’ll never forget,” she would say, “the day that Herb came back to Chacallit. I opened the door, and there he was. He smiled and said — ” What? What? By the time he reached the Hubers’ door, Herb had begun to think that he should have stayed in Boston. He caught sight of his reflection, and to himself he looked like a thin guy holding a battered hat, wearing a shabby suit and scuffed shoes, with an old heap parked behind him. Lorna was at home, since she was now unemployed. When the war ended, Lorna had been among the first of the Chacallit women Luther had let go from the main floor. Her parents were puzzled when she didn’t return to ivory work, but at dinner one Sunday, Luther had provided an explanation, one that was false when he offered it but became true in time: he said that the market for expensive jewelry for men was declining, and that he couldn’t very well keep Lorna at work when there were returning veterans without jobs. “Perhaps,” he said, giving Lorna an unwelcome pat on the arm, “things will change, and I’ll find a way to bring Lorna back to work.” She was in the kitchen chopping cabbage when Herb turned the doorbell. She started for the door in her apron, but the thought that had come to her so often came to her again, the thought that this might be Herb, and she quickly untied the apron and threw it onto the kitchen table. “Herb Piper,” she said when she opened the door, not daring to add what her heart hoped: “You’ve come back to me!” “I didn’t get killed,” said Herb. They were the first words that came to him, and by them he meant, “I came to see you because you’re always on my mind, even when I’m with someone else. You’re always there. The idea of you comes flickering through, like sunlight through the leaves on a tree.” Lorna burst out laughing. “I know,” she said. “You used to write to me, remember?” By it she meant, “When you stopped writing, I was afraid I’d never see you again, and then I knew how much I wanted to see you again.” “I don’t know why I said that,” said Herb. “It was the first thing that came to me.” He meant, “I didn’t have the courage to say any of the things that I wanted to say. To tell you the truth, I’m not even certain just what those things are. I just said whatever popped into my head. Please, please, don’t think I’m a fool.” Lorna pushed the screen door open and stepped out into the spring air. “I’m glad to see you,” she said, meaning, “I think I love you, Herb.” “And I’m glad to see you,” said Herb, looking down at his hat in his hands, embarrassed, because he was sure she must be able to tell that he meant to say, “I think I love you, Lorna.” “How’s your leg?” Lorna asked, instead of saying, “Gee, Herb, you look wonderful! I’m so happy to see you again that I could cry.” “It’s all right, thanks,” said Herb. “You look well.” (Instead of, “You look beautiful.”) “Oh, I’ve been fine.” (“I missed you.”) “Good.” (“I missed you.”) “Yes.” “You — um — didn’t get married or anything like that, did you?” “No. I would have told you so if I had.” “You would?” “Well, I — I would have because, well, because you’re my employer, and you might need to know.” “Employer?” “The books,” said Lorna. “The books,” said Herb. “Of course, the books. How are the books going?” “Fine. Just fine. Everyone’s pleased. No complaints.” “Good. Good.” For a moment, they just stood and smiled at each other. “So you didn’t get married, then?” Herb reached for her hands. “No.” Lorna put her hands in his. Too quickly for fear to stop him, Herb leaned forward and kissed her cheek. It was hardly a kiss at all. His lips just brushed her cheek. As the years passed, Lorna would become less and less sure about her memory of what Herb had said to her when he returned, but she never forgot that wisp of a kiss. It was the unforgettable statement Herb had hoped to make.
In Topical Guide 288, Mark Dorset considers Foreshadowing and Words and Gestures: Their Effect on Others, Fleeting or Lasting from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
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You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
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You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
-
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
THE NEXT MORNING, Herb went to see his uncle Ben. “Uncle Ben,” he said, “I want to go back to Chacallit.” “Good!” said Ben. “So do I. I’ve got an idea that is going to revolutionize the coarse-goods business.” Herb looked at his uncle with the wariness he’d inherited from his mother. “This isn’t going to lose you money, is it, Uncle Ben?” Benjamin colored, thrust his hands into his pockets, and cleared his throat. “It’s not kind of you to ask a question like that, Herb,” he said. “The Doughboy’s Dozen was a dandy idea, and I should have made out all right with it.” He pressed his lips together for a moment. “Commerce is a matter of subtleties, Herb,” he said, shaking his head. “Subtleties and chances. And luck. You’ve got to take chances if you’re going to get anywhere. You’ve got to understand the subtleties. You’ve got to have luck. I wasn’t lucky.” “I don’t follow you, Uncle Ben,” said Herb. “I made a little mistake, Herb,” said Ben. He held his hand up, showing a small gap between his thumb and forefinger. “A little mistake. I thought the war would last longer. I figured we’d still be in it now. If it had lasted another five months, just five months, we’d have come out all right on the Doughboy’s Dozen. If it were still on now, we’d be comfortable, Herb, very comfortable.” “Uncle Ben!” said Herb. “Oh, don’t get me wrong,” said Ben. “I don’t mean I wish it had lasted longer. I just mean that if it had, we’d be comfortable.” He shook his head. “Very comfortable,” he added. There was a silence between them for a while. Then Ben said suddenly, “But never mind that! It’s all over and done with, and I’ve got a terrific idea! Not only is it a good idea, but it doesn’t take any of our money.” “That sounds like a great idea,” said Herb. “What is it?” Ben grinned and reached into his pocket. He brought out something that he quickly concealed with both hands. He held his hands out, one cupped over the other, hiding and protecting something precious, as he might have held a tiny bird. Slowly, he opened his hands. There, cupped in Ben’s hands, was the world’s first piece of animated coarse goods. Herb burst out laughing. “Gosh!” he said. “Will you look at that workmanship!” Ben’s prototype was a crude piece of work. The two wax figures were badly modeled, thickset, lumpy, graceless. The mechanism was nothing more than a pair of heavy wire forms joined by a loop (not unlike the link swivels that Lorna once fashioned) and kept apart by a tiny coil spring. A crank turned a cam against the wire on which the man, the upper figure, was molded, and the action of the cam provided the jerky up-and-down motion that was all the animation of which the couple was capable. The act they performed was crude and basic. The woman just lay there; the man pounded away at her, up and down, in and out, grimly, mechanically. “It needs work,” said Ben. “I know that. I don’t have the talent to do anything better than this. But you do. You do, Herb. You’re mechanically inclined. This kind of thing — much better than this, mind you, but this kind of thing — could be very successful, Herb. It could fit into a little case, like a pocket watch. It could go onto a chain just like a watch. Or it could take the place of a fob. Or maybe it would just be something a guy would carry in his pocket. The stem could make it work. You’d turn the stem instead of this crank, and — well, you see what I’m getting at, don’t you?” “Yes,” said Herb, his mind already occupied with a set of interesting ideas prompted by the clumsy little couple. “I do.” Ben’s idea was a good one, and Herb saw that it was immediately. Animated coarse goods could sell for much higher prices, at a much greater margin of profit, than static carvings. If Ben could get such things manufactured in Chacallit without risking any money, he might recoup the losses he’d taken on the Doughboy’s Dozen. Herb worked night and day for a week to produce a more successful prototype, fabricated from two female figures that had been part of a shipment of conventional, static coarse goods from Chacallit. First, he had to make the tools his work would require. Then he had to transform one of the figures into a male. He wasn’t entirely pleased with the success of this operation, but he knew that he wasn’t likely to achieve anything better, so he went on to the articulation of the figures. Painstakingly, he cut the figures apart at the elbow, shoulder, hip, and knee joints and across their abdomens, so that he could achieve more versatile and fluid movement than Ben’s figures had been able to manage. As far as it was possible to do so, he concealed the articulating mechanism within the figures, which required him to drill through the arms and legs and to carve cavities in the figures where his tiny wires, cables, and pulleys could be concealed. The challenge to his ingenuity was exhilarating, much more so than designing the expandable shelves or the secret drawers or devising a repair for the mess-kit cup handles had been, and Herb took great pleasure in the work. In a week, he had finished, and, on the whole, he was pleased. Ben was overjoyed. “Brilliant work, Herb!” he said. “Brilliant! You’re a genius at this, my boy. You’ve got a great future! Collectors are going to be after these, and they’re going to want different positions, different ways of — well — moving, and so on. You’re going to be able to name your price. You’ve got talent, Herb, real talent.” Herb shook his head. “No, Uncle Ben,” he said. “I did this for you, but I won’t do any more. I’m getting out of coarse goods. I’m in love with Lorna Huber. She’s a wonderful girl, and I’m sure she’d be ashamed of me if she knew about this.”
In Topical Guide 287, Mark Dorset considers Art: Movable Models of the Human Figure (Share the Experience) and Technical Explanations: The Musculoskeletal Structure of the Human Body that Enables It to Assume a Wide Variety of Sexual Positions from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
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You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
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-
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
-
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
“I GUESS you want me to tell you some more about the war,” said Andrew. He and Lorna were sitting on the sofa in the Hubers’ parlor, as they had on many evenings since Andrew’s return. Richard was standing, filling his pipe. Lena was sitting in her accustomed chair, knitting. Before she quite realized what she was doing, Lena let a sigh escape from her. When she discovered herself sighing, she tried to disguise the sigh as a yawn. When she realized that a yawn was every bit as bad as a sigh, she became confused about what to do next, and she burst out giggling. She glanced up from her work and saw that she had become the focus of attention. Lorna rose from the couch and walked to her mother’s chair, where she stood behind her and squeezed her shoulders. “I’m sure we’d love to hear some more about the war,” Lena said, with a hearty eagerness that made Richard wonder whether she needed a long rest. “You needn’t feel that you have to tell us everything, my boy,” said Richard. “I’m sure that there are many things you’d rather keep to yourself.” “Oh, no,” said Andrew. “Not at all. I’ve got a million stories to tell!” “Ah,” said Lorna, barely audibly, “only half a million to go.” Lena giggled again. Richard, who had heard Lorna well enough, gave her a stern glance. Andrew, who told himself that surely she could not have said what he thought he’d heard, gave her a bewildered look. “What was that, Lorna?” he asked. “I said, ‘We really have to go,’ ” said Lorna. She gave her mother another squeeze and smiled at her father, who applied himself to the tamping of his pipe. When Lorna and Andrew had left, Lena let her knitting drop into her lap and said, looking straight ahead, “He really is a very nice boy.” “Yes,” said Richard. “He’s a fine boy. A brave fellow.” He puffed at his pipe. Lena said, “I only wish — ” “Yes,” said Richard, “so do I.” Lena went back to her knitting, and Richard stood puffing on his pipe and looking at the newspaper. He reminded himself, again, that Andrew was a good prospect. With the end of the war and the return to normal production, a wonderful optimism had spread through Chacallit. Hindsight allows us to see that this optimism was, insofar as it was based on the expectation of growth in the gentlemen’s furnishings industry, ill founded, but for the time being there seemed to be no reason to doubt that the industry on which Chacallit depended would prosper or that Andrew Proctor, who would one day ascend to the presidency of Proctor’s Products for Men, was a good prospect. So it was difficult for Richard, who wanted to see Lorna securely settled, to admit that he would really rather not have her settled on Andrew Proctor. It was even more difficult for Lena to admit. She had seen the war take some of the best young men of Lorna’s age and had watched Lorna pass what she considered her peak. She had watched Lorna grow less and less interested in the men who might have been interested in her. She felt that Lorna expected too much, and she was afraid that if Lorna drove Andrew away, there might be no one left. So, a little ashamed of what she was doing, she had begun to push Lorna toward thinking seriously about marrying Andrew, even though, whenever Lena watched them walk away from the house together, she admitted to herself that she was glad not to be the one who would have to listen to Andrew for the rest of the evening. Lorna tried to convince herself that Andrew’s failings didn’t matter, that she was imagining some and exaggerating others, that he really was good enough, but the truth struck her on the night when Andrew made love to her, on the back seat of his car, a Chevrolet. To be fair, her expectations may have been too high. Lorna was a nineteen-year-old virgin who in the last two years had spent approximately twenty-six hundred hours scrutinizing sexual performances of great diversity and sophistication and replicating them, in ivory, with painstaking exactitude. Though she didn’t yet know what she liked, she knew much about the art. When she decided that tonight might just as well be the night, her imagination summoned all the couples she had carved, all their frozen moments of sex. Lorna came at Andrew as a flame licks at tinder, and if Andrew had noticed that Lorna’s eyes burned brighter than his, that her breathing was quicker, her hands were hotter and bolder, and if, when she took his penis in her hands and inched herself toward him so that just the tip touched her, he had taken the time to notice her luscious concupiscence, then he would have cried out, “Oh, Lorna, take command, burn me up, consume me.” But Andrew didn’t notice any of that and wouldn’t have understood it if he had, and so when she approached him he thought she meant, “Take me, conquer me,” and he threw himself into the task with the cold-blooded single-mindedness that had made him a hero. He wrapped his arms around her, pressed her backward against the seat, and pushed himself, with one quick, grunting effort, as far into her as he could. Lorna hadn’t anticipated that, and she didn’t welcome it. Andrew began a steady humping progress toward his satisfaction, something like a forced march. A thought crossed Lorna’s mind: if there’s a medal for this, he’s determined to get it. She started to snicker, but she covered it with what she hoped sounded like a startled exclamation prompted by an unexpected pleasure. Andrew stopped moving in her. Just stopped. He extended his arms and raised himself up so that they could look each other in the face and said, “I’ll bet you’ve wondered what this would be like. I know I have.” He grinned and winked and went back to his huffing and puffing and f*g. Lorna looked at the mouse-colored fabric lining the roof of the car and let her mind wander away from Andrew’s fuss and hubbub, and on its own her mind wandered back to the rainy night when Herb stood on her front porch shaking his umbrella, and just as Andrew reached the end of the march, fired his salute, and collapsed in the shade, a shiver ran through her and she realized that she wanted more than anything else to be with Herb.
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To help move matters along, Mrs. Mills left Herb and Alice alone whenever she could arrange it. After several evenings of petting that ended with Alice’s whispering, “We mustn’t, my darling, we mustn’t,” Alice apparently succumbed to the heat of passion. At the point in their petting where (her blouse off, her bra undone, so much smooth, pale skin glowing in the dark, Herb’s shirt open, his belt loosened, Herb tugging at one of her nipples with his lips, she felt Herb’s hand reach above the tops of her stockings, felt him rubbing her thighs) she ordinarily pressed her legs together and whispered, “We mustn’t,” she sighed instead and seemed to melt, let her body drop slowly backward on the sofa, as if she were putting her head back to let herself float on a wave, and whispered, “Take me, my darling, please take me.” When Herb did, the little cry that escaped from her and the expression on her face when she looked deep into his eyes (an expression that she intended to say, “I feel pleasure, my darling, a new and thrilling pleasure, but my deepest pleasure comes from giving to you something wonderful and precious, something for which I know you must certainly be very, very grateful”) had been rehearsed. In anticipation of this grand moment, Alice had practiced often, in her bed, manipulating the darning egg handle with one hand and sighing, panting, smiling, and grimacing into the mirror that she held in the other. She had gotten rather good with the darning egg handle and had developed a repertoire that pleased her: ease in, eeeease out, sliiide in, sliiide out, thrust, retreat, thrust, retreat, thrust, retreat, in, out, in, out, eeeease in, eeeease out, eeeease in, eeeease out, thrust, thrust, thrust; repeat as needed. She was a little disappointed to find that Herb didn’t follow this satisfying pattern, but, still, this was the moment she’d been waiting for, and she was determined to try to make the best of it. “Oh, my darling, my darling Herb,” she said. “My poor darling. How often you must have dreamed of loving me like this, in the war.” She sighed and smiled. “Are you happy, Herb? Are you happy right now?” “Yes,” said Herb. “Yes, I’m happy.” He was lying. He certainly wasn’t unhappy, but Alice didn’t make him happy. At some time, after he had penetrated Alice, while he was moving in her, he had felt a curious sensation come over him, a sense of detachment, something like the disembodiment he had felt when he was hit by that shell fragment in France. Then, his mind had taken him aside, as a protector might, pulled him a step or two away from the place where that poor body, which happened to be his, was being ripped and splayed. His leg had suffered the pain; his self had stood apart. Now, his mind had taken him a step or two away from pleasure. His penis was having a wonderful time, the time of its life, slipping, sliding, slurping back and forth in Alice, delicious, lubricious Alice, but his mind had begun to wander, and in a vague sort of way it seemed to be headed for Chacallit. “Oh, so am I, Herb,” said Alice. He heard her, but he’d forgotten what she was talking about. Alice swallowed, and her eyes grew misty. The truth is that her mind had begun to roam around a little, too. She was puzzled and annoyed by the fact that, although Herb was, certainly, enjoying her, he didn’t seem to be enjoying her as much as he had enjoyed her when Alice had imagined herself as him enjoying her. With a little inner sigh, she admitted to herself that, therefore, Herb must not really be the right man for her after all. She was going to have to let him go. A lump formed in her throat when she thought about the pain she was going to cause him, the sadness he was sure to feel. She resolved to be very kind. And for now, she would make the best of things, not only for herself, but for Herb, too. She owed it to him, after what he’d been through, for all the time he’d yearned so for her, and — a surprise. A surging rush of sensation, a thrust, another, thrust and thrust again, lively and — oh — lively and — hot-headed compared to that darning egg handle, and a shudder ran through Herb, that ecstatic shudder, and his thoughts came dashing back to join his penis in its happy pop, its rip, its roar, its hip-hooray! And then, slowly, quietly, while Herb lay with his head on Alice’s breast and she ran her fingers through his hair and wondered whom she might try next, Herb’s thoughts wandered off again, to Chacallit, and brought him another ecstatic thrill, the thrill that comes when one is surprised by a truth, in this case the truth that he would rather be with Lorna.
In Topical Guide 285, Mark Dorset considers Tools: Darning Egg and Sex: Aids, Toys, and Tools: Dildos from this episode.
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“I WANT YOU to tell me about the war,” said Alice. She was sitting beside Herb on the sofa in the living room of the Millses’ apartment, over Alice’s father’s saloon. The Millses’ place wasn’t much grander than the Pipers’, but Alice and her mother put a lot of effort into making it “cozy,” and Herb enjoyed the shabby clutter they had created. “I don’t have much to tell,” said Herb. He looked at Alice and shrugged. “I know it must be hard to talk about it,” said Alice. She brought her hand to Herb’s cheek and looked into his eyes with great compassion. She had often imagined this time, when her Herb would have come home at last, when they would be alone and he could confide in her all the terrible things he had experienced and describe for her how often he’d thought of her in the midst of the horror, how often he’d dreamed of sitting beside her like this. “It’s not that,” said Herb. “It’s just that I don’t have many stories to tell. I didn’t do much of anything.” Alice brushed a tear from her cheek. This was even better than she’d hoped. Sitting alone with her was, apparently, so intoxicating that Herb could hardly speak, couldn’t find the words to tell her how much it had meant to him to know that she was waiting for him. “I understand,” she said. She let her head rest on his shoulder. Prohibition might have deprived the Millses of their livelihood if Mr. Mills hadn’t been as resourceful a man as he was. He reasoned that many people came to his saloon for companionship rather than, or as much as, for liquor, and that, if he kept the saloon open as a gathering place, without liquor, he stood a good chance of hanging on to some of his old customers and even drawing some new ones. He might even get them to bring their families. If he sold food and soft drinks and charged a membership fee, the place should make a small profit, he decided, and it would be a dandy cover for a speakeasy in the cellar. The idea worked brilliantly. He called the place “Mills’s Family Club.” It was hailed as a model of what temperance might do for family and community. The Millses prospered. Herb put off visiting Chacallit, and put it off again, and thought less and less about it. He began spending time in the club, upstairs and down, not only because Alice often worked there, but because Herb enjoyed the people who gathered there. He’d never had much time to relax and talk before. He discovered how much he liked being with people, listening to their stories, laughing at their jokes. He noticed the way other young men looked at Alice, but he didn’t notice how little he cared. Before Alice had fallen in love with Herb, her mother had worried that Alice would flirt away the years when her beauty was most marketable. “Nothing’s sure, is it?” she said to Alice one day. “Who’s to say you’ll get prettier? You might be as pretty right now as you’ll ever be. You may even be on the way down.” “Oh, Ma,” said Alice. “ ‘Oh, Ma’ nothing,” said Mrs. Mills. “Look at your friend Annie. We all thought she’d grow up gorgeous. Now she’s a fright.” “Oh, Ma,” said Alice. “She is. She’s a fright. It could happen to you. Then you’d have to settle for whatever men’re left.” “Oh, Ma,” said Alice. “Worse yet,” said Mrs. Mills, “you might never marry. You might become a nuisance and a burden.” Mrs. Mills had another worry, one that she kept to herself. She worried that Alice’s beauty might go on improving forever, while her own declined. At those times, she could imagine herself spending the rest of her life in the shadow of her daughter. It was this worry that most made Mrs. Mills like Herb. She liked Herb’s prospects. He seemed ambitious to her. She liked the idea that if he married Alice, his ambition might lead to his taking Alice away somewhere, somewhere far enough away so that she wouldn’t visit too often, so that she wouldn’t be a burden or cast a shadow.
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WHEN ANDREW PROCTOR returned to Chacallit, more than two thousand people were waiting on the platform at the railroad station to greet him. He was Chacallit’s hero. He had, single-handedly, taken a hill, saved his captain, and captured a German officer, but his exploits were already being exaggerated, so that in the conversation of Chacallit, he had, single-handedly, taken a hill, a ridge, a bridge, and the bank of a river, saved his captain, a trio of buddies, and a nurse, captured a German officer, a patrol, a regiment. No one in Chacallit would have dared correct the exaggerations. Nor would anyone have cared to correct them. Chacallit was proud to have a hero, and the more heroic he was, the better. Andrew was carried from the train on the shoulders of two stout men, and within an hour a dozen men were claiming to have been one of them. The men set Andrew down at the side of the mayor, who recounted the version of Andrew’s deeds that he favored. No one was in any mood to quibble about the accuracy of this version — certainly not Andrew, who was so overwhelmed by the admiration of his townsfolk that he couldn’t trust himself to speak and was happy just to smile and wave. Standing directly in front of Andrew was Lorna. When Andrew looked at her, he caught her in one of her moments. Lorna struck him as so beautiful a young woman that he stepped away from the mayor, put his arm around her, and kissed her. It was an extraordinary thing to do, but this was an extraordinary occasion, and Andrew was being honored because he had done extraordinary things. It seemed, once he had done it, like exactly the right thing for an extraordinary young fellow to do. No one minded, not even Lorna, who blushed but considered this a kiss inspired by nothing more than exuberance. Andrew had hardly noticed Lorna before he left Chacallit, but at just that moment he decided that he was in love. Andrew was an immediate success with Richard and Lena Huber, and Lorna was quite taken with him herself. He wasn’t bad looking, after all, and he was the talk of the town. Almost at once, Andrew and Lorna were considered a couple. Andrew’s father was pleased by his son’s choice. Mr. Proctor was wary of girls who were too pretty, since they were likely to be as attractive to other men as to their husbands. Lorna seemed just right to him. He considered her looks ordinary — pretty enough, but ordinary. (True, he admitted to himself, every now and then she struck him as positively dazzling, but that, he thought, was probably the effect of certain desires of his own that ought to be suppressed.) Mr. Proctor was a successful man, and his success enabled Andrew to employ the courting arsenal of a successful man. He was able to give gifts and arrange outings, surprises, and treats. Lorna enjoyed being courted so lavishly, enjoyed being part of Chacallit’s favorite couple, and enjoyed being the envy of the other girls in town, and she began to think that she was in love with Andrew.
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HERB HAD PLANNED, as soon as things settled down, to go to the tobacco shop, where there was a telephone, and call Lorna, but before he could get out, Ben’s wife, Herb’s aunt Louise, arrived with his cousins and a friend of his cousins’, Alice Mills. Alice was sixteen, a girl of striking beauty, with wide eyes, a lively, laughing mouth, and waves of fine golden hair that cascaded over her shoulders and caught and gilded even the poor dim light in the Pipers’ apartment. She was a quick blusher. She had voluptuous lips, and she kept them slightly parted in a look that made her seem naïve and vulnerable. She couldn’t take her eyes off Herb. She had fallen in love with him while he was in France. Before she had fallen in love with Herb, Alice had already developed a romantic attachment to the general idea that young men were fighting in France, suffering unspeakable horrors, and pining all the while for the girls they’d left behind, who pined in turn for them, sighing through slightly parted lips in a way that made them seem naïve and vulnerable. How Alice wished that she had been one of the girls that the boys had left behind, so that the poignant ache she felt in her heart might have some specific object, and so that, in his turn, the object of her heartache, some doughboy lying cold and miserable in a trench somewhere in France, might pine for her, specifically for her. Alas, the boys she knew were all too young for war, so none of them was likely to be heading over there with his heart full of her. She needed someone already over there, and so she chose Herb, her best friend’s cousin. She’d seen him before, but her memory of him was fuzzy enough not to interfere with her fantasy. She wrote letters to him but found that they never struck the note she had intended them to strike, and so never sent them. She prayed for his safety. She promised herself that, once he returned home, and they were firmly in love, she would always be faithful to him. She sat in the window seat at home, looked wistful, and sighed for him through her voluptuous lips. She stood in front of her mirror and admired the way she was maturing, touched her lips with her fingertips and tried to imagine what kissing her would be like for Herb, touched her breasts and tried to isolate her fingertips, tried to make them Herb’s, to feel her nipples tighten as he would, and, in bed, tried to remove herself from herself, put herself beside herself, be Herb beside her, caress herself as Herb would, beg herself to give herself to him as Herb would, tried to imagine climbing atop herself as Herb would, and slowly, gratefully, tenderly, reverently, augmenting her imagination with the handle on a darning egg, penetrating herself as Herb would. She succeeded well enough to convince herself that she was in love with Herb. She had never had a serious doubt that, given the opportunity, he would love her. When Herb saw Alice he was astonished. She wasn’t at all the little girl he remembered. She was beautiful. She was alluring. She seemed to adore him. What he felt for her he immediately took for love. He put off telephoning Lorna.
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Chapter 7
In Which Herb and Lorna Ignite the Flame of Passion
HERB’S UNCLE BEN met his train when Herb returned to Boston. Millie Piper couldn’t trust herself to meet her son in public. She was determined not to cry, absolutely determined, but she knew that she would cry, and she didn’t want to cry over him with everyone watching — if she was going to cry and make a fuss, and she was afraid that she was, she wanted to do it at home, where she could do it without embarrassing Herb. And cry she did, but not at all as she had supposed she would. Silent tears began running down her cheeks when she heard Herb’s rapid footsteps on the stairs. Herb meant to keep her from crying. He intended to burst into the room and fill it with noise, fling his cap against the wall, pick Millie up, and whirl her around the room, but when he opened the door and saw her there, he couldn’t even say hello. All he could do was clear his throat. His hands and feet seemed suddenly so much heavier than normal, like the puffed and clumsy hands and feet we sometimes find attached to us in dreams. He couldn’t move. Millie had imagined herself running to him the moment he opened the door, but her feet seemed to have undergone the same nightmarish transformation, and for a minute she couldn’t move, either. They stood across the room from each other without moving or speaking. Herb began to sniffle. He held his arms out to Millie and began shuffling toward her. She held her arms out and began shuffling toward him. Slumped in his chair in the corner, Lester Piper watched. There wasn’t a sound in the room but Millie and Herb’s sniffling and the shuffling of their feet. Lester felt something unfamiliar. He had a sudden awareness of his chair, the presence of it behind his back, under him, the worn spots on the arms, the burnished, darkened cork in the places where he rested his hands. He seemed to be able to feel every tiny fissure in the cork, to feel the floor through his shoes. He seemed to be able to taste the air he breathed, to hear the crunch of individual grains of grit beneath the shoes of Herb and Millie as they shuffled toward each other. What was this odd sensation? It was — it was — joy. “Herb!” he shouted. He leaped up from his chair. “Herb!” He swept Millie off her feet and carried her in one arm to Herb, where he crushed them together and began whirling them around the room, crying, “What a wonderful day, a wonderful day!” Ben appeared in the doorway, red-faced and sweating. “All right, all right, all right,” he said. “He’s home. You’re out of your chair. It’s a wonderful day, but I’m holding the bags, remember? How about a hand?” Millie sat Herb at the table and made him eat. While he ate, she stood behind him with both hands on his shoulders, crying as quietly as she could manage, her tears running down her cheeks.
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LORNA DID go to work in the suspender fitting section. It doesn’t seem likely to me that she actually feared Luther’s spilling the beans about her erotica work if she didn’t do what he wanted. She must have known that their standoff was stable. It’s more likely that she took a place on the main floor, where an American flag was mounted on each of the machines, at each of the benches and tables, because she knew that more hands were always needed and because she would have missed the company of the other women. At her cutting machine, she worked among women who gave their work only the necessary effort. She made herself work in the same manner, letting her hands perform while her mind wandered. More and more often her thoughts were of Herb.
HERB HAD BEEN assigned to a prisoner-of-war camp, where he and other recuperating men supervised German prisoners who were put to the task of fabricating cup handle repair kits. The men who ran the camp were a mixed lot, thrown together from among the wounded of many divisions. They were a group that represented the whole fabric of American society, including men from the warp and men from the woof, the only truly integrated group of soldiers in the American Expeditionary Forces. About three weeks after the Armistice was signed, a tremor of excitement rippled through the camp. Herb was stretched out on his bunk, writing a letter, when Ezio Corelli, a wisecracking, curly-haired pastry chef from Brooklyn, burst in with startling news. “Hey, Piper!” he shouted, “you better polish your f*g shoes and practice your fg salute — they’re gonna make a fg hero out of you.” “What?” said Herb. He grinned at Corelli, anticipating the gag that was sure to come. “Yes, Herbie, that’s right,” said Jo Jo Washington, a serious-minded cornetist from Chicago. “That certainly is right. No jokes this time, Herbie. They are going to recognize you. That’s the truth.” “What is this?” asked Herb, his amusement and caution growing. “Herb! Herb!” called Anton “Boom-Boom” Delacroix, a big-hearted fisherman from New Orleans. He burst into the bunkroom, lumbered to Herb’s bunk, and lifted Herb to his feet. “You are one damn lucky son-of-a-b*h, you,” Boom-Boom boomed. “What on earth are you talking about?” asked Herb, wriggling in Boom-Boom’s bear hug. “Herbert!” called Izzy Moskowitz, a devil-may-care dental student from South Bend, “I certainly hope you are prepared for this. This is going to be one of the most memorable moments of your life.” He stood in front of Herb, regarding him with evident pride, as a brother might. Herb put his hands on his hips. “All right, all right,” he said. “What are you—” From the doorway, Seamus O’Brien, a freckle-faced barkeep from Alabama, cried, “Tennnnnnshun!” and in a moment, without other fanfare, Black Jack Pershing himself strode into the bunkhouse. “Which one of you figured out how to fix the coffee cups?” asked the General. “Here, sir,” said Herb. For the first and only time since it had healed, his leg gave him some trouble. A queer flutter ran through it, and he was afraid it would fold under him. “Herb Piper,” said Pershing, “it’s a pleasure.” He saluted Herb and then held out his hand. For a moment, Herb thought that Pershing wanted to shake hands with him. Then, pointing, with the other hand, to a spot on the extended hand, Pershing said, “See this scar?” Everyone craned his neck to see. “A damned cup of coffee did that. Before you came along.” He paused, stared at his hand, and said reflectively, “You know, it’s a funny thing how life doesn’t really change much in a war — how the little things are still annoying.” He took a deep breath and frowned at the bitter mysteries of war. “I’ve seen a man with one leg gone—torn away—prop himself up so he could keep firing, and I’ve seen men just as brave scream in pain and lose all their will to fight when they were burned by one of those damned collapsing coffee cups.” He put a hand on Herb’s shoulder. “Piper, you’ve done more for the morale of our men than taking Quelquepart-sur-Marne did.” Grinning, he reached into his pocket. “Now, what you did,” he said, “isn’t the sort of thing I can give you a medal for, you understand, but you ought to get something, so—” He extended his hand, and Herb cupped his under it. “—here’s something for what you’ve done.” Into Herb’s hand he dropped a pornographic shirt button. “Sew that on your shirt, Piper,” said Pershing, “and if anybody complains, tell ’em I gave it to you.” Herb did what Pershing told him to do. He sewed the button onto his shirt, and he wore it with some pride while he was still in France. On the way home, however, he tore the button off. It embarrassed him and it frightened him. He couldn’t help feeling, though he knew that the feeling didn’t make sense, that the button would somehow give him away. When asked, he claimed to have lost it, and he even suggested that it might have fallen overboard somewhere in the Atlantic. In the next forty years, he showed it to only one person, his uncle Benjamin, who said when he saw it, “Will you look at the workmanship on that!”
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
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You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
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You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
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You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
-
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
EARLY ONE AFTERNOON, about two months before the Armistice was signed, Lorna sat in the lunchroom in the mill, reading a pamphlet. What she read struck her with such force that she pounded her fist on the table, spilling her soup and startling the women around her. “Damn!” she said. “What’s the matter?” asked Elsie Hensel. “Oh, I’m furious with myself for being so—so—childish!” cried Lorna. She stormed out of the lunchroom and strode through the building. She hesitated for only an instant outside Luther’s door; then she knocked, with sharp, rapid taps. “Come in,” said Luther. Lorna opened the door and went inside. “Uncle Luther,” she said in a rush, knowing that if she hesitated she would surely waver in her resolve, “I want you to tell me how much you were paying John Caldwell to do the work I’m doing.” She took a long breath. Behind her back, she rolled and twisted the pamphlet in her hands. Luther drew a long breath of his own. “Lorna,” he said, “I’m surprised at you. That’s not a polite question to ask.” “Politeness doesn’t have anything to do with it,” said Lorna. She hoped that the anger and fear rippling through her wouldn’t make her voice quaver. “I’ve been reading this pamphlet.” She brought it out from behind her back, untwisted it, bent it back to flatten it, and held it out to Luther with both hands. “It’s about women’s working conditions.” “Lorna, Lorna,” said Luther, rising and moving toward her. “You mustn’t let yourself get into such a state. These are difficult times, Lorna dear,” he said. He put his hand on her shoulder, and Lorna stiffened. “We all have important work to do, and we all must make sacrifices. This is not a time when any of us should be thinking about personal gain.” “I’m not thinking about personal gain,” said Lorna. She had to work to keep the pfrom betraying her anger. “Now, really, Lorna,” said Luther. “What other name can we put on it?” He took the pamphlet that Lorna held out to him. “ ‘The National Women’s Trade Union League of America,’ ” he read. “Now who are they? Do we know anything about them?” “I know something about them,” said Lorna. She was surprised (and, she would admit to herself later, pleased) to find that Luther’s attitude incensed her, made her bolder than she would have been. “I know that I like what they say.” “And what do they say?” asked Luther. He smiled. Lorna thought that she might kick him if he didn’t stop smiling. She snatched the pamphlet from him and flipped through its pages to the place where she’d been reading when she’d struck the table with her fist. “They say,” she said, “ ‘Equal pay for equal work.’ ” “Oh, now, Lorna,” said Luther. “Uncle Luther,” said Lorna, pressing her feet together so that she wouldn’t kick him, “I don’t want to argue with you. My mind is made up. I’m going to — ” “Stop,” said Luther, with maddening calm. He looked at her for a moment, deciding what he wanted to do. He had begun to consider Lorna a liability in coarse goods. Her work was wonderful, of course, superior in every way, but as a carver she had been bad for morale. She had set a standard that the others couldn’t attain. Half of them strained to measure up, taking pains that wasted time without improving their work, and the other half fell into grumbling and loafing. Production had fallen off. As manager, she was an even more imposing presence. The others in the specialty department feared or resented her ability, and Luther, though he admired her talent, wondered if he wouldn’t be just as glad to see her go. “Perhaps you’re right,” he said. “I have an idea. Why don’t you quit the specialty goods and go onto the regular line in suspenders or buttons? I shall be pleased to pay you just what everyone else is getting there.” “I — ” Lorna began, surprised and confused. Still smiling, quoting her, Luther said, “I don’t want to argue with you. My mind is made up.” Lorna stood straight and clenched her fists at her sides. “I think I’ll just quit work altogether,” she said. “Lorna, Lorna,” said Luther with an exaggerated look of offense and disappointment. “There’s a war on, remember? I’m sure you want to do your part.” “Uncle Luther — ” Lorna began. “You know, Lorna,” said Luther, as if the idea had just occurred to him, “it would break your parents’ hearts if they knew what you’d been up to here.” Lorna took two steps backward, as if she’d been pushed. In an instant, she understood how rough a fight she was in, and she struck back with the kind of blow she’d been dealt. “And it would make your brother furious if he knew what you’d been up to with his daughters,” she said with a calm like that she’d seen in Luther. On the way out she repeated to herself, Do not slam the door; do not slam the door, and because she couldn’t trust herself not to slam it, she left it standing open. Luther slammed it.
In Topical Guide 279, Mark Dorset considers Real Reality and Fictional Reality and Working Women from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
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You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
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You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
In his letters to Lorna from the hospital, Herb began to devote more space to matters other than business, including personal matters:
A lot of the other guys complain about the food, but I’ve had worse. We generally have boiled potatoes and onions, and sometimes we have rice or stew. Breakfast might be just crackers and coffee, but it wasn’t many years ago that I didn’t have any breakfast. Lots of times, when I went to school, for lunch I would just take a potato. Sometimes I’d have an onion sandwich, which didn’t make me too popular with the other kids! I used to sell papers on the street and also a thing that my buddies and I called rat pie. We got these pies at a bakery so we could sell them, and we used to joke that they were made of rat meat. I think all of us thought it was probably true. If a rat pie got wet in the rain or if somebody dropped one on the pavement, I’d take it home, and we’d have that for dinner. Many nights we’d have just potatoes. So I don’t mind this food at all. In fact, sometimes when we have just bread and onions I make an onion sandwich and it reminds me of home. The truth is, I like onion sandwiches. . . . I’m glad that the books are arriving on time. I’d be pleased if you would continue to write to me to let me know how things are going, if it isn’t too much trouble.
One of Herb’s letters to his mother was much like another, and they all included something like this:
So, you mustn’t worry about me, because, as I said, I’m all right. My leg is healing just fine, and everyone says that I probably won’t walk with a limp or be able to predict rain. I’ve arranged to have some money sent to Uncle Ben for you. I don’t need any money where I am, so don’t you worry about taking it.
One of his letters to Ben was much like another, and they all ended in the manner of this one:
I’ve had a good week — prices are climbing. Please give Mother an extra twelve dollars. I know you’re keeping track of everything you give her, and you can rest assured that I will be able to pay all of it back and then some.
In one, however, he had a couple of interesting questions to ask:
Here’s a funny thing. Some of the fellows here have been buying “special” carved buttons for their uniforms. Where do you suppose they’re buying them? Do you think we have competition? Some of the fellows say they heard that sometimes special carvings — not buttons, but very special carvings — come in packages from the Red Cross, but I don’t think that could be right, do you?
In Topical Guide 278, Mark Dorset considers Food: Onion Sandwiches from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
AT THAT MOMENT, Herb was in a field hospital, recovering from a wound that would keep him hors de combat for the rest of the war.
The evening before, as the sun began to set, Herb had been lying in a trench just west of a wood outside the village of Quelquepart-sur-Marne. The sun was going down, and its golden light lit a low serpentine ridge between the trench and the wood, about two hundred yards from where Herb and his fellows crouched, waiting. The ridge was strongly fortified, and so was the wood. In a moment, Herb and the others expected the order to charge the ridge, to charge out of the blinding light of the setting sun.
Herb crouched below the lip of the trench, waiting for the call to go up and over, to try to take the ridge and, beyond it, the wood. Before the call came, a shell burst in the trench, to Herb’s right, and the explosion pushed him backward, just as if someone had tackled him around the legs and shoved him, against a timber that supported the muddy walls of the trench, and then spun him around it, as if he were in a revolving door.
May Castle recalled hearing Herb tell the story:
Well, of course, if you know someone for as long as Garth and I knew Herb and Lorna, you’re bound to have to listen to the same stories quite a few times — you can count yourself lucky if the stories are at least interesting. Garth told his war stories over and over and over, God knows. Well, poor Herb really didn’t have much to tell. You had to twist his arm to get him to tell about being praised by Pershing, it embarrassed him so, and he only had one other story to tell — that one about the shell that exploded in the trench. Well, there he was in a trench at Someplace-or-other-on-the-Marne, and of course it was all just ghastly. Well, it was all ghastly, wasn’t it? Herb and his trench-mates or whatever you call them were supposed to come dashing out of the trench and overrun some Germans who were holding some damned hill or other. Well! Suddenly this shell exploded and Herb was tossed around pretty badly. “It was the darnedest thing,” he said. “I kept thinking that someone had hold of me by the leg and was shaking me. There I was spun around and flat on my back, and I reached down to try to push away whoever was holding me by the leg. Well, no one was holding me by the leg at all. I’d been hit, and my leg was opened up from the knee to the hip, just the way you’d cut open a baked potato.”
Herb passed his time in the hospital, as soon as he was able, assembling kits to improve the drinking cup handle catches. He taught others of the recovering wounded how to make these, and soon he had a group of some fifty men working on them. The work was useful in more than the immediately obvious ways; the men who did it probably benefited as much as those for whom they made the kits. In Terror and Tedium,his important but neglected study of the psychology of war, Major Edward Keefe wrote of the work that Herb initiated:
The typical field hospital was behind the lines but barely beyond the range of the shelling. The war was still so close, such a constant presence, that there was no emotional escape from it. Added to the whole catalog of feelings that the war inspired in these wounded men was an almost overwhelming sense of frustration, of impotence, of not being able to do anything about it, not being able to participate. (We see another example of the effect of this feeling of impotence, by the way, in the flourishing traffic within the hospitals in pornography of all sorts — photographs, drawings, literature, even pornographic jewelry and tiny netsuke-like carvings.) Those on the mend would sometimes plead to be sent back into the fighting, even when they were obviously unfit. They worked at various tasks in and around the hospitals, of course — orderly work, supply-train work, and work on the “ice flotillas,” the trucks and ice-making equipment that kept the hospitals supplied with the ice so necessary for their operation. But this was not enough. A sense of distance developed among the wounded, a sense of being a class apart. The work they did was most often work for other wounded. They felt that they weren’t doing anything for their fellows who were still fighting, and they began to think of themselves as not belonging to the same group, not worthy of belonging to it. The cup handle repair kits were something that they could do for the men who were still fighting, and the wounded were eager to get in on the action, so to speak.
In Topical Guide 277, Mark Dorset considers Places: Real and Fictional and War: World War I: Trench Warfare from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
THE WOMEN’S COMMITTEE of the Council of National Defense produced a long list of efforts that they considered worthwhile contributions to the war effort, but the writing of lascivious letters to soldiers was not among them. A woman in Chacallit was likely to be asked to join the Back Yard Gardeners (though the steep slope of the land in Chacallit limited the efforts of this group), the Picklers and Canners (who specialized in sauerkraut), the Children’s Bureau (which sought to “keep the living standards, spirits, and chins of the children of Chacallit’s men-in-arms up”), the Chacallit chapter of “America First” (which, lacking immigrants to instruct in English and citizenship, had cast about for another project and had been steered by Ben Piper’s original contact in Chacallit, Axel Schweib, whose wife headed the Chacallit chapter, in the direction of the Doughboy’s Dozen and so put its efforts into purchasing for departing soldiers subscriptions to the entire series of books), or the Red Cross Knitters and Stitchers (who specialized in bed socks). However, of all the kinds of volunteer work that women were doing to support the war effort, the one that most appealed to Lorna was the assembling of Red Cross Comfort Kits. In American Women and the World War, Ida Clyde Clarke describes these Comfort Kits as “bags made in three styles with pockets containing comforts, buttons and sewing outfits, games, soap, socks, and the like.” In the kits assembled in Chacallit, “the like” included money clips, cuff links, collar stays, and the like, donated by the manufacturers in town, who also donated brochures describing their other products.
Lorna was also kept busy by her duties as Herb’s representative for Professor Clapp’s Five-Foot Shelf of Indispensable Information for Modern Times. These duties were sweet, for they required her, she had decided, to write to Herb more and more frequently. She began her early letters with news about the book business, as she did this one:
I finished delivering The Automobile: Its Selection, Care, and Use. I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know that everyone is quite satisfied with the book. Reverend Binder even stopped me the other day to say that he had been reading the chapter on “Housing the Automobile,” and that it has inspired him to build a garage. I knew you would enjoy hearing that.
Soon, however, she would turn from business to other matters:
With those deliveries finished, I will go back to my work for the Red Cross, putting together Comfort Kits. Have you gotten one of these kits? I think about you sometimes when I’m working on them, because sometimes the thought strikes me that you might get one of the kits that I put together. What do you think of that? I think it would be quite a coincidence if you did. It has become a great game among us girls to slip some personal token into a kit, just some little thing that could only have come from the girl who put it together. Some of the girls write a little note. Others put a picture in or something else. . . .
The “something else” that Lorna began putting into the kits she assembled made her a legend among the troops in France, anonymous, but the object of fantasies in miles of trenches.
One evening, when she gathered with the other women who worked on Comfort Kits, she brought with her, in a pocket that she had sewn into her skirt, a tiny ivory figure. It resembled the jewelry she carved, but this figure was not meant to be attached to anything else. It was not an ornament; it was a tiny piece of sculpture. Lorna had worked on it at home, in the evenings, alone in her room, using herself as a model, carving ivory that she had persuaded Luther to donate to the Comfort Kit effort.
She slipped her hand into her pocket and removed the carving. Working below the table while she kept up her chatter with Adelaide Hooper, she slipped the carving into a packet of tobacco. She let the packet rest in her lap until Adelaide turned away to get another sack of buttons; then she brought the packet up to the table and put it into the Comfort Kit she was packing. She couldn’t help smiling at the thought of its being discovered.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
LORNA also threw herself into work. All over America, women answered the call to do the work of men who had answered the call to war. In Chacallit, there was much work to do.
In the years before the United States entered the war, Chacallitans gave the outward appearance of favoring neutrality, but in fact neutrality had made everyone nervous, since Chacallitans of German and British background distrusted one another’s private convictions. When the United States had finally decided to go to war, Chacallit had rushed to support the decision. Several of the young men of Chacallit had enlisted at once, and the town was surprised to find itself fuming unanimously with anti-German sentiment and puffing with pride in America and Chacallit. When the draft began, Chacallit showed none of the resistance shown in some other small towns — towns that answered the call by drafting ruffians, drunks, and layabouts — nor was there any of the grisly pettiness of towns where officials on a local draft board, handed the power to administer fear, pain, even death, used it to revenge lost boundary disputes or arguments over rights-of-way, to return, horribly inflated, schoolyard taunts, to exact satisfaction for cuckoldry. Chacallit sent its best, and the draftees were treated in the Chacallit Sentinel as if they’d already won the Croix de Guerre.
The gentlemen’s furnishings industry converted to production of bits and pieces for uniforms: buttons, buckles, snaps, grommets, hooks, clamps, straps, bandoliers, and such. Since women had long been employed in the mills of Chacallit, replacement sometimes meant advancement, when women moved into positions their supervisors vacated. Such was Lorna’s case. She had been the only woman in the carving section of the coarse-goods operation. Two of her co-workers enlisted, and her supervisor, John Caldwell, who had always kept to himself and rarely spoke to any of the workers on any subject but their work, surprised them all by announcing that he was leaving to assist in the work being done by the Young Men’s Christian Association in France. Said he, in part:
When this terrible war is over, who will return to us? Will the men who return to our shores prove to be a greater menace than the Prussian bullies? Will they be the sons and husbands and brothers we sent over there, or will they be a syphilitic horde of Frenchified monsters? I am going to France to do my part to see that when our boys return we can embrace them without fear and loathing. I’ll counsel abstinence, but I will also provide protection, for no doughboy should be without his three safeguards: his helmet, his mask, and his condoms.
Luther wanted Lorna to take over as supervisor of the coarse-goods division, but she demurred, for two reasons. One was personal: with Herb so much on her mind, she was embarrassed by her work and afraid of his finding out about it. The other was patriotic: she thought that she should be working on uniform fittings.
“Uncle Luther,” she said, “I can’t do what you want.” She took a deep breath. “In fact,” she said, “I think we should suspend production of ‘specialty items’ and put all our efforts into things that are necessary for the war.” She took another breath and pressed her lips together to keep herself from smiling with pride. She had been afraid to say what she felt she had to say, and she was proud and relieved to have said it. Luther stood and folded his arms across his chest.
“Necessary for the war,” he said, nodding his head. “Necessary for the war. And you know what is necessary for the war, do you? Do you think wars are won with bullets? Do you think wars are won with gas or grommets or belt buckles? Ha! Let me tell you something, Lorna my dear: wars are won with spirit! Wars are won with the will to win! I’d rather see the women of America writing lascivious letters to our boys than knitting socks and canning carrots! Spirit is what we want, and specialty jewelry helps build spirit.”
Turning partly away and taking his chin in his deficient hand, he said, “I wasn’t planning to announce this just yet, but I suppose now is the time. We’re going to begin producing specialty uniform buttons. They should be a wonderful morale booster.” He turned to look at Lorna again. “The tide of war turns in mysterious ways,” he said. “Who can say whether these buttons might not be enough to turn the tide in France?”
Luther gained the advantage, for the time being. He succeeded in making Lorna doubt herself and her motives. She hung her head and, with ambiguous feelings, agreed to take the supervisor’s job.
In Topical Guide 275, Mark Dorset considers Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs): World War I from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Chapter 6
In Which Lorna Becomes a Legend and Herb Is Decorated
ONE CANNOT leave oneself behind. Emerson and Huber were right: one’s giant always tags along. When we say that success or divorce or war changes people, and mean by it that it makes great changes, we are likely to be commenting not on the people, but on our perceptions of them. In war, certain traits sometimes appear with a prominence that they do not have or cannot have in peacetime. The bookkeeper who becomes the fabled hero of his regiment, who astonishes us with his valor and nobility, may have stoutly but quietly refused to juggle his employer’s books the week before he enlisted, but that civilian demonstration of valor and nobility may have gone unsung, may even have cost him his job. Of Herb’s traits, the one that came to prominence in the Great War was his mechanical ingenuity.
Training in the muddy woods of North Carolina, Herb learned to fire a rifle and jump into a trench and breathe through a gas mask and throw a grenade and thrust a bayonet through a stuffed sack. He worried about his mother, and he dreamed about Lorna, and he was drawn with all the foolhardiness of a Piper toward the schemes that flourished in the camp. He was ever wary, though, of doing a foolish Piper thing, and his wariness kept him out of lotteries and pyramid plans and, most of the time, whorehouses. He brought his talent for salesmanship with him, but he found that he hardly needed it to sell coarse goods among his fellow draftees and recruits. When he realized how large the demand was, he decided, knowing how short the supply was, that he could increase the price by exaggerating the shortage. He invented a mysterious character who, he claimed, brought him the goods a few pieces at a time, from an orphanage, where young girls carved the items to earn their keep, using one another as models. To provide the unlikely detail that lends verisimilitude to a lie, he gave the man a mutilated right hand.
When he had time to kill, he often killed it, as he always had, by tinkering. He found plenty to keep him occupied. There was always something to fix, and there was always something that could be improved. By the end of the war, his love of tinkering had made him famous. He was known among the doughboys as “that guy from Boston,” who found a way to fix the handle on the mess-kit cup.
Each infantryman was issued a cleverly designed mess kit that combined all the essential containers and implements in one package. In fact, it became its own package, the pan mating with the plate, like the two halves of a clamshell, and the handle of the pan rotating to hold the two together. One component of this kit was a cup with a folding handle. This coffee cup showed how ill prepared America had been for war: the folding handle had never been tested under combat conditions, or even under rigorous training conditions. The handle couldn’t be depended on to stay in the open position, and it was most likely to fail when the cup was full. The first time Herb’s failed, coffee spilled down his right leg. He wasn’t alone in having this happen; it happened to many. He was, however, alone in his reaction to it. He immediately began thinking of a way to make the cup handle work as it should. He wore a little grin while he ate, though his leg was scalded and his food was insipid, because he was turning over in his mind ways that he might solve the problem the Army had given him to keep him from feeling miserable.
In Topical Guide 274, Mark Dorset considers Gadgets: Mechanical and Reality: Real and Fictional from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
THE NEXT MORNING, Herb left Ben at a table in the Chacallit House dining room, bent over eggs and sausage and kartoffelpuffers, the potato pancakes that would forever be Ben’s second-fondest memory of Chacallit. His fondest would be the deal he had made with Luther Huber for dozens of pieces of coarse goods, a deal of that satisfying kind in which each party feels that he’s getting the better of the other. Ben was pleased because he’d been able to get a price spectacularly lower than what he’d been paying to the Clapp people. Luther was pleased because Ben had paid a good bit more than Clapp paid. Both men looked forward to doing more business together in the future.
While Ben ate, Herb drove up the steep and winding road to the Hubers’. Lorna heard a car stop in front of the house, but she was rushing to leave for work and didn’t give it much thought. Herb bounded from the car, strode up the walk, mounted the steps, and stopped in front of the door, uncertain whether to turn the knurled knob to ring the bell or not. He had no idea what he’d say when the door opened. Ever since he had decided, in the moonlight, to return to the Hubers’, he’d assumed that inspiration would come to him at the last moment, that as soon as he had to speak, he would know what to say. He’d slept well, eaten heartily, and driven the winding road with a song in his heart, all because he expected inspiration to come to him. Now he found himself at the door, still uninspired; he felt a damp chill in his chest and a dryness in his mouth.
For Lorna’s part, once she had decided, in the moonlight, that Herb would never return, the things that she would say to him if only he would return had come to her easily. In the morning, she stayed in bed longer than she should have, and then she had to rush to leave for the mill in time. She bounded down the stairs, dashed into the kitchen, drank the milk her mother had poured for her, and started for the door, licking her upper lip.
Well, here it comes at last, the moment that would have occurred the night before, had everything gone as these things ought to go. Lorna opened the door and found Herb, staring into her face. Her beauty flared and transfixed Herb with his hand to his hat, his mouth hanging open.
“Good morning, Herb Piper,” she said without a moment’s hesitation. “Did you find anybody to deliver those books for you while you’re in France?” She had said exactly the right thing, and she knew it. She beamed.
Herb was astonished, ecstatic, euphoric, drunk on love, and he was, all at once, inspired. He beamed right back. “No,” he said. “I didn’t. In fact, I came here this morning hoping that I might persuade you to take the work on.”
“I’ll do it,” said Lorna. “I don’t care about the terms. I think it’s important for you to know that your business in Chacallit is being looked after while you’re in the — in the trenches.” Her voice threatened to fail her, but she swallowed hard and went on. “You can’t afford to be distracted by business worries at a time like that,” she said, pressing right on with the argument she had prepared without reading in Herb’s expression the fact that none of it was necessary.
“You’re right,” he said, speaking straight from the center of his thoughts, without any face-saving deviation. “I could get killed if I’m not careful, but they say if you look out for yourself, if you keep your eyes open, chances are good you’ll get through all right.”
They didn’t speak for a moment, just looked at each other across the possibility of death.
“I have to go to work,” Lorna said at last. She frowned.
“Let me drive you,” said Herb. “I’ve got my own car.”
“I see you do,” said Lorna. She walked beside him to the car, and he opened the door for her, and when, to steady herself, she reached for the edge of the door that he held open, her hand touched his.
“Of course, I’ll write to you often,” she said, “to keep you informed about the progress of — things.”
“Oh, yes,” said Herb. “I hope so. Once a week, at least.”
“At least,” she agreed. “There are so many things for us to discuss,” she said suddenly, noting with alarm how quickly they were approaching River Road. “I wonder if you could come by this evening to explain it all to me. You might come for dinner — if you like.”
“I’d like to,” said Herb, “but my uncle Ben and I have to get back to Boston, and we were going to leave right after breakfast.”
“Boston?” Lorna asked. “Is that where you’re from?”
“Sure,” said Herb, grinning. “Can’t you tell?”
“Tell?” she asked.
“From the way I talk?”
“I never knew anyone from Boston before,” said Lorna. “I thought you were from Albany.”
They made a couple of selections from the catalog of little giggles, titters, chuckles, and chortles that timid would-be lovers use when they don’t know how to say, or can’t bring themselves to say, what they want to say. They approached the center of town, and Lorna was reminded of work. She thought with horror that a young man from Boston wasn’t likely to approve of a girl who carved improper subjects on men’s jewelry. She didn’t want him to see where she worked. She had Herb stop when he reached River Road. They shook hands. Lorna said, “Good luck, Herb. I hope you don’t — have a hard time.”
Herb grinned. “I hope I don’t get killed,” he said. Lorna got out. Herb put the car in gear. “So long, Lorna,” he said.
In Topical Guide 273, Mark Dorset considers Food: Kartoffelpuffers and Language: Regional Accents from this episode.
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
HERB STOOD at a window in the Chacallit House, smoking, looking at the moon, thinking of Lorna, trying to remember everything she had said and done, every move she’d made, the way she’d looked in every slant of light, especially the way she’d looked when she’d made him lose track of what he’d meant to say.
How does she do that? It’s some trick she has with the way she turns her head, or the way she tilts her chin. Something. I don’t know. And quick-witted? You’ve got to hand it to her. That business with her parents. She had her mother and father thinking I was somebody else. What did she say? “They were sure they should know you, so they decided they did know you.” Something like that. I’m not sure how she did it. Maybe they had been expecting someone else, but I don’t think so. It was the way she conducted herself, as if they ought to know who I was, and she confused them. She does that to many people, I imagine. She must have the fellows in Chacallit following her in a line. How many, I wonder? Too many for her to bother with me, I guess. Why not me, though? There’s nothing wrong with me. Mr. Huber liked me; I’m sure of that. He seemed sorry for me somehow. He made me wonder whether my coat was torn or something. Still, I could tell he liked me. The mother, too. Why shouldn’t she, then? I’ve got good prospects. I probably make more money than most fellows my age in this town. Oh, don’t be foolish. She doesn’t know anything about me. I can call her Cinderella. Cinderella. Why did I let her get away with that? Aaaah, because it wasn’t worth pursuing. I’ll be gone tomorrow, and there isn’t much chance that I’ll ever be back. Good God, I didn’t mean that. I’ll be back. Knock on wood. You look out for yourself, you keep your eyes open, and you do just what you have to do, chances are good you’ll get through all right. I might get killed. I might get hurt, lose something, lose a leg, a hand, fingers. Suppose I do get killed. Suppose I do? I might. Here I am about to get killed, and I don’t have the courage to go back and talk to her, ask her to write to me. I will go back, first thing in the morning.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
“I’ll see you in a month, I suppose,” said Lorna. “I’m sure I can’t wait for you to bring us our copy of One Hundred Lessons in Business.”
“You won’t see me,” said Herb. He was a little annoyed now, and he let it show. “I don’t live around here. Besides, I’ve been called up for service.”
“Oh,” said Lorna, surprised at how much this news startled her.
“I’ll have to find someone here in Chacallit who can deliver the books for me.”
“Oh,” said Lorna. She couldn’t think of anything to add.
“I’d better be on my way,” said Herb, in a tentative way, without moving any closer to the steps. “My uncle Ben must be wondering what I’ve been up to all this time.”
“Well, I’m sure he’ll be pleased when he learns what a fine job you did selling books to the Hubers,” said Lorna. The pert tone was back in her voice, but she had the sickening feeling that Herb and his uncle might laugh at her parents, laugh at her too.
“Good-bye, Cinderella,” said Herb. He turned and walked down the steps, down the walk, to his car. He got in, started it, and drove away. Lorna felt the chill, but she hugged herself and watched from the porch until the taillights disappeared.
“A shame about that boy,” said Lena when Lorna returned to the living room. Lorna stood with her back to the fire, but the chill she felt came from within her.
“Yes,” she said, abstractedly.
“He’s got gumption, that boy,” said Richard. “He’s going to go places, I’d say. He’s a pusher, you can see that. Doesn’t sit around feeling sorry for himself. Runs right at a thing. Probably a real scrapper when he was little. He’ll be a scrapper in business too. He’s going to go places.”
“He’s going to France,” said Lorna.
“France?” asked her mother.
“He’s been drafted,” said Lorna, still abstracted, still attending to her own thoughts.
“Oh,” said Richard. “Well, good for him, and I wish him luck.” He raised his paper in front of his face.
“He’ll probably do just as well in the war as in business, don’t you think, Richard?” asked Lena, partly just to say something, to contribute her share to the conversation, and partly because, still grateful to her husband for steering them through their interview with Herb Piper, she wanted to show him that she was paying careful attention to everything he said.
“Hmmm,” said Richard. “Not necessarily. He may be a little too plucky, if you know what I mean, a little too eager. That kind is apt to get himself killed.”
Lorna brought her hand to her face, tried to speak, but found that only a strangled cry came from her. She looked at her father in terror. She ran from the room and up the stairs to her bed, which she found so cold that she shivered under her quilt. The clouds had dispersed, and moonlight fell across Lorna’s bed. She lay awake, thinking of Herb — mostly of that smile of his, that honest smile. She smiled herself when she recalled his surprise when he’d seen her in the right light, the way he’d paused in folding his umbrella, the way he’d held his hat, the way he’d lost his tongue. She was also thinking of herself, mostly of things she might have said, might have done.
I could have stayed out on the porch with him, talking. Just talking about this and that. The moon even came out from behind the clouds. The perfect setting. Why didn’t I? Why didn’t I?
“Where are you from, Herb? Albany, I’ll bet. How did you ever find your way to Chacallit? Are you afraid to go to the war?”
No, no. That wouldn’t be the thing to ask. He might be killed. He’s got gumption, and that can be dangerous in a war. I could have touched his hand, could have made him promise to write to me, to come back to me. That’s a ridiculous idea. When he comes home from France, he won’t be coming to Chacallit. He might not come home at all. He might be killed.
Father liked him, even if he had no idea who he was. “He’s got gumption.” He liked me, liked me even when I was teasing him, liked me even when I told him to call me Cinderella. Cinderella. Damn. I might as well have told him to go away and leave me alone. Well, he has. I wish something would bring him back.
“Do you like selling books?”
That would have been better than nothing.
“You must have stories to tell about traveling, don’t you, Herb? I’ll bet you have stories you wouldn’t want to tell me.”
Teasing again. He probably does have stories he wouldn’t want to tell. There may be girls lying awake from here to Albany or wherever he came from. All of us lying awake, with the moonlight falling across our beds, thinking of things we might have said to keep Herb from going on to the next girl. Are the others thinking that, that there are others, that we’re all thinking the same things? Maybe not. Maybe there are no others. Maybe I’m the only one who’s made him feel awkward; maybe I’m the only one he’s wanted to talk to. But maybe not. Maybe I’m different. Maybe each of us thinks she’s different, that she’s the only one he’s really noticed, that he’ll be back. Maybe each of us is wishing that something would bring him back.
In Topical Guide 271, Mark Dorset considersL’Esprit de L’Escalier from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
An hour later, Great-Grandfather Huber had subscribed to Professor Clapp’s entire five-foot shelf of books and bought one of Herb’s expandable five-foot shelves, and he had also written a letter of introduction for Herb and given him the names of half a dozen friends and business associates whom he considered likely prospects.
When Lorna and Herb were standing alone at the door again, Lorna said, “Well, Herb Piper, you really can sell books.”
Herb laughed. “Thanks,” he said. “I didn’t need your help, you know.”
“Oh, I’m sure of that,” said Lorna. She raised her eyebrows.
“I didn’t,” insisted Herb. He laughed again. “It didn’t hurt, though. Who do you suppose your mother and father thought I was?”
Lorna couldn’t keep from giggling. “I haven’t any idea,” she said. “They were sure they ought to know you, and so I suppose they made themselves remember you.”
“They seemed sorry for me,” said Herb. “I — I think I took advantage of them.”
“Oh, no,” said Lorna. “You didn’t. You just — let them think what they wanted to think. You were really only being polite. They would have been terribly embarrassed if you had told them that they were wrong about you.”
“You don’t think there’s a chance that they really do know me, do you?” asked Herb. The thought had occurred to him that they might have been investors in his father’s cork furniture business.
“No,” said Lorna. She pursed her lips. She shook her head. “They couldn’t, not unless you had lived in Chacallit. My mother and father have been here forever and ever.”
“Well, thanks for giving them the impression that they ought to know me,” said Herb. He grinned, and he offered her his hand to shake. She shook it. She stepped onto the porch and closed the door behind her.
“It’s stopped raining,” she said. She walked to the railing, leaned on it, and looked up at the sky, where a bit of moon lit the thinning clouds from behind.
“Yes,” said Herb. “It has.” He put his hat on, stood straight, and said, “Good evening.”
“You’re quite right,” said Lorna.
“May I call you Lorna?” asked Herb.
Lorna was surprised to find that the thought that he was going to leave in a minute or two made her feel colder suddenly, as if a breeze had come up, though the air was still. Something told her to hide the feeling from Herb. That something, that damned something, was the sense of personal dignity that is one of our most civilized attributes, the source of so many of our discontents, the cause of so many missed opportunities. I make that judgment nearly seventy years after the fact, but I have support for it from May Castle:
Oh, you know it’s just the damnedest thing, isn’t it, the way we hold ourselves back! Of course, in the long run it’s probably for the best that we do, or we’d be throwing ourselves at half the people we meet and throwing stones at the others. But how many times have I said to myself, “Oh, damn! Why didn’t I let myself go and try dancing the tango?” Well, that may not be the best example — I always do try dancing the tango whenever the opportunity presents itself, and I’ve gotten quite good at it over the years — which is just my point, isn’t it? But I’ve never gone into one of those saunas, you see. There I’ve held myself back, because I’ve thought I’d look foolish. Well, that’s just the way Lorna felt, I’m sure.
It’s a negative desire: not to lose one’s dignity, not to look foolish. It may be love’s worst enemy. It made Lorna let Herb leave for the war without giving herself a chance to fall in love with him. She didn’t want to look foolish, to look like an infatuated girl, so she continued to behave as if she were only playing with Herb. She said, “You can call me Cinderella if you like — that’s what my sisters call me.”
“Hmm,” said Herb. “Cinderella.” He was disappointed. He liked Lorna, and he knew that he was going to see her face when he closed his eyes that night, and perhaps for many nights to come. He knew that for days he was going to be concocting, too late, clever answers to her questions, parries for her taunts. He had had, when she stepped onto the porch with him, the crazy idea that he might ask her to write to him while he was away, and that she just might agree to do so. It seemed to him now that she had only been playing with him, that there was nothing underlying her playfulness but the boredom of a rainy evening. He put his hat on. “Good night, Cinderella,” he said.
In Topical Guide 270, Mark Dorset considers Dance: The Tango from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
WHEN MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER Richard looked up from his newspaper, he was surprised to find that Herb Piper was someone he didn’t know. My great-grandmother Lena wasn’t at all certain whether she knew the boy or not. Lorna had seemed to know him when she’d called out his name, and her manner now suggested that he was someone Lena ought to remember, but she simply couldn’t place him. Richard glanced at Lena to see whether he could find on her face any hint of their connection with the Pipers. He saw there a pleasant smile. It was that thin smile we all employ when we attempt to hide our ignorance, but either Lena was too accomplished at employing that smile or the light in the Huber parlor was too dim for Richard to see it for what it was. To him, the smile on Lena’s face looked like evidence of recognition, and the idea began to form in his mind that Herb Piper was the son of a fellow named Henry, called Hank, a terrible drinker, notorious for it, who had fallen face-down in a pool at the Whatsit’s edge one moonless night about four years ago and drowned in three inches of water. “A terrible thing, terrible,” Richard reflected. He recalled that it had happened during a drought, making it one of the bitter ironies of life.
The sight of Herb, neatly dressed and apparently prosperous, gladdened Richard’s heart, but, at the same time, made him feel that he might have done, really ought to have done, more for Hank’s widow, and for poor Herb too, for that matter. He was glad to see Herb looking so hale, but he would be gladder still when the boy was gone. Given the pathetic circumstances, Richard thought it appropriate to stand, and he did.
“How’s your mother, young fellow?” he asked, taking Herb’s hand in a firm grip, grabbing Herb’s elbow with his other hand, composing his features in a look of grave concern.
“She’s fine, sir,” said Herb, smiling, humoring this stocky burgher, who, through this sudden question, impressed him as certainly mad and possibly dangerous.
“Wonderful!” exclaimed Lena, delighted to find that Richard, at least, not only recognized this Herb Piper but knew enough about the boy to ask after his mother. Then, in the manner of many a person who, relieved to find that his ignorance has apparently gone undetected, throws to the winds his former caution, his wise reticence, and boldly, recklessly, with a certain jaunty sangfroid, puts his foot straight into his mouth, she added: “I’m so glad to hear that. We were concerned, weren’t we, Richard?”
Richard, his notion of the boy’s past now apparently confirmed by Lena, nodded gravely, guiltily, and looked at his shoes. “Yes,” he muttered. “I’m sorry we haven’t seen you before this, Herb. The door was always open, you know. Still,” he said, brightening, “I’m glad you’ve come to see us now, and I’m pleased to see you looking so well. You seem to be making quite a success of yourself.” He pounded Herb on the shoulder. Herb stood his ground, and he maintained the smile on his face, since he had learned from his years of street-corner rat-pie selling that a calm manner and ready agreement worked best with lunatics.
“Yes, sir,” he said, still smiling. “Thank you, sir.”
“Herb’s selling books now,” said Lorna, taking a spot at the end of the sofa. Her eyes twinkled. This was going to be even more fun than she’d imagined. “He’d like to sell you some books, Father.”
“Oh?” said Richard Huber. “Books?” He was entirely ready to buy a book or two at once, to salve his conscience, and then to send Herb on his way. “We could use some books, couldn’t we, Lena?”
“Why, I’m sure we could,” said Lena, eager to surrender any further dealings with the mystifying Herb Piper to her husband, now that she’d established incontrovertibly the strength and vividness of her recollection of Herb and Herb’s mother, even after what she supposed had been so long a lapse of time.
“What books have you got, Herb?” asked Richard.
“He hasn’t got Ben-Hur,” said Lorna. “I’ve already asked him about that.”
“No, I’m afraid I don’t have Ben-Hur,” said Herb. “The books I’m offering are more of the useful than the entertaining kind.” He bent to his sample case.
“Now there’s a distinction I’ve never understood,” said Lorna.
“Quiet, now, Lorna,” said Richard. He was embarrassed for Herb, having to go into the homes of people who had known his father, to trade on their sympathy as a way of inducing them to buy his books. He considered it little more than a way of putting a respectable front on asking for charity. However, he wasn’t offended by Herb’s exploiting his acquaintances in this way — in fact, he was impressed by the resourcefulness the idea showed — but he was sorry that poor Herb had been brought to it. “Let Herb show us what he’s got,” he said, “and don’t you interrupt him, Lorna.”
“What I have, sir,” said Herb, “is something no home should be without.” He gave everyone his smile, and when he turned to Lorna he allowed himself to add a wink. “The books that I’m about to offer for your consideration have been chosen by Professor Alonzo Clapp, late of Harvard College, as books that are essential to the health, wealth, and savoir-faire of today’s man, woman, or child. This,” he said, flinging open the clever case he had designed and built, “is Professor Clapp’s Five-Foot Shelf of Indispensable Information for Modern Times.”
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
THE MOMENT when Lorna opened the door was not one of those moments in which her elusive beauty shone, so Herb wasn’t dumbfounded at the sight of her. He didn’t stand there on the porch transfixed, with his hand to his hat, his mouth hanging open. It wasn’t love at first sight. When Lorna opened the door, Herb saw a young woman with a nice-enough figure, a pleasant smile, and dark hair. She looked to him like a good prospect for books. Lorna saw a neat young man with a salesman’s case. He looked to her like a good prospect for a little diversion on a rainy night.
“Good evening,” Herb said. He removed his hat and smiled.
Lorna put on a look of exaggerated surprise. “You must be fond of rain,” she said, “if you think this is a good evening.” She returned his smile. She was looking forward to watching this neat young man try to persuade her father to buy whatever he was selling.
“I guess you’re right,” said Herb. “Not only rain, but wind and cold, too.” He chuckled. He liked her. He liked the pert and sassy way she spoke to him. He put his hat back on, stood again as he’d been standing when she opened the door, took his hat off again as he’d taken it off before, gave a shiver, and said, frowning, “Nasty evening.”
“What are you selling?” Lorna asked. She leaned against the door frame, and that’s when it happened: her beauty shone, and it intoxicated Herb, befuddled and delighted him.
“What are you selling?” Lorna asked again.
Flabbergasted, Herb looked at his case. It was on the porch, at his feet. He remembered that he was selling something, and that he had samples of it in that case, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember what it was.
“I — you — you’re,” he said, and stopped. He couldn’t make himself say, “You’re beautiful,” and he felt foolish for having begun.
“Yes?” asked Lorna. She knew what had happened. She had seen it happen before. She always enjoyed it. She was enjoying this young man, too. She liked the way he looked. She suspected that he was as straightforward and friendly as he appeared, that he wasn’t just putting on a salesman’s front. She also liked the way she could rattle him with a quick question.
Herb stooped to open the case at his feet and find out what he was selling. With the act of stooping, when he was bent over, with his eyes off Lorna, his memory returned. He took a deep breath, got a grip on himself. He grasped the handle of the case, straightened up, and, to his surprise, laughed at himself for having been so rattled. He said, smiling broadly: “Books.” He risked looking at Lorna again. He was surprised, puzzled, disappointed, and — so unsettling had the experience been — a little relieved to find that the befuddling beauty he’d seen before had disappeared. Had he fooled himself into thinking he’d seen it? Had it been only a trick of the gray light, a soft shadow that fell on her face in a certain way that would never be duplicated?
“Do you have Ben-Hur?” asked Lorna. She’d been wanting to read Ben-Hur for some time. One of the girls at the mill had promised to trade her copy for Lorna’s copy of The Life Everlasting, but the girl was an extraordinarily slow reader, and Lorna had begun to despair of her ever finishing the book.
“Well, no,” said Herb. “I don’t think I do have that one.”
“I saw the moving picture,” said Lorna. “Did you?”
“No,” said Herb. “I — ”
“Lorna,” my great-grandfather Huber called from the living room, “who is that you’re talking to?”
Lorna leaned toward Herb, put her hand on his arm, and dropped her voice. “What’s your name?” she asked. She was inviting him to join her in a conspiracy, a conspiracy of the young, of children against parents. Herb would have told her his name at once, but he saw again the beauty that he’d seen a moment earlier, and again he was befuddled by it.
Lorna poked him. “What does your mother say when she wants you to come to dinner?” she asked.
“She says, ‘Supper’s ready, Herb.’ ”
“That’s nice,” said Lorna. She smiled. “ ‘Supper’s ready, Herb.’ You know what?”
“What?” asked Herb.
“I’ll bet your name is Herb,” said Lorna.
“Yes,” said Herb. “Herb. Herb Piper.”
“It’s Herb Piper, Father,” called Lorna. She spoke as if Herb Piper were someone her father had known for years, perhaps a boy she had gone to school with, and so convincing was her tone that Richard Huber reacted as if Herb Piper’s being there were an expected occurrence.
“Well, tell him to come in, then,” he called. “And close that door. The damp air is getting into the house.”
“Goodness!” said Lorna. She looked this way and that in mock terror. “Hurry inside, Herb Piper,” she said, “before the damn bear gets you.” She took Herb’s hand and tugged at him. “And try to calm yourself,” she added, in a whisper. “You’re going to do a fine job. You mustn’t let yourself be so nervous. Is this your first try at selling books?”
“No,” said Herb, a little offended. “It certainly is not.”
Lorna gave him a doubtful look. “It’s no disgrace,” she said. “You have to start somewhere.” She liked his nervousness, and she liked his face, his open, no-tricks-up-my-sleeve face.
“I’m not pretending,” said Herb. He couldn’t help chuckling when he said it. “I really am experienced, and in fact I’m very good at selling books.” Lorna liked this too, this pride in his ability. She also liked the way that, for all his apparent seriousness, he seemed always to be laughing, chuckling, grinning. She couldn’t have known that he wasn’t ordinarily much of a laugher, chuckler, or grinner, that it was she who made him feel like chuckling.
Lorna took his hat and umbrella from him. “I can’t wait to see you sell some books to my father,” she said. She turned and led the way into the parlor.
In Topical Guide 268, Mark Dorset considers Salesmen: Perceptions of, Early Twentieth Century; Literature: American, Popular and Gags, Repeated from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
THE TRIP TO CHACALLIT was an adventure. Any motor trip of that time that went much beyond the streets of a fair-sized town was something of an adventure, one that was likely to include among its highlights plenty of dust and mud, flat tires, running out of gas, leaving the road to avoid surprise obstacles, discovering roads not indicated on any map, and failing to find roads clearly indicated on every map. Herb and Ben’s trip included all of these, but it also included long stretches of pleasant rural scenery and some dazzling early-autumn days. They spent nights in farmhouses, in barns, and in fields, and when they reached Chacallit at last, muddy and tired, Ben was prepared to spring for the cost of a room in a hotel.
They took a room at the Chacallit House, Chacallit’s only hotel, more a rooming house, really, which stood right on River Road, not far from the building in which Lorna worked. The dining room of the Chacallit House was one of those spots that Henrietta Drechsler, director of the Society for the Preservation of Small-Town Values, had in mind when she wrote:
There is, in every small town, one place, most often a coffee shop, sometimes a bar, where the movers and shakers gather, where the town officials, businessmen, and shopkeepers eat breakfast or lunch and exchange bits of gossip, rumor, speculation, innuendo, ideas, and hunches. It would be an exaggeration to claim that the town is actually run from this spot — let’s call it the luncheonette — but it is certainly true that many a policy has its origin there, that many careers begin and end there, and that the luncheonette is the forum within which new arrivals, people and ideas alike, are subjected to a terrifying, inquisitorial scrutiny, usually in absentia.
Ben knew, from the ripple of attention that he and Herb occasioned when they passed the entrance to the dining room on their way to the desk, that the Chacallit House dining room was such a place. After he and Herb had registered, settled in their room, bathed and changed, he said to Herb, “Now I don’t know who exactly we should see about buying coarse goods, so I want to let him find us.”
“How are you going to do that?” asked Herb.
“Well,” said Ben, “I’m going to start by spending a considerable amount of time drinking coffee and eating sandwiches in the dining room downstairs. That’s the place to get to know people in this town.”
“How do you know that?” asked Herb.
“Oh,” said Ben, “I can tell by the look of those fellows who were sitting there when we came in. Those are the fellows whose pants have shiny seats. They do most of their day’s work right there in that dining room, keeping track of what’s what and making sure that what’s what is what they want to be what. Do you follow me?”
“Well — ” said Herb.
“You can bet,” said Ben, without offering any further explanation, “that they spent a half hour or so engaged in speculation about us after we came in, and you can bet that by now they know from the register where we’re from, and you can also bet that the dining room will be quite full this noon in the expectation that we’ll take our lunch there.”
“And will we?” asked Herb.
“I will,” said Ben. “I think it might be best if I handled this part of the business myself. You’re — well — you’re a little young, Herb.” He grabbed Herb by the scruff of the neck and shook him as he used to when Herb was a boy. “I’m a little better acquainted with the ways of the world than you are, for one thing, and for another a lot of men in business don’t think of a young fellow as being — well — ready.”
“Ready for what?” asked Herb.
“Well, ready to do business,” said Ben.
Herb shrugged and said, “All right. What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to set out to sell books,” said Ben. “It will keep you busy, keep you out of the way, and show that we’ve got a good cover for selling coarse goods. You’ll probably make some money for the trip home, too.”
While Ben spent time in the Chacallit House dining room, drinking coffee, eating stew and sausages and potato salad, and chewing the fat, Herb sold Professor Clapp’s Five-Foot Shelf from door to door. It took Ben a day to establish himself as a pleasant fellow traveling with his nephew to teach the boy the book business, to help him find his feet. In the afternoon of the second day, a Chacallitan, Axel Schweib, shot his cuffs during a conversation with Ben, as if gesticulating to emphasize a point, displayed in so doing a really remarkable pair of erotic links, and then went on to deliver a pitch for Ben’s taking erotic links and studs on as a sure-to-be-profitable sideline. Ben expressed interest, with reservations. A meeting was arranged with Luther Huber for the next day.
In the meantime, Herb had found Chacallit fertile ground for book sales. So successful had he been that he kept selling nonstop, knowing that everything he made would buy more coarse goods. On the second evening, he worked right through dinner, stopping at houses along the road that wound upward from the town. Rain began to fall. He thought of quitting for the day, but he was doing so well that he said to himself, “I’ll make one more stop, at that house just ahead, the one with its windows glowing.”
It was the narrow house on Ackerman hill, where Lorna sat in the parlor with her parents.
In Topical Guide 267, Mark Dorset considers Small-Town America from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
WHEN HE GOT the news, he ran to his Uncle Ben’s and burst into the apartment shouting, “Uncle Ben, I’ve been drafted!”
“Oh, Herb!” cried his Aunt Louise. “Oh, your poor mother.”
“I know,” said Herb. “That’s what I’m worried about. But I’ve got it all worked out, Uncle Ben.”
Ben put his fork down and looked at Herb thoughtfully. He assumed that Herb was going to try to get him to support Lester and Millie while he was in the army, or even — God forbid — try to make him agree to support them forever if Herb were killed. “Now, Herb,” said Ben, “you know I’d like to be in a position to take on the burden of seeing that your mother and father are cared for — ”
Herb laughed. “Relax, Uncle Ben,” he said. “I’m not going to ask you to support them. Go back to eating. I’ve got a plan that will enable me to keep right on selling.”
“Oh?” said Ben, brightening.
“That’s right,” said Herb. “Listen. I’m going to be in a camp with a thousand, ten thousand, I-don’t-know-how-many thousand men. What better place for me to sell — ”
He stopped himself, glanced at his aunt and at his young cousins. They were more attentive than ever before, the new imminence of death or dismemberment lending to Herb’s words a gravity and fascination they’d never had before.
“Sell books,” said Herb.
“Books?” asked Ben. He wore a look of surprise and incredulity.
“That’s right!” said Herb. “Those men are going to be lonely, isn’t that right, Uncle Ben?”
“Oh yes,” said Ben. “I’m certain they will be lonely. Frightened, too, I guess. Lonely and frightened. Mostly frightened.”
“I see what Herb’s getting at,” said Louise. “All those lonely, frightened men. What would they want most?”
“Um, that’s exactly right,” said Herb. He turned toward Ben and risked a wink. “What is it that a man turns to to alleviate his loneliness and fear? What fire drives away the chill of fear and lights even the darkest and loneliest corners?”
“Literature!” shouted Ben. “By God, you’re right, Herb! It’s a brilliant stroke.”
“Well, uh, yes, I’m glad you think so, Uncle Ben,” said Herb. He looked at his aunt and his cousins. Their eyes had filled with tears inspired by Herb’s selflessness, his thinking of the fear and loneliness of his fellow doughboys, even as he must have anticipated his own loneliness, his own fear.
“I don’t see how we can miss,” said Ben. He threw his arm across Herb’s shoulders and drew him close. “I don’t want you telling anyone else about this, Herb,” he said. “We can do this all on our own. Who needs Professor Clapp? Besides, we’re going to want to pick our books especially for the young man in the trenches or on his way to the trenches, the young man about to look death in the teeth. Oh, sorry, Herb. You know what I mean. Those doughboys aren’t going to want to waste their time on Practical Poultry Keeping. They’re going to want stuff like, well, the Aeneid and Julius Caesar and Gulliver’s Travels. Twelve books, twelve great books. The Doughboy’s Dozen. We’ll sell subscriptions to the folks at home and ship the books to their boys on the front lines. The same one-book-every-month idea!”
Later, when they managed to speak alone, Ben said, “I know what you have in mind, Herb, but I’m not sure we can ship something like that to France. I think the army checks packages and letters. The goods would never reach the boys.”
“I know, Uncle Ben,” said Herb. “That’s why I’ve got to take a supply with me, a large supply. I’m sure I can sell everything I can take, but I imagine that I’ll be moving around a lot, so I probably won’t be able to take much. I don’t know how much I can afford to buy all at once, though. I’ll bet I could get a better price if I could get some pieces without buying through the Professor Clapp people. Can I go right to the people who make the goods?”
“Of course you can!” said Ben. “They’re in New York somewhere, not too far from Albany, I think. What’s it called, now? Chack–? Check–? Chacallit. That’s it. I’ll go with you! It should be quite an adventure.”
In Topical Guide 266, Mark Dorset considers Literature: Its Value and Utility and Real Reality, Fictional Reality from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
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You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Chapter 5
In Which Herb and Lorna Meet but Are Separated by War
THEIR MEETING almost didn’t occur, because Herb met Tessie Norris first. He met her at a gas station. He was stopped at a pump, leafing through his appointment book while he was having his tank filled and his oil and water and tires checked. An antiquated touring car pulled up on the opposite side of the pumps, its arrival heralded by a flourish of rattles, pings, and wheezes that made Herb look up from his book. In the passenger’s seat, he saw Tessie. She looked like a pastel portrait. That she was picking distractedly at the hem of her dress Herb couldn’t see; that her eyes darted about like those of a frightened bird he didn’t notice; that she was biting her lower lip he overlooked. He was smitten by her pale, perfect face.
Herb had had little experience with girls or women. In school he’d had his share of crushes but little opportunity to do much about them. Now, sitting in his own car, with some money in his pocket, wearing a new suit, he not only noticed but felt in a position to act.
He got out of his car and walked around the pumps. He seemed to be on his way inside the station, perhaps to inspect the inner tubes displayed in the tiny office, but then a sudden determination seemed to come over him. He looked at the car and at its driver, and he seemed to waver in his course. The driver had by now noticed Herb, and Herb grinned sheepishly, shrugged his shoulders, and stepped briskly to the driver’s side of the car.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I’ve noticed that your machine is — well, heck, it needs some repair, doesn’t it? I hope you won’t mind my giving you some advice that may save you considerable frustration and unnecessary expense.”
“Huh?” said the driver.
“Hello,” said Herb, leaning to his left so that he could see past the large driver to the young woman beside him. He touched the brim of his hat.
“You selling something?” asked the driver.
Herb chuckled. “As a matter of fact, I am,” he said, “but that isn’t my reason for stopping to talk with you. I wanted to tell you that my machine, when I bought it, was, well — ”
“As bad as this?” asked the driver.
“Yes,” said Herb, grinning. “I’m glad you said it. Would you like to know something? I made all the repairs myself.” He leaned toward the man and spoke in a low voice. “Who’s willing to pay what a professional mechanic asks today? I know I’m not. Even if I were, you and I both know that workmanship today is not what it once was.” Involuntarily, Herb reached for his pocket watch. He stopped himself.
“You’re a mechanic?” asked the driver.
“No, no,” said Herb. “I learned everything I know about the automobile from a book! A remarkable book by a fellow named Robert Sloss. I keep it in my machine all the time now. I’d be quite willing to lend you a copy, and I’m sure that by following Mr. Sloss’s advice you could achieve remarkable results. Why, one chapter alone — I’m thinking of the chapter called ‘How to Find the Motor Trouble’ — would make the book worth its price.”
The man at the wheel of the car was Arthur Norris. Herb lent him a copy of The Automobile: Its Selection, Care, and Use and got his name and address, insisting that it was no trouble at all for him to stop by in a week or two to pick the book up. Herb drove away, humming, planning that, in a week, he would drop by, during the day, in the hope that Arthur Norris would not be at home, but that the young woman, whom he supposed to be Arthur Norris’s daughter, would be.
She was not Norris’s daughter. She was his wife. She was distracted, nervous, and unhappy. Marriage had been a terrible disappointment to her, a disappointment that had metastasized, and now affected every aspect of her life. She wandered through her days picking at her clothes, biting her lips, mumbling to herself, discovering new disappointments. All days seemed gray, all music seemed monotonous, all birds resembled pigeons, all food tasted like lima beans. Had Herb ever gone to the Norrises’ house, as he had planned, Tessie would have grabbed him, clung to him, would have poured out everything to him in the incoherent volubility of the disappointed, the drunken, the mad. Herb wouldn’t have been able to take his eyes off her. Arthur might have returned while Herb was still there, and he might well have been pleased to have found Herb there, since Arthur couldn’t have been getting much more fun out of married life than Tessie was. Herb wouldn’t have been able to prevent himself from selling books to Arthur even if he tried. Arthur would have signed up for Professor Clapp’s entire five-foot shelf. He might even have bought one of Herb’s five-foot shelves.
In the months that followed, Herb might have become a frequent visitor at the Norrises’. Arthur would have liked Herb, and he would have liked the effect Herb had on Tessie. Arthur would have been quite willing to have them spend time alone together because Herb’s lively, hopeful manner would have brought the light back to her eyes, and in a clumsy, uncertain way, Arthur would have tried to push them into becoming lovers, thinking that perhaps Tessie might then bring to lovemaking with him at least an echo, some tremor or ripple, of whatever pleasure she took from Herb. Had Herb become Tessie’s lover, his sense of honor, of loyalty, of shame would certainly have pushed him closer and closer to the Norrises, and the trio would have wrapped itself more and more tightly, snugly, closer and closer in its own misery and desperation as time passed. Herb would never have extricated himself, he would never have gone to Chacallit, he would never even have met Lorna.
Luckily, Herb was drafted.
In Topical Guide 265, Mark Dorset considers Settings: Gas Stations; World War I; and Luck from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Said May Castle of Herb’s affection for tinkering:
Herb loved to make things and fix things — oh, he’d make a stab at fixing anything that was broken, well just anything! He was not always successful, mind you, but he’d give a try all the same. Garth couldn’t fix a thing and didn’t care to try — he could fix martinis, but that was about it. Garth would always manage to get Herb to try to fix something whenever he and Lorna came to visit. Well, this wasn’t difficult to do. I mean, all Garth had to do was say, “Herb, what do you think is the matter with the doohickey that makes this mixer go?” And right away Herb would have the mixer apart and spread out all over the kitchen table. And then he always wanted to make some new gadget or improvement. It wasn’t enough for him to try to fix something; he always had an idea for something new. He concocted some twisted-wire thingamabob so that Garth could use the mixer to mix paint, I think. Well, that’s about the last thing Garth had any use for, something to mix paint. Now something that would shake up a cocktail, well, maybe, but paint!
The selling went much as Ben had predicted. The system of selling a large set of items one item at a time was a stroke of genius. The customer found it easy to agree to purchase the first book or shirt stud; not much money was involved, after all. However, in agreeing to purchase the first, the customer had struck a bargain — not only with Herb, but with himself — to continue, to fill out the five-foot shelf, to complete the set of links and studs. Most customers did. Some of the customers for Professor Clapp’s Five-Foot Shelf of books continued to buy beyond five feet, and a few became serious bibliophiles. Some of Herb’s link-and-stud customers went on to buy fobs, stickpins, and belt buckles, and a few became serious collectors of erotica.
Herb was soon successful enough to be able to tell his mother to stop working, and he even managed to move the family to a new and larger apartment, on the ground floor, with a large, sunny, pleasant front room where his father, who slumped lower in his cork chair with each of Herb’s successes, sat in the only dark corner. Despite Herb’s losses on the expandable shelves and the jewelry caches, the Lester Pipers ate well, were well supplied with books, and were able to afford a few luxuries: a meal in a restaurant now and then, excursions to seaside amusement parks, evenings at a moving-picture house, and even an automobile.
Among the books that Herb sold was The Automobile: Its Selection, Care, and Use. Herb read and reread this guide, and he cast a critical eye about for a car that would suit the needs of his expanding business, since it was now necessary for him to call on a lengthening list of established customers and to continue to find new ones. He also wanted a car that he could use for pleasure, one that he could use to take the family on outings, with his parents seated in the back, his mother savoring the sun and fresh air, his father slumped morosely by her side. He also wanted a car that he would look good in, something with a little dash, something that suited a young man who already enjoyed a modest success and had every hope of enjoying more in the future. He couldn’t afford a car that would do all of that, so he settled for a used Studebaker four-cylinder Model SA Touring Car.
In Topical Guide 264, Mark Dorset considers Real Reality: Books Therein and Studebakers: Model SA Touring Car from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
From the day that Herb sold his first piece of erotic jewelry, he had ambiguous feelings about the product he sold. On the one hand, he was proud of its quality, and he had reason to be, as Cecelia Pecksmith, chronicler of the American coarse-goods trade, notes early in her Collector’s Pricing Guide to Under-the-Counter Jewelry:
Mass-production never cheapened the quality of erotic and pornographic jewelry, because the market for these goods was never large enough to justify mass-producing them. Its craftsmanship was, for some buyers, sufficient justification for their buying it, and well-to-do collectors often professed to buy “coarse goods” only because they represented the last vestige of the kind of craftsmanship that had been common-place when they were in their prime, the level of which, they were sure, succeeding generations were not likely to attain again, since each generation is inclined, in its late years, to see itself as having represented, in its prime, if not the end of civilization, then civilization’s highest ascent, the pause before its accelerating downward slide.
But if the jewelry was of good quality, it was also, for its time, obscene, and so Herb was at once proud of and ashamed of the studs, links, fobs, stickpins, buttons, and buckles he sold.
Herb never tried to sell the jewelry on the basis of its prurient attractions. To have done so would have been too risky; there was the possibility that the customer, offended by the thought that Herb took him for the sort of man who bought such things, would be aroused to anger or to the pretense of anger. Instead, Herb sold it on the basis of the quality of its workmanship. To give himself a means of introducing the topic of workmanship, he carried a cheap pocket watch that he never wound. When he had maneuvered the man of the house onto the porch for a smoke and had completed the book deal, he would take his pocket watch out, shake it, mutter under his breath, and then say aloud, “It should be a criminal offense to sell a shoddy piece of goods like this. A new watch, and it simply won’t work. I tell you, it’s becoming impossible to find really fine workmanship today. Don’t you find that so?”
The man was likely to say, “True, true,” or something of the sort.
“Now you take this shirt stud,” Herb would say, handing one to the man. “Just look at the workmanship on that. It takes your breath away, doesn’t it? Take a closer look. Here, use this glass.”
Because Herb was one of the best salesmen the Piper family had ever produced, he simply couldn’t keep himself from selling his cover. He sold Professor Clapp’s Five-Foot Shelf of books with a degree of success that not even his Uncle Ben had ever achieved. Nor could Herb resist putting his predilection for tinkering to the service of the goods he sold, and that was how the Piper nemesis, that misdirected enthusiasm, caught up with him. He invested considerable time and money in designing and manufacturing a shelf that expanded as his customers received their monthly books, eventually reaching a full five feet, but he lost money on each one he sold. He developed clever hideaway boxes and false bottoms for dresser drawers, which allowed his coarse-goods customers to keep their collections out of sight, but on these too he lost money.
In Topical Guide 263, Mark Dorset considers Projects: Practical, Impractical, and Both; Hobbies: Tinkering and Bookshelves: Expandable from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
When Herb and Ben reached the street, Ben grabbed Herb’s shirt and pulled him toward the cab of the delivery van he was driving, a Studebaker “20.”
“Come here, Herb,” he said. “I’ve got something to show you. Come here.”
There was in Ben’s voice the breathless quality that Herb recognized in the voices of his other Piper relatives when they had a scheme to sell. A cautious reluctance anchored Herb to the spot where he stood.
“Come on, Herb,” said Ben. “I’m not going to get you into anything. You’ve got a lot of your mother’s caution in you, Herb. That’s probably good, but it certainly does make you a difficult person to talk to. Now come here.” He tugged Herb to the door, opened it, and all but shoved Herb into the passenger’s seat. Then he puffed his way to the driver’s door and climbed in. From a pocket of his coat he took a small, round, white object. He held it up and turned it in the light of the streetlamp.
“What is this?” he asked Herb.
“A button,” said Herb.
“Very good,” said Ben. He chuckled. “But not quite correct. It’s a shirt stud. Look at it more closely.” He handed it to Herb.
Puzzled, wary, Herb was reluctant even to take the stud from his uncle Ben. He knew how many Pipers in the past had been undone by being smitten with a scheme at first glance.
“Take it!” said Uncle Ben. “Look at it!”
Herb obeyed. He was surprised by what he saw. The face of the stud was made of a fine grade of ivory. Carved into it, in high relief, was the figure of a woman, a naked woman, reclining against the disk that was the button part of the stud. She was toying with herself in a way that had brought a smile to her face and made Herb’s heart pound and his palms sweat. Ben poked him in the ribs.
“Here,” said Ben. He handed Herb a magnifying glass. “Look at the workmanship.”
The glass revealed details that Herb had only imagined heretofore. Once, he had stood in a semicircle of boys in an alley and watched Elsie Campbell raise her skirt for a nickel an inch. He had contributed his share, but what he’d seen hadn’t told him everything he wanted to know, and since the money he had spent on the elevation of Elsie’s skirt had been money he should have brought home to his mother, the whole affair left him frustrated and ashamed. He left the alley thinking that he’d done a foolish Piper thing with the thirty cents he’d pitched into the pot. Here, on the instructive shirt stud his uncle Ben had handed him, was an education that, figuring at the rate Elsie had been paid, would have cost him more than he earned in a week.
“Gee, Uncle Ben,” said Herb, “where’d you ever get a thing like this?”
“You like it, do you?” asked Ben.
“Well, sure,” said Herb. He blushed. The thought had struck him that he ought to be embarrassed by what he was looking at.
“This is what you’re going to sell,” said Uncle Ben.
“What about the books?” asked Herb.
“The books are your answer,” said Uncle Ben, chuckling again.
“Answer to what?” asked Herb.
“To the question, ‘How’d you make all that money?’ ” said Ben.
“I can’t sell these, Uncle Ben,” Herb said, still examining the shirt stud through the magnifying glass. “What would Mother say if she found out? And who would I sell them to? They must be expensive, more expensive than what anyone I know could afford, and I can’t very well sell them on the street.”
Uncle Ben grasped the nape of Herb’s neck in one large hand. “Tell me, Herb,” he said, “what did your mother eat for dinner tonight? Rat pie? She can’t afford rat pie. The only time she gets to eat that well is when you drop one on the street and have to bring it home.”
“Please, Uncle Ben,” said Herb.
“You listen to me, Herb. Your father is never going to get out of that chair. If you want to do something for your mother, you’ll take this offer.”
“But how can I find men to buy them?” asked Herb.
“Herb!” cried Ben. “Wake up! That’s the other thing the books are for. The books are going to get you into situations where you can sell the jewelry. And you sell the jewelry the same way you sell the books! You get a fellow to buy one piece for nineteen cents and agree to take another piece every month on approval. You let the fellow have the piece for a week, with no charge. By the end of the week, he’s gotten used to having it, he’s won the admiration of his friends when he wears it at his lodge meeting or whatever, and he doesn’t want to give it up. You collect for it. It’s a thing of beauty, Herb.”
“I don’t know, Uncle Ben,” said Herb.
“I know, Herb,” said Ben. “This is your opportunity to do something for your mother — and for yourself, too. You can make something of yourself, Herb. And you can make your mother proud. She’ll be proud of you because you’ve worked hard and you’ve been successful. She won’t know how you did it; she’ll think you did it by selling books. So will everyone else.”
Herb drew a breath. It seemed worth a try. He did want to make his mother’s life easier. If he was careful to keep his head, he ought to be able to get out before anything went wrong. “All right,” said Herb. “I’ll do it.”
In Topical Guide 262, Mark Dorset considers Studebakers: Model 20 Truck or Van or “Delivery Car” from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
LESTER’S BROTHER Benjamin had little tolerance for Lester’s defeated-man-slumped-in-a-chair attitude. Benjamin was a tireless worker, unceasingly optimistic. He sold from door to door, and he had over the years taken on more and more lines, so that when he found an especially susceptible client he could return month after month with something else to sell. Among the lines he sold was the series of books distributed by Alonzo Clapp, of Albany, the jobber to whom Luther Huber had turned for the distribution of coarse goods, and when Clapp approached Ben with the idea of selling erotic jewelry, Ben took the line on eagerly, with exactly the same eagerness with which he would have added a promising line of cookware.
Every evening, when Ben came home, his eyes fell on his brother, the defeated man, slumped in his lightweight chair. Ben couldn’t stand seeing his brother so. With the help of some of the other Pipers, he managed to find and subsidize a shabby and cramped apartment where Lester, Millie, and Herb could live on their own, out of Ben’s sight. One evening, in Herb’s fifteenth year, Herb was sitting on the floor of the larger room of that apartment — a room that served as living room, dining room, kitchen, and Herb’s bedroom — fixing a meat grinder. Millie was setting the table for dinner. The sound of footsteps on the stairs made Millie and Herb start and look at each other with concern.
“Someone’s coming up the stairs, Lester,” Millie said. Lester Piper didn’t move. He sat slumped in his chair. Millie sighed. “It’s sure to be Mrs. Lightner,” she said to Herb. “I owe Mr. Lightner for two weeks’ worth of meat, and she doesn’t like him to give credit. She knows he never asks to be paid. You answer it, Herb.”
There was a knock at the door, and Herb answered. He opened the door a crack and said before he looked through it, “My mother and father aren’t home.”
“The hell they’re not,” said a breathless, wheezing, masculine voice from the hallway. “Your father’s sitting in the cork chair in the corner, and your mother’s standing beside him, wringing her hands.”
“It’s Uncle Ben,” said Herb. He opened the door, and Benjamin Piper lurched into the room, placing a heavy hand on Herb for support.
“Good evening, Benjamin,” said Millie, her eyes down, her hands nervous. Benjamin was a creditor, even if he was Lester’s brother and never made demands. “It’s always good to see you.”
Ben grunted. “Good evening to you, brother,” he shouted at Lester, in an attitude of false good humor. “Any prospects?”
Lester raised his head and squinted at his brother. “I’m ruined,” he said.
“And you’ve been ruined for more than ten years,” said Ben. He turned to Herb and said, “You ought to sell tickets to see him. The Ruined Man. And I’ll bet you could do it, Herb. You’ve got a good tongue.” He boxed the boy playfully on the ears.
“Stop it, Uncle Ben,” said Herb. He twisted away. Ben held him with his large hands.
“All right, all right,” he said. “That’s why I’m here, though. I’ve got something for you, Herb, something to sell. Better than newspapers. Better than those rat pies.”
“What is it?” asked Herb. He had acquired a skepticism much stronger than his mother’s about the Piper enthusiasms. He recognized a tendency in himself toward dreaming and scheming, and he fought it back with skeptical questioning. Whenever one of his Piper relatives got a certain gleam in his eye, Herb got an uncomfortable feeling in his stomach, like hunger.
Millie came forward, put a hand on Herb’s shoulder, and drew him to her. It was a protective gesture, and Ben recognized it. He chuckled.
“Now don’t be frightened,” he said. “It’s nothing foolish, and you don’t have to put any money in or anything like that. It’s one of my lines. A guaranteed success. Such a success for me that I’ve got more than I can handle with it. I’m going to get you into it, Herb. Of course, I’ll take a cut, but we can go through all of that later. Don’t look so skeptical, Herb! It’s a regular company, and they offer a straight commission arrangement. I’ll even buy your samples for you.”
“What is it?” asked Herb.
“Books,” said Ben.
“Books?” asked Herb.
“Yep,” said Ben. “Books. Professor Clapp’s Five-Foot Shelf of Indispensable Information for Modern Times. It’s a great sche — ”
He saw the fear in Millie’s eyes, and he raised his hands quickly, waving them in front of her as if to erase what he had said.
“It’s a great arrangement,” he corrected himself. “You go to a house, show the books, and you make the people want them, even though they can’t afford to buy them and probably wouldn’t get around to reading all of them if they did. Now here’s the beauty of it. You pipe up with, ‘Mr. Whoosis, I wonder if we might step outside for a smoke?’ When you get Whoosis alone, you say, ‘Please, Mr. Whoosis, let me spare you any embarrassment. The cost of the entire five-foot shelf of books is indeed quite high, as I’m sure you’ve guessed from the quality of the books themselves. Suppose I were to tell you that the first book can be yours, right now, for just five cents.’ He can’t believe it, of course. But it’s true. You give him the first book for a nickel and get him to sign a paper saying he’ll buy another book every month for fifty-nine cents a book until he’s bought the whole five-foot shelf.”
“Oh, Ben,” said Millie disapprovingly.
“Now, Millie,” said Ben, “what on earth is wrong with it? These people are getting a chance to enjoy some of the best books of our times. Why, just think how easily that fifty-nine cents would be wasted on useless things! No home should be without books.”
“What books are they?” asked Herb.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Ben. “Clapp buys them from the printers and booksellers; whatever they can’t sell, they sell to him by the crate, cheap.”
“Ben,” said Millie, “you’re a scoundrel.”
He shrugged. “Come with me, Herb,” he said. “I’ve got your books downstairs.”
In Topical Guide 261, Mark Dorset considers Books: Five-Foot Shelf of and Marketing: Subscription Schemes from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy(a pdf document) and at Encyclopedia.com.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Chapter 4
In Which Herb Is Recruited for the Coarse-Goods Trade
HERB’S FATHER, Lester, was the least successful Piper of his generation, though he had the most talent, the best ideas, and the greatest ambition. As a young man, he experienced one short period of relative prosperity, when he not only had no debts but had some real prospects for a comfortable future. At the time, he represented a Portuguese cork company in and around Boston, selling cork on commission. He was, then, bright-eyed and eager, bursting with ideas and high spirits. He wooed and won Millie McDougal, sweeping the girl off her feet with his obvious affection for her, his stream of hopes and dreams and plans and schemes, and his genuine desire for a quiet, settled middle age lived soberly at the center of a happy family. When Lester and Millie were married, there wasn’t a person at the wedding who didn’t sigh at the warmth and pleasantness of it all and beam at the brightness of their future.
However, Lester Piper’s dreams and ideas, his ambition and impatience, and the Piper talent for doing the foolish Piper thing proved his undoing.
Almost from the start of his work for the cork company, he had reasoned that if there were more uses for cork, he could sell more of it and make more money. He had sold himself on the idea that his future was in cork, that everything depended on his expanding the market for it, and that a slip in his first attempt would send him on an accelerating downward path. He had undertaken a careful and deliberate examination of his surroundings, looking for everyday objects that might be made of cork, but nothing struck him as quite the right thing on which to stake his future. He bided his time, hopeful that the right idea would present itself.
After Lester and Millie were married, they moved into two rented rooms above a bakery. Up the narrow stairs they carried their belongings, their gifts, and some furniture that had been given to them by Millie’s family and Lester’s. Among the pieces of furniture was an enormous heirloom bed, made entirely of oak. The bed was plain and solid, painfully heavy even when disassembled. At the end of the moving day, Lester sank into an overstuffed chair; he had wobbly legs, an aching back, and what he thought was a good idea: cork furniture. It would be sturdy but light, easy to move, easy to rearrange. Over the course of the next three years, he allowed himself, in the Piper manner, to become cozened by his own idea. He invested every penny he could scrape together, every penny he could borrow, every moment he could steal, in establishing a company to manufacture a complete line of cork furniture, including sofas and armchairs, dining room tables and chairs, armoires and highboys, and, of course, beds. Millie was by nature a cautious young woman, with a skepticism that might have saved them from ruin, but Lester was so good a salesman that he sold his young wife on the soundness of his plans, with the result that, when Piper’s Patented Featherweight Furniture failed, Millie’s parents, a sister, and a cousin were ruined along with Lester Piper and his little family, which by then included a son, Herb.
Lester Piper watched his dreams fall apart, and when the last possibility of success was gone, when everything had been taken away from him, when the auctioneer’s gavel fell for the final time, Lester went home with Millie and Herb to his brother Benjamin’s apartment, where they were now forced to live, and sank onto a cork armchair in a corner of the front room. He spent most of his time slumped in that chair, brooding on his past mistakes. He did, of course, get up to eat and sleep and so on, but his attitude even when out of the chair was forevermore that of a man slumped in a chair, brooding on his past mistakes, and he wore exactly the same hangdog look when he was out of the chair as he did when he was in it. Millie tried to rally him, tried to get him to get up and try again, to get another selling job, but it was no use. Lester had decided that he was a defeated man, and so he was.
Millie went to work as a seamstress, assisting a tailor in a men’s clothing shop, making repairs and doing small, repetitive jobs: sewing on buttons, letting out the seats of pants, and the like. Herb began working when he was eight. His first job was ripping seams out of pants that his mother brought home from the shop, so that she could work more quickly. By the time he was fourteen, he had found several other ways to make money. He had a secondhand wagon, a Studebaker Junior, a toy that was modeled after the most popular Studebaker farm wagon. Every morning, he loaded the wagon with newspapers, muffins, fruit tarts, and rolls, which he sold from a street corner before going to school. Every evening, at the same street corner, he sold newspapers and meat pies, a type of meat pie that the boys who sold them called, among themselves, “rat pie.” On his way home, he visited every neighbor, looking for mending his mother could do or broken household gadgets that he could fix.
In Topical Guide 260, Mark Dorset considers Work: Child Labor and Toys: Wagonsfrom this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
In Bombay harbor, Tom, Nathaniel, and Tudor pace the deck, anxiously awaiting the arrival of the Sultan of Gujarat and representatives of the British East India Company. When they arrive, Tom, in an inspired scene, delivers two simultaneous sales pitches, one directed toward the interests of the Indians, one toward the British. The final disclosure of the ice is a huge success with both. Tom offers a sample piece to the Sultan as a gift.
The cargo of ice is being unloaded when hundreds of fierce, armed Indians arrive and surround the wharf. The Sultan himself arrives, in high dudgeon, and appeals to the British for justice. He’s been tricked. The ice he was given yesterday is gone. Much chuckling about this on the part of the British, who explain that this is melting, something ice always does, but that fortunately Tudor has leased to them the exclusive rights to build icehouses in Bombay, following the secret methods discovered in America after long and arduous effort.
Back in Boston, some time later, on the wharves, Lavinia and Katherine wait, and watch, and worry. Lavinia, peering through a spyglass, suddenly cries, “There!” It’s the Tuscany! Both peer through their spyglasses, looking for a sign that will tell them whether the trip has been a success or a failure. At last they spot Tudor, Tom, and Nathaniel, standing in the bow of the first ship, decked out in flamboyant outfits. For some reason not made clear in the film, the Sultan of Gujarat, his attendants, his guards, a bevy of girls in harem pants, four elephants, and a delegation of British colonial officials have come along with them. They are all singing, “Hooray for Freddie Tudor,” a number that is, it must be admitted, a pallid reworking of “Hooray for Captain Spaulding.” It is sung to the same tune:
Hooray for Freddie Tudor!
Yo ho! The iceman cometh!
“Did someone call me goniff?”
Yo ho! Yo ho! Yo ho!
THE TRIUMPH didn’t last for the Pipers, although ice made Tom Piper a wealthy man. When he died in 1852, he left a considerable fortune, including stock in Tudor’s ice business, but within two years his two sons and two daughters had lost it all.
Tom Piper’s eldest son, Eleazer, visited a palmist on the day after his father was buried. The thrust of the palmist’s remarks was that Eleazer was about to go through a key pivotal time in his life, and that prospects were not good, but that Eleazer could make the best of things by trusting his intuition. Eleazer left the palmist’s with his head reeling. In the course of his walk home, he decided to act in accordance with a hunch he’d had for some time. He had been keeping an eye on a British patent medicine, Tono-Bungay. Its sales had grown phenomenally. Eleazer had tried to persuade his father to invest in it, but Thomas Piper’s interest in ice had been so consuming that he had paid little attention to his son; Eleazer suspected that his father thought little of his business abilities. The Tono-Bungay company was just beginning to make a serious move toward expansion beyond the British Isles, and Eleazer’s intuition told him that now was the time to strike. If he could persuade his siblings to invest, they might obtain an American monopoly in Tono-Bungay, which ought to put them on a surer footing in the coming turbulent times that the palmist had predicted. This was surer than ice, as sure as sure can be.
The sons and daughters of Thomas Piper agreed, swept up by the force of Eleazer’s conviction and his hereditary gift for salesmanship. They divested themselves of everything ice had brought them and bid for and won exclusive rights to the American market for Tono-Bungay.
Within a month, Tono-Bungay collapsed. The Ponderevos, who had launched the business in Britain, and the Pipers, who had hoped to advance it in America, were paupers. The palmist, confronted by a blubbering, drunk, and disheveled Eleazer Piper, told him that he had actually been extremely lucky. “If you hadn’t followed your hunch in this matter,” she said, “there’s no telling what might have happened. Of this, however, I am certain: things would have been far worse.”
In the years that followed, the Piper fortunes rose and fell within a narrower range on the scale of success and failure. When they rose, they rose only to the level where there was enough for dinner and a little extra in case someone dropped by; when they fell, they fell to the level where there wasn’t enough for dinner, and if someone dropped by, one of the children would answer the door and say that Father was out.
In Topical Guide 259, Mark Dorset considers Popular Culture: Songs: “Hooray for Captain Spaulding” and Schemes, Swindles, and Scams: Tono-Bungay from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Suddenly, we’re at sea! The great ice-filled schooner Tuscany noses through the waves. The Tuscany arrives in Savannah, and Tom goes to work at once. He sets up a little stage right on the dock, gathers a crowd, and pulls aside a curtain to reveal Wyeth, stripped to the waist, his cheeks puffed out as if he were straining under a great weight, carrying a huge Chinese lacquer chest. He sets the chest down, unlocks it, opens it, and reveals a gemlike piece of ice inside. The crowd is delighted. Ice! Here in Savannah! They clamor to buy. “Boss, the ice it’s a go like hotcakes,” Tom reports to Tudor.
On the sea again, the Tuscany is now bound for Cuba. During a storm, Tom Piper entertains the crew with some snappy tunes on the ship’s piano, and Wyeth, alone in his cabin, falls into a contemplative mood and plucks a harp he has brought along. At last, they arrive in Havana, and Tom goes to work again, but just as Tom and Tudor are about to conclude a deal with the Spanish governor, the captain of the Tuscany rushes in, upset, flustered, worried. Glancing anxiously at the governor’s guards, he blurts out, “The arrangements must be canceled! The ice has melted!” Wyeth tries to muffle him with a scarf.
Calmly, taking his cigar from his mouth, Tudor says to the governor, “This must be your lucky day! Now we can give you a better price.”
At sea again, the three pace the deck at night, in step, Tudor in the lead. “We’ve got to find a way to keep ice from melting!” he cries. “I won’t be defeated! I will find a way!” All three pound their fists into their open hands.
Back in Boston, Tudor begins the experiments in preserving ice that will occupy him for months. In a quick sequence of scenes, we see that things are going badly.
Tudor flings open the doors of an icehouse and water rushes out. “Blankets won’t work,” he says in disgust.
He flings open another icehouse. Water rushes out. Wyeth staggers out with wet feathers stuck all over him. “Feathers won’t work, either,” Tudor says.
Katherine is seen in her office, trying to keep creditors at bay. Wyeth is seen trying to sell his shares in the company to passersby. Tom Piper is seen trying to raise more money and being turned down.
Katherine tries to persuade Tudor to abandon the project. They are walking along the line of icehouses set up for testing. Water is running from each one they pass. “Perhaps you’re right,” admits Tudor.
Suddenly, Wyeth rushes up, whistling like mad, carrying a huge saw. He begins sawing at one of the icehouses, still whistling like crazy, smiling and bobbing his head up and down.
“Perhaps you’re right,” says Tudor, misinterpreting Wyeth’s message. “I’ll put all this behind me and become a lumberjack.”
Wyeth grabs Tudor by the coat and drags him to an icehouse from which no water runs. Tudor’s eyes light up. He flings the door open. “Sawdust!” he cries.
At sea again, the Tuscany, with a load of ice packed in sawdust, is bound for Bombay.
In Topical Guide 258, Mark Dorset considers Useful Things: Sawdust from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Tom climbs down again and helps Tudor to his feet. “What’s your name, fellow?” Tudor asks.
“Huh?” Tom replies, surprised.
“That can’t be it,” says Tudor. “Think, man! What does your mother say when she wants you to come to dinner?” He wears a look that suggests he thinks he’s dealing with an idiot.
“Come and get it!”
“Well, if it’s good enough for your mother, it’s good enough for me,” says Tudor, throwing his arm across Tom’s shoulders. “Cumangetit, tell me about ice.”
“Well, itsa real cold — ” begins Tom.
Tudor rides along with Tom Piper, pumping him for information about the ice business. Suddenly, Tom seems suspicious. “Just a minute,” he asks, “why you aska me this?”
“Cumangetit,” says Tudor, chewing on his cigar, “I’m going to start an ice company of my own.”
Tom begins laughing. “You?” he says. Suddenly he stops laughing. “You got a vice president?” he asks. Tudor shakes his head. “How much does it pay?” Tudor shrugs. “Okay, I take it,” says Tom. They shake hands.
Tom brings Tudor to his home. There we meet Tom’s wife, Lavinia, and her beautiful sister, Katherine, who is visiting from Savannah. Tom warns Tudor that there isn’t much room for another ice company in these parts. Tudor, who is lying with his head in Katherine’s lap, batting his lashes at her, asks coyly, “Do y’all have many ice companies in Savannah?”
Giggling, blushing, Katherine replies that there are none.
“Well then!” declares Tudor. “We’ll sell our ice in Savannah. We’ll sell our ice where it’s most wanted, in the sultry climes! We’ll sell it in Savannah, and we’ll sell it in Havana, and we’ll sell it in Bombay!”
“ ’At’s an ice idea, boss,” says Tom.
They all toast the start of their enterprise.
A mad scramble begins. Tudor must raise money, obtain ice-cutting monopolies on lakes and ponds, find ships, hire workers, build icehouses, and so on. At one point, Tom and Tudor recruit the help of Nathaniel Wyeth (Harpo), who has invented a more efficient way of cutting ice. They pay him in stock.
Tom Piper is always at Tudor’s side, and Katherine, who stays on in Boston to help, grows daily more smitten with the stubborn genius. Tudor grows so obsessed with what he now thinks of as his mission in life that he begins to sound like a madman, not the sort of person in whose venture one would be likely to invest. Tom Piper, however, is able to lay the whole scheme out before a potential investor in a stream of compelling words, to make it sound like a sure thing, as sure as sure can be, and he is the one who brings the investors in.
Against all odds, the enterprise is in place and operating when winter arrives. In a curiously balletic scene, we watch a swarm of workers cutting ice in a light snow: small, dark figures moving against a seamless white background under the direction of Wyeth, who scoots around, directing their work by waving, whistling, clapping his hands, and honking a small horn. It’s a strange interlude, one that European audiences in particular seem to find oddly moving.
In Topical Guide 257, Mark Dorset considers Eureka Moments from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Frederick Lewis Tudor was the man who established the international ice trade, cutting ice on the lakes of New England and shipping it virtually all over the world. This remarkable enterprise captured the imaginations of so disparate a trio as Henry David Thoreau, Gabriel García Márquez, and the Marx Brothers.
In the winter of 1846–1847, when the ice trade was in full swing, Thoreau watched a crew of immigrant Irish ice cutters at work on Walden Pond and recorded in his journal these remarks about the extent and influence of the ice trade:
The sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well. . . . The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.
A hundred years later, Márquez described the arrival in nineteenth-century Macondo of what may well have been some Walden Pond ice:
There was a giant with a hairy torso and a shaved head, with a copper ring in his nose and a heavy iron chain on his ankle, watching over a pirate chest. When it was opened by the giant, the chest gave off a glacial exhalation. Inside there was only an enormous, transparent block. . . .
Surely the ice trade, based as it was on teaching people to want something that they hadn’t even known existed before, selling something for which there was no demand, marks the dawn of modern marketing, and the Piper family, in the person of Thomas Piper, was there.
What was Thomas Piper like? My mind’s eye’s image of him is an inaccurate but appealing one. It comes straight from the movie Cracked Ice, in which the Marx Brothers romp through a series of madcap adventures loosely based on the events leading to the establishment of the ice trade.
In Cracked Ice, we first meet the flamboyant Frederick Lewis Tudor (Groucho) at a dinner party in a fashionable home on Beacon Hill, in Boston, in 1805, where he is sitting between the wives of two of his brothers. The brothers, successful, sober men, sit opposite him. Tudor inclines toward one of the women and whispers in her ear. She looks startled, then smiles coquettishly. Tudor inclines toward the other (Margaret Dumont) and whispers in her ear. She squeals and slaps his face.
“Really, Fred,” says one brother, “be reasonable, won’t you?”
Tudor, demonstrating the mercurial temper and physical agility for which he was noted, leaps upon the table and begins berating his brothers for their unimaginative reasonableness, gesticulating with the leg of a roast duck as he does so.
“The difference between us, brothers,” he declares at the end of his tirade, dropping himself into the lap of Margaret Dumont, “is that you have hearts of ice. Not mine, brothers! My heart burns! (It must have been the horseradish.) I say phooey to being reasonable. Give me imagination! It’s men with imagination who leave their mark on this world!” He looks at Margaret Dumont and bats his eyes. “Am I right, toots?” he asks.
“That sounds like hubris to me, Fred,” says the other brother.
“Hubris, schmoobris,” Tudor fires back. “I tell you the man with imagination can do anything he puts his mind to. Anything!”
“How about — selling water?” suggests the first of the brothers, with haughty composure, idly turning the stem of his crystal goblet. The other guests laugh. Tudor storms out of the house in a rage, and from the street he shouts, “I will sell water, and I’ll make my fortune at it, too!”
Striding across the street, blinded by rage, he is nearly run over by a wagon (not a Studebaker; Henry and Clem Studebaker built their first wagons in 1852). The driver, young Tom Piper (Chico), stops his horses and rushes to pick Tudor up from the cobblestone pavement. Still in a fury, Tudor waves him off. “When I need your help, I’ll ask for it,” he shouts.
Tom climbs back up to his seat and is about to pull away. Tudor notices the lettering on the side of the van: WENHAM ICE. His face lights up. “Help!” he cries.
In Topical Guide 266, Mark Dorset considers Real People and Historical Figures from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
3
In Which Herb Is Born to the Pipers of Boston
MY GRANDFATHER, Herb Piper, was born in Boston, into a family that was broke. For generations, the Pipers had exhibited two outstanding characteristics: a cool-headed talent for selling and a gullible ineptitude for investing. It was quite possible for a Piper to accumulate a tidy nest egg over the course of a week of selling and lose it in an hour by buying into a scheme that he thought would double his money overnight — a land deal, say, that he had overheard two fellows talking about downtown while he was having lunch, a deal that, he allowed himself to be convinced, involved virtually no risk whatsoever, a deal that was as sure as sure can be. Like a dog biting its own tail, a Piper at his worst turned his talent against himself, selling himself on the wisdom of his folly. This type of self-deception, self-injury, has been known in my family for generations as “doing a foolish Piper thing.” When imprudent Pipers found that they had done a foolish Piper thing, when the land, the development company, and the two fellows vanished, some Pipers would brood and curse themselves and the foolish Piper giant who seemed to dog their steps, but others would shrug and chuckle at themselves and their inherited folly. Herb’s grandfather was of the chuckling type. “Well,” he had said when he broke the news about the land, the development company, and the two vanishing fellows to Herb’s grandmother, “I’ve gone and done a foolish Piper thing, haven’t I?”
Once, however, there had been a substantial Piper fortune, thanks to Herb’s great-grandfather, Thomas Piper, and his association with Frederick Lewis Tudor, the finest flower ever to blossom on the vine of American marketing genius. In his essay “The American Drummer,” Wilhelm Huber wrote, “I am among those who hold that a genius for selling, that curious alliance of art, ingenuity, inspiration, cupidity, and fraud, is the American genius.” Certainly it was a genius for selling that made the United States, for a while at any rate, the commercial giant of the world, indeed the model for what a commercial giant might be. Just what was the nature of that genius that made America a great commercial nation, that genius that was so pronounced in Frederick Lewis Tudor and in the Piper family? Edward Huxtable has attempted to describe it, in The Person in Your Mirror Is You:
The inept salesman or saleswoman has the wrong mental image of himself or herself and his or her product, something like a huckster at a sideshow in a traveling circus might have: he or she feels that what he or she sells is inferior, an embarrassment. He or she imagines that he or she could be a much better huckster if the fat lady were fatter, the rubber man more limber, the dog-boy more slavering. But the best huckster, the genius huckster, begins by selling him- or herself on the merits of his or her commodity and so finds it not merely easy but intellectually satisfying, even morally gratifying, to persuade the rubes or inform the consumers that slim fat ladies are the rage, arthritic rubber men the rarest, dry-mouthed dog-boys the marvel of the age. The natural genius salesperson, whether he or she peddles books, cars, furniture, jewelry, pocket calculators, or investment schemes, is a carrier of his or her own infectious self-deception.
In Topical Guide 255, Mark Dorset considers Real Places: Boston, Late Nineteenth Century; Salesmanship; Traits, Generational Persistence of and Real People and Historical Figures from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
BERTHA AND CLARA were married to Richard Reuter and Harold Russell in the summer, in a dual wedding. Richard Huber grumbled publicly over the expense but savored a secret satisfaction, since the expense of a dual wedding had been much less than the expense of two would have been. The following year Bertha and Clara each gave birth to a boy, conceived that warm spring night when Luther took Lorna for a row on Lake Serenity.
Lorna built a wall between herself and Luther. She spoke with him at the mill or in her parents’ house — he was a rare visitor now — but she had no more to say to him than what was necessary to keep people from suspecting that something was wrong. He had spoiled everything she had felt for him. Her memories of his kindnesses to her, of the way that he had taught her to model in papier-mâché and to carve ivory, were pleasant ones, but they were difficult to recall when he was present. She knew all the gossip about him now; she heard it from other workers at the link-and-stud mill. She knew that he took girls riding in his new automobile, a Studebaker Big Six, and she knew — or guessed — that many of the papier-mâché models that Luther made for the ivory carvers to copy in the room behind the unmarked door recorded his own amorous experiments. Worst of all, she knew that what he had felt for Bertha — and for her — was nothing more than what the rooster felt for the chickens or the boar for the sows.
ON A COLD AND RAINY NIGHT the next September, Richard and Lena and Lorna were sitting in their living room, in front of a fire in the stone fireplace that was set into the north wall. The air was still heavy with the aromas of dinner — fresh ham, sauerkraut, boiled potatoes, turnips, and rye bread. Richard Huber was dozing in his chair; Lena was darning socks. Lorna was playing anagrams alone.
From outside came the sound of a car on the steep road beside the house. The car stopped, and from its sound Lorna decided that it must have stopped at the bend, in front of the house. It might be Uncle Luther. Lorna decided that she would go up to her room if it was.
She went to the window. There was a car outside, but it wasn’t Luther’s. Footsteps on the porch. A knock at the door. Lena looked up. Richard snorted.
“I’ll go,” said Lorna.
She pulled the curtain aside and looked out through the glass before she opened the door. A young man was on the porch, collapsing his umbrella. He was wearing a wool suit, and he seemed nervous. It was Herb.
In Topical Guide 254, Mark Dorset considers Atmosphere: Rain and Unforgettable Moments from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
She let her hand drop onto Luther’s leg, and she allowed it to slip a couple of inches downward along the inside of his thigh. Luther was surprised. He looked at Lorna. The color was high in her cheeks. He kissed the blush along her cheekbone. She couldn’t trust herself to say or do anything, so she just kept looking upward, at the stars. Luther talked on, but his voice had become merely a low mumble, a part of the evening sounds on Lake Serenity: whispering breeze, lapping wavelets, chirping crickets, mumbling Luther. Lorna was paying no attention to what he was saying. All her attention was on her hand and his. When his hand moved, her heart leaped, and she moved her hand. When his hand stopped, she drew a breath and stopped hers. When his hand flexed, her whole body stiffened, and she squeezed Luther’s leg, so slightly that he may not even have noticed it.
Lorna was thrilled. She felt the anticipatory thrill that she felt before anything that she expected to be pleasant, but more intensely than ever before. There was the nervousness she knew, the burning tremulousness in the muscles of her hands and arms and face and belly. The coldness in her chest. The flutter in her heart. There was the familiar sense of floating, intensified by the fact that she was floating.
Luther was fussing with his trousers, she realized, and then quite suddenly he had taken her hand with his other and pushed it into his trousers and folded her fingers around his erect penis. This was so surprising and welcome a development that Lorna smiled unthinkingly in her delight. Her curiosity, always great, had become enormous since Luther had added couples to the cuff link line. So tightly were the couples coupled that Lorna couldn’t see much of the man, though she examined the papier-mâché models thoroughly, and she carved faithful representations of what she saw, something like an inverted mushroom, its button top between the man’s legs, a bit of stem, and dark mystery where it disappeared in the woman. Lorna seized the opportunity Luther had given her and began a thorough exploration, running her fingers along and around his penis, feeling for details with a sculptor’s touch. She drifted into an abstracted exploration, an exercise in genital cartography. It was as if the rest of Luther had disappeared, and she were alone with his penis and the lake and the night and the stars, and she hardly noticed that he had pulled her skirt up and brought his hand between her legs.
Luther was ecstatic. He hadn’t hoped for this eagerness. He began poking and probing with his forefinger, and a rush of pleasure ran through Lorna, and she drew a sharp breath and raised her hips almost involuntarily, rubbing herself against Luther’s hand, Luther’s forefinger, and that’s when things began to go wrong.
It was that hand. The one good finger was in her, the thumb was poking around, hunting for her clitoris, and the three stumps were tickling her. A wave of revulsion ran through her, but the tickling made her want to giggle. She seemed to see the whole thing, as fully and clearly as if she had to carve it, and she imagined carving the thumb, and the forefinger, and the stumps, and herself. She turned toward Luther with terror in her eyes, her mouth in a twisted grin. He misinterpreted her look. “Now, Lorna,” he began, “don’t be frightened. Don’t cry out. I won’t hurt — ”
And then she was ashamed. She shouldn’t be revolted by his hand, she told herself. Even if she were, she shouldn’t have let him see it. “Oh, Uncle Luther,” she said. “I’m so ashamed — ”
“There’s nothing for you to feel ashamed about, Lorna,” said Luther. He began pulling his trousers down, and then he was on top of Lorna, pulling at her clothes. “Just relax yourself,” he said. “Look at the stars, and think lovely thoughts, and it won’t hurt. I promise — ”
But the feeling of abstraction, of detachment, had vanished, and Lorna was suddenly aware of everything and full of doubts and fears, like a person awakened by a thunderclap, frantic, sure that everything is about to fall apart. Out of all the questions she was asking herself, one of the unlikeliest came through loudest: What about Bertha?
“What about Bertha?” she said. “Bertha loves you, Uncle Luther. I know she does.” To her surprise, Lorna found that she felt horribly disloyal. Poor Bertha, she thought. She’s homely, and she’s in love with Uncle Luther. She must have been afraid of me for years —
“Bertha! Bertha is nothing. She’s — Lorna?”
Lorna was pushing him away, struggling to get free of him, reaching for the oars, calling out, “No, no. Stop it! Get away from me!”
In Topical Guide 253, Mark Dorset considers Settings: Lake Serenity from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
HAD LUTHER HAD all his fingers, he would probably have been Lorna’s first lover. It nearly happened one moonlit spring night, when Lorna was eighteen. Luther took her for a ride in a rowboat, on Lake Serenity, not far from Chacallit, where there was a large ballroom that extended out over the lake. The night was one of those warm, hazy ones in spring that anticipate summer and lift the spirit.
When Luther helped Lorna into the boat and pushed off, Bertha and Clara were standing on the dock with several of the young men who hung around the Huber girls because they were enchanted by Lorna’s elusive beauty. Each stroke Luther took, each set of circular ripples the blades left in the wake, made Bertha feel more furious, more horribly betrayed, more determined to get even, at least to show Luther that he wasn’t the only object of her desire. She thrust her hip against the hip of the young man beside her, Richard Reuter. Richard was surprised; Richard was pleased. He was a frequenter of the Serenity Ballroom, a poor dancer, a young man too shy to approach young women alone. He usually stayed in the company of other young men who were too shy to approach young women alone and so stood on the fringes of the flirting and dancing and gaiety, making remarks about the others and trying to appear, instead of shy, bored. This evening, he had wandered outside with Bertha and Clara because many others had. He didn’t consider Bertha one of the more attractive young women, but she was a young woman, and that was what he wanted. He glanced at Bertha, and he almost put his arm around her. He caught himself, however, and kept his hands to himself, remembering the startled reactions he’d occasioned in the past by that sort of impulsive grabbing. When Bertha repeated the pressure of her hip, however, he was emboldened to return the pressure, tentatively. He felt, unmistakably, an increase in pressure, and — there could be no doubt about it — he felt Bertha turn so that she rubbed herself against him, just enough so that the gesture could be understood as intentional before she pulled away. By the time Bertha had grown angry enough to link her arm with Richard’s and lead him off into the shadows, Richard had decided that he was in love.
Clara watched her sister walk off with Richard Reuter and felt much as she had felt when she had watched Bertha heaping her plate with potato salad so many years before. She was frightened and impressed. She intended to show Bertha that what Bertha could do, she could do. And she did, with Harold Russell, a much better catch.
Luther pulled at the oars with steady, sure strokes. Lorna was careful not to look at the hand with the missing fingers, and she was careful not to praise Luther’s rowing ability because she was afraid that if she did, Luther would think that the unspoken qualification to whatever she said was “for a man who has only seven fingers.” So careful was she not to praise his rowing ability that Luther had to do it himself. He said, at a lull in Lorna’s talk about the stars twinkling through the haze, the mild weather, the breeze that drifted through the tiny, pale, spring-green leaves, the bright half-moon, the light and the shadows and the reflections, “I’m not doing bad for a fellow with only seventy percent of his fingers, am I?”
Lorna laughed and turned away.
“What do you say we just drift for a while?” asked Luther.
“Oh, yes,” said Lorna at once, glad to relieve Uncle Luther of what she felt certain must be a difficult and painful labor. “I’d like that — just to drift and look at the stars.”
“Do you know the constellations?” asked Luther.
“I know some,” said Lorna. “Let’s see. There’s Orion.” She pointed, and Luther turned his head to look at the sky.
“That’s right,” he said. “Do you know Cassiopeia?”
It all happened so quickly, was accomplished with such fluidity of movement, that the boat never rocked in the water and Lorna didn’t even have time to be surprised. Truly before she knew it, Uncle Luther was by her side, they were reclining against the cushion in the stern of the boat, Uncle Luther was pointing to Cassiopeia with one hand, and the other lay idly, just resting on her dress, as if it had fallen there of its own accord and Luther had no idea where it had gone to, along the inside of her thigh.
Lorna’s heart began to pound. A number of emotions and sensations raced crazily through her, dashing this way and that, like clowns at a circus. She was curious, certainly. What Luther might be on the way toward doing did intrigue her, after what she had seen in the barn and had elaborated so often in her imagination, at night, lying awake in her bed. The rosiness she saw in Bertha’s cheeks after she’d spent some time with Luther, and the smiles Luther put on the faces of his papier-mâché couples, suggested that what Uncle Luther seemed to be proposing was sure to be a pleasure.
In Topical Guide 252, Mark Dorset considers Natural Beauty: The Night Sky from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
DID LUTHER PLAN Lorna’s entire career as soon as he saw that she had talent, or did he improvise as he saw her talent and interest grow? No one can say with certainty, but I think he improvised. I suspect that Luther was too cautious about his coarse-goods work and too concerned about his standing in the family to have permitted himself even to imagine his brother’s daughter as an apprentice in coarse-goods making when he first recognized her talent at the age of four. On the other hand, he was too calculating a sort not to have considered from the start what an asset she could become, with the right training. In any event, Luther saw that she got that training. He moved her through every aspect of jewelry making at a quick pace, always in the direction of the more skilled, the more aesthetically demanding.
By the time she was sixteen, Lorna had become one of the best ivory carvers in Chacallit, which made her one of the best in the men’s jewelry business. The work required all the skills that Uncle Luther had taught her. The carvers sat around a circular table at the center of which was the archetype of the product that was currently required — a rampant lion, say — constructed by Luther, in papier-mâché, several times larger than what the carvers would produce. The ivory carvers would duplicate the archetype as precisely as they could in the form of, for example, insets for a set of shirt studs.
One afternoon, Uncle Luther came to the carving room and stood behind Lorna while she worked. He said nothing until the day’s work was done, and then he asked her to wait until the others had left. When they had, he picked up one of the pieces she had carved, looked at it closely, and sighed. “Lorna,” he said, “you are an astounding copyist. Do you know that?”
“I have a good eye,” she said.
“A good eye, a good hand, a good imagination. You seem to understand how to adjust the proportions in a miniature so that the apparent proportions of the original are preserved.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“Lorna,” he asked, looking into her eyes, “how would you like to carve human figures?”
Luther was taking a great risk in leading Lorna into the shadowy underworld of the men’s furnishings industry, but Lorna’s talent led him to believe that the rewards would be worth the risk. Events were to prove him correct. Lorna became as good at copying the human figure in ivory as she had been at copying lions and horses and such. Lorna’s work had more than precision; it had a warmth that came from the pleasure she found in the work itself. This pleasure had had its origin in Lorna’s desire to please Luther, to win his approval, to do work that was worthy of his approval, and some of that impulse remained, but far stronger now was the desire to please herself, to do difficult work and do it better than she had done it before, to do work that was worthy of her approval.
Luther had two reasons for thinking that Lorna was likely to be, and to remain, circumspect about the new work he gave her to do. First, he recognized the pleasure she took in the work itself, and he knew that she wouldn’t want to lose the opportunity to work at this level of her craft, the most challenging. Second, he knew that the Lorna who sat at home of an evening, in front of the fire, playing anagrams with her sisters and her mother, would be embarrassed by the subject of, the content of, the purpose of the work she did in the small room behind an unmarked door, where she and two other carvers sat at a circular table at the center of which was one of Luther’s oversized papier-mâché models of a naked woman and a naked man, intriguingly entangled. Luther thought that he had a third reason for trusting Lorna to be circumspect, but in this one he was wrong. He thought that he detected in Lorna signs of the awakening of a desire for him of the sort that Bertha felt.
In Topical Guide 251, Mark Dorset considers Art: Sculpture, Erotic from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Lorna thought that Uncle Luther’s affections had been parceled out quite satisfactorily. What Bertha had received Lorna didn’t want, and what Lorna had received Bertha must certainly, she supposed, be willing to let her have. For the most part, Bertha was willing to let Lorna have what now seemed to her nothing more than an indulgent uncle’s fondness for a talented child. She didn’t mind his praising Lorna’s talents; she had discovered talents of her own. She did, however, mind the time that Luther spent with Lorna. Time spent with Lorna was time that might have been spent with her. It was hard enough for Bertha to find times and places to be alone with Luther without arousing her parents’ suspicions, though it was certainly easier now that Bertha was working in the mill and had developed friendships with young women who had no one but themselves to whom they had to account for the way they spent their time. Bertha began demanding more and more of the time that Luther would have spent with Lorna.
After a while, though, Lorna didn’t miss Luther’s teaching. She had already surpassed him in modeling ability, and she could see that she was learning more from her own work than he could have taught her. She was working in other materials now — clay and plaster — and she had begun to make a little money doing jewelry work at home, doing piecework on links and studs, mounting glass in cheap settings of tin or pinchbeck, work that was far below her abilities.
As soon as she persuaded her parents to let her work for an hour or two each day in the mill, she was able to work with much better stuff, mounting mother-of-pearl and garnet and onyx in silver and gold. In a very short time, she had gone beyond mere mounting to fabrication, fabricating link swivels, the interlinked projecting wires that join the two parts of old-fashioned cuff links and shirt studs. The ends of the wires are turned into loops and joined in the manner of the Chinese puzzles that so frustrated me when I was a boy, puzzles that I have taken care to avoid ever since I learned, as an adult, that there are some things I do not have to be able to do. Making these link swivels was skilled work, work that lay on the border between the mechanical operations — setting the stones and other ornaments, cutting, stamping, and buffing — and the artisanship of those who actually made the gold and silver settings or those who carved figures in ivory.
One could become good at making swivels in a way that one never could at gluing or buffing. There was room for style and grace here. The pliers could be manipulated in an individual manner. The loops could vary slightly. A swivel maker could vary the styles of loops from oval to round, could even introduce triangularity or, if very adept — and Lorna was — attempt squarish loops now and then. Any variation had to be accomplished within formal constraints. There was the constraint of time, indirectly applied through the piecework method of payment. There was the constraint of length, since the managers of the link-and-stud works railed against the women who used too much of the wire that formed the swivels.
When I examined the link-and-stud collection at the Chacallit Historical Society, my first reaction was that fabricating link swivels must have been boring work, but I’ve come to understand that there were elements of dance (in the movements of the fabricator’s hands), of sculpture (in the shaping of the swivels themselves), and of mathematics (in the geometry of the loops and in using just the right length of wire). I can see how it led to Lorna’s exacting work in the slide-rule factory later on, to her affection for logic and for recreational mathematics, and, of course, to the making of erotic jewelry.
In Topical Guide 250, Mark Dorset considers Amusements and Pastimes: Puzzles from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
LUTHER ALSO PROVIDED the occasion for Lorna’s introduction to the acrobatics of sex. It happened a few years later, one winter, on the day of Luther’s first sleigh ride of the season.
The first sleigh ride of the winter was an event that Luther began to anticipate in the fall. He needed the infusion of daring that he got from that first ride of the winter, and his need increased throughout the fall. He lived in two rooms, down in the valley, near the mills, but he kept his sleigh in his brother’s barn, behind his brother’s house, beside his brother’s boxy farm wagon, where it stood idle until the winter. In the winter of the year in which Bertha turned sixteen, after the first good snowfall, when Uncle Luther arrived to take the sleigh out for the first run of the season, he found Bertha sitting in the sleigh, waiting for him, shivering. She begged him to take her with him on the first ride, though she knew that he always made the first run alone.
“You know that I always make the first run alone, Bertha,” said Luther.
“I know you do,” said Bertha. “But this year I want you to take me with you.”
“I’m inclined to drive like a madman on the first run, Bertha. I don’t want to put you in danger. You’ll have to wait until tomorrow.”
“I want to feel the danger,” said Bertha. “I want you to take me with you, Uncle Luther.”
He insisted that she get out. She insisted that he take her with him. He tried to lift her from the seat. She threw her arms around his neck, and said, “Oh, please, Uncle Luther, I won’t be afraid. I want to go with you so much. I’ve always wanted to go with you on the first mad run of the winter. Take me, please, just this once.” He lifted her in his arms, lifting her out of the sleigh, with the intention of setting her on her feet and telling her firmly that she could not go, but she kissed him, awkwardly, eagerly. Luther changed his mind.
“Run to the house and see if your mother will let you go,” he said, slowly, looking into her eyes while he spoke. “Tell her that I’m willing to have you come with me.” He set Bertha on her feet. She turned and ran at once for the house. Lorna, who had been watching through the barn door, turned and ran around the corner of the barn before she was seen.
When Luther and Bertha returned from the ride, Lorna was waiting in the hay loft. May Castle was able to give me a good idea of what Lorna saw:
Oh, she thought it was quite a hilarious scene. Well, she was half frozen by the time they came back, and she was just terribly frightened too, because she could tell that something was up that shouldn’t be up. Well, and she was just exhilarated too, of course, since she knew she was likely to see something worth seeing.
So there she was, up above them, in this hay thing, terrified that she would be discovered, but she could hardly keep herself from laughing. It seemed to her that they were doing the most outlandish things. Of course, she hardly saw a thing in the flesh, so to speak. It was winter, of course, and her uncle and sister were bundled up because of the cold. This was — well — around 1910, I would think. People used to wear much more clothing then than they do now, at any time of year. Well, her uncle Luther had all but disappeared under her sister’s skirts, and Lorna thought she would surely burst out laughing. Then they were turned this way, and then that way, but the blankets and clothing kept her from seeing exactly what was going on.
Lorna was not — well — innocent. No, I didn’t mean to say that. Snip that out. Snip! I meant to say that she was innocent, but she was not ignorant. This was country living! The Hubers had some chickens and goats and dogs and such. Lorna had seen plenty of rutting, and she was quite sure — in a little girl’s way — that rutting was what her sister and uncle were up to, but she couldn’t tell exactly how they were going about it. She put together an idea — a very complicated and rather kinky idea, from what she knew about the farm animals and what she knew about — well, about herself. Oh, she told this story once so very well, when she got a little tipsy. That was rare for Lorna, but whenever she and Herb and Garth and I got together, well, Garth would always do his best to get her a little looped. And now and then he succeeded. He always had a new drink for her to try, something exotic, with fruit juice and rum. She never knew how much rum she was getting with all of that juice and — oh, I don’t know what else — an orange slice, and a cherry, and so on. Well, she would get quite giddy after a while. She always became giddy when she drank. Herb became serious. Garth became flirtatious. Well, he was always flirtatious — more than flirtatious. If he hadn’t been so charming, he would have gotten himself slapped many a time. And punched many another. As it was, well — oops, I’m straying. Well, that’s when she told the story about Bertha and Luther. Oh, but the best part of it was that she mimicked their expressions, and it was just the most lascivious performance. She never behaved like that at any other time. And don’t think that Garth didn’t try to get her to tell the story again and again.
In Topical Guide 249, Mark Dorset considers Amusements and Pastimes: Sleigh Ride from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
IT WAS LUTHER who occasioned the first manifestation of Lorna’s interest in, and talent for, sculpture. For Lorna’s fourth birthday, Luther made her a papier-mâché duck. He painted the duck in lurid colors, colors that have never been seen on a real duck, colors that Luther supposed would please a four-year-old girl. It was a large duck, large for Lorna, who had to use both her chubby hands to hold it. After dinner, while Lorna’s parents and her Uncle Luther were still sitting at the dinner table, Lorna sat in the parlor, on the davenport, holding the duck.
“That’s an ugly duck,” said Bertha. She had come into the parlor silently, and she stood in front of Lorna, looking down at her and her duck. Bertha had in the past year or so begun to think of the affections of Uncle Luther as hers, rightfully hers, only hers, in part because Luther had begun to call her “Little Lady” or “My Little Lady,” but also because she had determined, secretly, that she would marry Luther when she grew up. Now he had given Lorna a papier-mâché duck that he had made himself. Bertha snatched the duck from Lorna to look at it more closely.
“This is an extremely ugly duck,” she said. She looked at Lorna to see what effect she was having on her, and Lorna, who had been looking into her lap, lifted her head and looked up at Bertha, and it was one of those moments when Lorna’s elusive beauty shone. Bertha wanted to hurt her then, wanted to hurt Lorna immediately; the urge to hurt was so pressing that she couldn’t allow herself the time to design an injury, could only strike with the crudest sort of blow.
“Uncle Luther,” she said, slowly, leaning closer and closer as she spoke, “wouldn’t give you an ugly duck like this if he liked you. He made this duck for you so you’d know that he doesn’t like you.”
Lorna watched Bertha turn the duck over in her hands. Lorna still thought the duck was beautiful. What Bertha had said hadn’t changed that. But what Bertha had said, and the way she had leaned toward Lorna when she said it, had changed the way Lorna thought about Bertha. It had shown Lorna that Bertha hated her.
“It’s mine!” Lorna cried. She reached out and tore the duck from Bertha’s hands. It seemed to hang in the air for a moment, that heartbreaking moment when we realize we’ve made a terrible error and imagine that if we act quickly enough we can reverse it, and then fell to the floor. A crack opened along the neck, and the feathers in the tail were bent upward crazily.
“And you’re welcome to it,” said Bertha. She turned on her heel and walked out of the parlor, up the stairs, and into her room.
Crying, Lorna carried the duck into the dining room and asked Luther to fix it for her. She told him, when he asked, that she had dropped it. She never told him how it had happened. She watched while Luther made some papier-mâché and patched the broken parts. When he had finished, Lorna asked him to teach her how to make a duck like it, and Luther agreed. Over the next several weeks, he showed her how to make papier-mâché and how to work with it. She made a series of ducks in imitation of the one that Luther had made for her, and her ability to work in the medium improved with each. Luther was surprised and pleased. She had a talent for imitation, and she had a good eye. He provided more complex models, and he helped her refine her technique. She continued to progress.
Bertha watched with a jealous eye. She felt that Lorna was taking from her something that was hers: the affections of her Uncle Luther, which she valued far more than the affections of her parents, whom she considered hopelessly enthralled by the magic beauty of the little interloper anyway.
In Topical Guide 248, Mark Dorset considers Art: Materials and Media: Papier-Mâché and Interpersonal Relationships: Sibling Rivalry from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Luther created the coarse-goods trade almost by accident. He was sitting at his desk one morning, day-dreaming about one of the girls in the workroom, a new one, who was working in sight of his office. While he thought about the new girl, he sketched her, on a sheet of the drawing paper that he kept handy on his desk, at his right hand, for recording ideas for new jewelry whenever they came to him. He recorded the girl not as he saw her in the workroom, but as he hoped soon to see her, in his bedroom. When he studied the sketches he had made, he discovered a curious thing: his sketches of her aroused him, whetted his appetite for her, better than imagination alone had, and far better than actually observing the girl had. In the sketches, he had given her a mix of coyness, shyness, fear, and lasciviousness that he sought in all the girls he pursued but that none ever quite provided. There was a knock on the glass of his office door. Luther looked up, waved his “typewriter” in, and slipped the page of sketches into the drawer in which he habitually put the sketches he made for new jewelry ideas. You can guess the rest. That page went, in a stack of other pages of sketches, to the man who conducted “outlet studies” for Cole & Lord’s, work that today would be called market research. He was, it happened, another Huber, one so devoted to the family policy of unblinking dullness that he prepared a straightforward report on the marketing potential of jewelry based on Luther’s sexual fantasies and submitted it with his reports on all the other sketches Luther had sent him. “I presume that these would be made into cuff links and shirt studs,” he wrote. “They would be a specialty item and not likely ever to sell well to the broad middle. They are, however, likely to sell well among men of a certain degree of sophistication, in larger cities, and abroad. I predict few buyers in the towns, and none at all in the rural areas. The likely buyer may consider these goods works of art and be, therefore, willing to pay considerably more for them than for similar goods that depict, to give the first example that comes to mind, dogs. It might be best to buttress this perception of the goods by offering them only in the most expensive materials. Finding outlets will be difficult. None of the stores that currently sell our links and studs, to extrapolate from the inquiries I have made, will carry them. This need not be an insuperable difficulty, however. Might not drummers sell them directly to the customer?”
Luther was no fool. He had unwittingly created a new product with great potential, and he had been handed an innovative marketing strategy. In Albany, he found an organization that could put that strategy into effect: “Professor” Alonzo Clapp’s bookselling business. Clapp already had an army of door-to-door salesmen selling books. Luther reasoned that there was likely to be a good overlap between the audience for books and the audience for erotic jewelry. He struck a deal with Clapp, enlisted a few of the very best artisans at Cole & Lord’s, and the coarse-goods industry was launched.
WHENEVER UNCLE LUTHER came to visit, Lorna couldn’t stop herself from looking at his damaged hand; it was terribly fascinating. Clara thought the hand was horrible, and she prayed, after her other prayers, silently, when she was in bed, with her hands together in the dark, that Uncle Luther’s hand would be made normal or that he would wear a glove always. She felt her stomach fill with cold when she looked at the hand, just as it filled with cold when she sat behind Bertha on their toboggan at the top of Ackerman Hill, and she too couldn’t keep herself from looking, just couldn’t keep herself from looking, no matter how many times she told herself to look only at Uncle Luther’s eyes or only at his chin. Bertha, who was eight years older than Lorna, felt that Uncle Luther’s hand was one of the things that made him better than other people. She made a point of taking his hand whenever he arrived for a visit, and making a little curtsy while she held it, because she wanted him to know, wanted everyone to know, that his hand didn’t frighten her, that she didn’t mind the way it was.
In Topical Guide 247, Mark Dorset considers Work: Job Titles and Opportunities Missed from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
The chain of events that led to Luther’s losing his fingers began in 1902, when Luther bought a Studebaker Brothers Gentleman’s Road Cart. In fact, he bought two. In the spring he bought a standard cart, and he enjoyed driving it so much that in the fall he bought another and had it fitted with runners as a sleigh, for the winter. The Gentleman’s Road Cart was a lean, handsome, jaunty, bachelor-uncle’s sort of vehicle. Both of Luther’s were beautifully painted in red Chinese lacquer, with gold pinstriping. He kept them polished and gleaming. “I would never drive a dirty cart or sleigh,” said Luther, in the way that bachelor uncles make pronouncements about the principles that underlie the life they make for themselves. Bachelor uncles tend to accumulate such words to live by and, as time goes by, tend increasingly to live by them. I suppose that this happens to all of us, but there is something about bachelor uncles, perhaps the fear that if they fall there will be no one to catch them, that makes them behave like umpires over their own behavior, interpreters of an ever-lengthening rule book, like the Hubers’ rule book for croquet.
The rules in Luther’s book became increasingly bizarre after he bought the cart and sleigh. His rules about cleanliness became stricter and stricter: his mustache was always clipped, the lacquer on his cart and sleigh always gleamed, his shoes were always shined, and so on. At the same time, however, his rules governing and defining acceptable behavior for a man of his age and station became laxer and laxer, especially those governing his conduct with young girls. Before he bought the Gentleman’s Road Carts, Luther’s work at Cole & Lord’s Gent’s Accessories had been marked by a simple Huber conscientiousness and lack of imagination that had earned him a series of small promotions and an office that overlooked the rushing Whatsit.
He drove, at that time, a sensible and unremarkable carriage, and he drove it in a brisk but sensible fashion. He smiled at the young girls of Chacallit but kept his distance.
The Gentleman’s Road Carts did something to him. He drove the sleigh along outlying roads and through fields like a madman in the winter, and he was nearly as wild when he drove the cart through the streets. His daredevil driving earned him the spoken condemnation and unspoken admiration of most of the other men in Chacallit, and it earned him the attention of young girls. Increasingly often he took one of the mill girls riding with him, and increasingly often he brought the girls — flushed, giggling, exhilarated — home with him after their rides.
He brought to his work the reckless daring that he had discovered in his driving. This new daring led to the accident in which he lost his fingers, but it also led him, for the first time, to give his talent its head. He produced some striking designs for cuff links and shirt studs, and eventually he created the profitable industry that lurked in the shadows and dark recesses of the gentlemen’s jewelry business, the branch that came to be known as “the coarse-goods trade,” not for the quality of materials and workmanship that went into the goods, for they far surpassed that found in most other jewelry produced in Chacallit, but for their erotic content.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Chapter 2
In Which Lorna’s Uncle Luther Becomes the Father of the Coarse-Goods Trade
THE CROQUET ground rules that have been kept by the Hubers fill a small book generations old, maintained and expanded by successive occupants of the narrow house and passed along with the house itself. It makes an interesting historical document. Of the following samples from this book, the entry made in 1910 is of particular interest, because it was added to the rules by Lorna, in her hand, when she was nine.
No player may drive the ball of another player in a downhill direction. [1856 — just three years before Lieutenant Amédée Mannheim, of the French artillery, developed the form of slide rule that endured until the development of the electronic calculator]
No player may drive the ball of another player on a course so close to the contour of Ackerman Hill that the net effect will be the same as if the ball had been driven on a downward course. [1888]
No player may drive the ball of another player into the new drainage ditch along the upward border of the front lawn, since a ball so driven is certain to roll through the new culvert and continue on an accelerating downward path. [1901]
Driving the ball of a player who is injured or who does not have the full use of his fingers is not fair play. [1910]
Any player who causes any ball to roll downward and be lost, whether by direct or indirect means or by accident, must pay for it or replace it. [1930]
When the ball of another player is driven, it must be driven uphill only, and if an uphill ball starts rolling downhill it MUST be caught before it rolls off the property. [1952]
It would be more fun for everybody if no player drove the ball of another player in any direction whatsoever, because it’s really the pleasure of the game that we ought to be interested in and not the whole competitive thing. [1969]
All croquet balls and mallets used on this court shall be made exclusively of wood. The use of mallets made of carbon fibre compounds or of aluminum alloys is expressly forbidden. In fact, those damned aluminum baseball bats that make a sound like “pwong” are not to be used within earshot of this court either. [1983]
Lorna had a specific person in mind when she protested against driving the ball of a player “who does not have the full use of his fingers.” It was her Uncle Luther. Uncle Luther was tall and quiet and dark. He had a pointed chin and deep-set eyes; those would have been his most prominent features if his right hand had not been so terrifying a curiosity. The forefinger was normal, but the other three fingers ended at the first knuckle. They had been sliced off by the machine that cut the clamps for suspenders from thin sheets of brass, while Luther was demonstrating the speed at which he wanted the machine run. “As neat an amputation as any surgeon could have done,” Luther enjoyed saying.
In Topical Guide 245, Mark Dorset considers Games: Croquet and Gadgets: Slide Rulefrom this episode.
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You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
THE PROBLEM was Lorna’s elusive beauty. Clara and Bertha were envious of it from the moment they saw her, although they never quite realized that that was what they envied. In fact, they hardly considered Lorna attractive. Most of the time Lorna’s appearance seemed to them just on the pretty side of plain. Her beauty really did seem to live in the mind, or the heart, of her beholder. Bertha and Clara never saw it, but Lorna possessed, throughout her life, an elusive loveliness that showed from certain angles at certain moments, for certain people, a beauty that could enchant a person in the blink of an eye and then would disappear if she turned her head or touched her hair. That fleeting beauty might return a moment or an hour later, all the more tantalizing and desirable for having been away, for being so hard to see clearly, for being so like a twinkling star on a hazy summer night. Bertha saw and understood the effect of this scintillating beauty, even if she couldn’t see the beauty itself, and it seemed to her bewitching and unfair, an advantage given to Lorna over her, for she was a homely, large-boned, gangling girl.
That intriguing beauty never left Lorna, not even in the last years of her life, not even when she was ill, when she looked older than she was, when she was pale and weak, and her skin hung in loose folds. Her beauty in age was not of the type that is a lingering reminder, the lingering remainder, of youthful beauty, the type that makes people say, “She must have been a beauty in her day.” It was an unchanged, undiminished quality; perhaps it was really a manifestation of inner beauty, and only its representation, never its essence, changed as Lorna aged, so that it was always appropriate to her age and condition.
ACCORDING TO MAY CASTLE, Lorna’s friend and confidante for more than forty years, Lorna never forgot Bertha and Clara’s teasing.
She told me that at an early age, and I mean quite an early age, while Lorna was still sleeping in her parents’ room, Clara and Bertha began to call her Cinderella. Well, Cinderella! Isn’t that rather a stupid thing for two sisters to do, call their younger sister Cinderella? If Lorna was Cinderella, Clara and Bertha would have to be the ugly stepsisters, wouldn’t they? Well. I met those sisters on a couple of occasions, when they were grown women, and I would say that they might have been passably good-looking girls once, perhaps when they were very young, but they had become — well — dowdy and positively homely. I really think they brought it on themselves. Do you think that can’t be done? Believe me, it can. And those husbands of theirs! At any rate, Clara and Bertha began calling her Cinderella, out of envy you see, and anger, and because Lorna had this absolutely haunting beauty. Well, my dear! It was haunting, you would have to call it haunting. It would positively light her up at unpredictable times, and the sisters must have been — well! — just depressed as hell by the sense that everything would work out for Lorna the way everything worked out for Cinderella, in a way that things would never work out for them, because of this odd beauty she had, you see. Well, they kept it up as she grew, and then when the sisters began to have suitors, the fellows loved to bounce Lorna on their knee, and so on. And when Lorna began going to dances, the sisters were still unmarried and they were still going to the dancehall themselves, hunting. Well, their men friends would bring little Lorna punch and ask to be put on her card, and they began calling her Cinderella too. But when they said it, these young men, there was moonlight in it, you see. Well, only then did it dawn on Clara and Bertha that they might be creating a sort of Frankenstein’s Cinderella. Don’t you just love the idea? Well, they decided that perhaps they had better knock it off. But it was too late, you see, because Lorna had been hurt, terribly hurt, by her sisters’ taunting, so hurt that she had no love, no affection of any sort, left for them, and because she was determined now that this name she had endured, this Cinderella that she’d heard so often as a taunt would become a — badge — or a — title — that she could take to show that she had won in the end. When she sent birthday or Christmas cards to her sisters she signed them Cinderella, and when she had a daughter of her own she named her Ella.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
THE HOUSE where Lorna was born is tall and narrow, perched on the steep northern slope of the Whatsit Valley. A narrow, highly crowned road runs along the uphill side of the house, turns sharply in front of it, and drops steeply, running past the downhill side of the house and on downward, past more houses, set in tiers on the hillside, winding down toward the river below. From the front porch of the Huber house, one can see the river here and there through the trees and, strung out along both banks, the mills and, alongside the mills, back from the river, climbing the hills on either side, the other houses of Chacallit.
In that narrow house, on Lorna’s christening day, after the christening itself, my great-grandparents, Richard and Lena Huber, invited their friends and neighbors to meet their third daughter more informally, in the parlor of their home. Richard Huber was a “production anticipator” for the American Garter Company. It was his job to monitor the sales of the company’s products, record them, chart them, note seasonal and regional trends, and predict future production levels and the materials that would be needed to meet them. His was the sort of job that would today be done by a computer. Lena was the daughter of a production anticipator for Gryphon Grip-Tight Patented Fasteners. Their marriage represented a precisely horizontal alliance in the Chacallit social scheme.
Richard served his guests beer, wine, and root beer in the parlor and urged them into the dining room, where the table was covered with food: hams, sausages of six kinds, breads and rolls, honey and preserves, smoked mackerel and eels, sprats, cheeses, a smoked goose and a smoked turkey, and, at either end of the table, two enormous bowls of potato salad. However, the guests showed no strong inclination to eat. They remained in the living room, content to drink and look at Lorna and remark on the odd beauty they saw in her.
In the dining room, Lorna’s sister Bertha stood in front of one of the bowls of potato salad, mechanically and purposefully filling a plate with it, piling the potatoes in a mound, as if she were daring gravity to make the uppermost chunks fall. One did, and Bertha stooped to pick it up from the floor, mashing it a bit as she did, perhaps from clumsiness alone. Another fell. She was making a fine mess.
Clara, now the middle of the three Huber daughters, moved to her sister’s side and whispered to her without looking at her.
“Bertha,” she said, “you’re taking too much. You’ll get a smack if you get caught.”
Bertha didn’t even pause when Clara spoke. She pressed another spoonful of potato salad onto the mound, and under her breath she said to Clara, “Nobody’s looking at me. They’re all looking at her. You just be quiet, and no one will even notice.”
Clara half turned toward the adults, who were clustered around the wicker cradle where Lorna was displayed. Clara could see only backs, for all the adults were turned toward Lorna, and they were so tightly crowded together that she couldn’t see either her mother or the little cynosure. She saw her father standing outside the crowd, with his hands behind his back, rocking on his heels. Clara didn’t have to see his face to know that he was beaming, that he was proud of his new daughter. Uncle Luther stood beside him, his right arm flung across his brother’s shoulders. Clara saw that what Bertha said was true; no one in the living room would notice what they did in the dining room. She turned toward the table, took a plate, and began piling slices of turkey as purposefully and mechanically as Bertha had filled her plate with potato salad.
When Bertha’s plate was as full as she could make it, she began making her way toward the door to the porch, scuttling sideways, so that her illicit heap of potato salad was hidden. She pushed the door open with her hip and slipped outside, onto the porch. When she was safely outside, she let the door slide off her hip, and it swung against Clara’s elbow, jostling her so that a slice of turkey fell onto the floor.
Bertha sat on the porch railing, and, just as methodically as she had filled her plate, she ate all the potato salad she had taken. Clara watched, amazed and terrified. She tried to emulate Bertha’s methodical determination, but she couldn’t come near to finishing all the turkey she had taken. Quietly, she slipped back into the dining room and replaced most of it. When she came back outside, Bertha was under the porch, vomiting.
In Topical Guide 243, Mark Dorset considers Books, Real and Fictional; Cover Illustrations; and Food: as Significant Element of a Remembered Incident and Its Literary Reproduction from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
With the arrival of the twentieth century came a slow decline in interest in men’s furnishings, and that, of course, meant economic decline for Chacallit. For decades, this was a gradual slipping, but then in the period following the Second World War the bottom really fell out of the domestic men’s furnishings market. There were many reasons. Primary among them was the belief among younger men that everything had been changed by the war, that nothing was the same, that nothing prewar had much of a role in the postwar world, that the world had broken forever with its past, had left its sad old self behind. Interest in suspenders, detachable collars, shirt studs, and cuff links disappeared among younger men as if overnight. Though some interest in such haberdashery persisted among the older, more conservative, and wealthier, those men were increasingly attracted to the products of the rebuilding Europe, especially those of England and Germany, which were thought to be of a quality that the domestic products couldn’t match. (How ironic that the people around Chacallit who lost so much to that competition should be mostly of English and German ancestry themselves, and proud of it. Many people in Chacallit still distribute gifts on Boxing Day, and there’s still an annual wurst, kraut, and potato salad festival every summer.)
For nearly three decades following World War II, Chacallit slept. It was awakened at last by a local boy, Deke Schumacher, who, riding the crest of a wave of success as Vice President for Computer Furniture at IBM, walked away from it all in a huff one day and returned home, to the steep hills of Chacallit, beside the rushing waters of the Whatsit, to start his own computer furniture company. Sales of the ChacalliTech Computer Scooter, a platform — actually a whole line of platforms of various sizes — that can be installed under computer components, allowing one to move them around at will, exceeded even the sunniest predictions of Deke himself. What the ChacalliTech ads say about the Scooter (borrowing, probably unconsciously, from a nineteenth-century advertisement for Studebaker wagons) is true: “The Brightest Star in the Computer Furniture Firmament Is the ChacalliTech Computer Scooter™.”
Chacallit today is, in outward appearance, remarkably like the town in which Lorna grew up, and that similarity is the result of a pattern of economic decline and renewal that first isolated Chacallit from architectural modernization and then rescued it from physical decay. Had the town prospered throughout this century, modernization and overdevelopment would certainly have obliterated its past. Instead, Chacallit dozed until the ChacalliTech prosperity brought new hope for the future and an urge to restore and preserve the past, with the result that, when I visited, I found that I could easily imagine life in Chacallit as it must have been in the early part of this century, when Lorna was a girl.
When Lorna was born, the century had just turned, and the mills hummed, turning out suspenders, collars, collar stays, cuff links, money clips, and the like. Money seemed to flow into the town as swiftly as the swollen waters of the Whatsit in a January thaw. Today, the gentlemen’s furnishings that one finds in the bright shops along River Road are likely to come from Japan, but prosperity has returned. The old brick mills along the Whatsit have been painstakingly restored, and some of the stern, handsome buildings now house the humming facilities of ChacalliTech.
All along River Road a visitor will find, in other resurrected mills and warehouses, charming shops — among them the Tie-Tack Tack Shop and Hot-Cha-Chatchkes (a treasure trove of a place that specializes in gewgaws of the 1920s) — and intriguing boites and restaurants — including Chez Mom (a homey eatery where one can get Tarte aux Pommes Façon de Mom, and the day’s special is always listed as Les Restes), Eau Boy (an all-water bar with more than a hundred domestic and imported waters), 24-Karat Studs (a gay bar), and the Sleeve Garter Pub (where a Huber tends bar).
The Whatsit Valley is a pretty but forbidding area. The winters here are long and cold, as they were then; the autumn woods blaze with color, as they did then; the spring earth is fecund and odorous, as it was then; the summers are damp and languorous, as they were then; and all the year round the night wind howls in the valley as if it held a grudge, just as it did then.
The houses in Chacallit are plain and staunch. Only stubborn people could have built their houses here, notched the hillside for foundations, cut and fit the stone, created a level foothold for each house, for themselves, always working against the slope, always working against gravity. It is as if the difficulty of building here was part of the attraction that Chacallit held for its early settlers. Here was a place where they could test themselves, their resolve, and their aspirations against the slope, against the unrelenting downward tug. The builders bequeathed to the generations that followed them a test no less difficult, for they, too, have always to battle the tug of gravity. The young and well-to-do employees of ChacalliTech who now pay high prices for the staunch hillside houses, who paint them, furnish them sparely and brightly, and landscape their yards with plants that never grew in the valley before, find that the rain washes the grass seed down the slope, the garden cart wants to roll across the lawn into the drainage ditch that runs beside the road, and croquet is a nightmare.
In Topical Guide 242, Mark Dorset considers Life Imitates Art? and Chacallit, New York from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Chacallit’s rise in the haberdashery industry was purchased at the expense of some self-esteem. The men’s-furnishings business took itself quite seriously in those days, and the name of the town, because it did not suggest high seriousness, top-notch standards, and vaulting aspiration, might have stood in the way of further growth. When the Excelsior Celluloid Collar Company became interested in building a mill in Chacallit, Excelsior officials made clear their feeling that the company would find it an embarrassment to be known as the Excelsior Celluloid Collar Company of Chacallit because of the humorous connotations of the name of the town. “We fear,” the board of directors said in a letter to the mayor of Chacallit, “that in a short time we would be known, not openly, but behind our collective back, in a snickering, mocking way, as the Whatchamacallit Collar Company.”
Stormy meetings followed, but soon the citizens of Chacallit made an offer that satisfied the company: they offered to rename the town Excelsior. (According to diaries and letters from the period, there was some interest in changing the name of the river to Celluloid at the same time, but nothing came of it.) A precedent was established, and throughout the rest of the nineteenth century, whenever a larger and richer men’s furnishings company hesitated about building a new mill there, in a town named for one of its rivals, the citizens would vote to change the name of the town. As a result, the place was known at various times as Acme (for Acme Fancy Buttons), Premier (for Premier Furnishings), Hermes (for Hermes Brand Gentlemen’s Necessities), and Atlas (for Atlas Glovers & Hatters).
Late in the nineteenth century, however, the attitude of Chacallitans changed. Ralph Waldo Emerson never visited Chacallit (the difficulty of winter travel in the Whatsit Valley in those days kept him from venturing into Chacallit on his winter lecture tours), but there was an Emersonian flavor to the decision reached by the citizens of Chacallit in 1883 (just shortly after Emerson’s death) to revert to the “rightful name of this place, Chacallit, now and forevermore, and be no more the pliant w***e of industry.”
Some have argued that the people of Chacallit (or, more accurately, of Dr. Scott’s, as the place was then known — for Dr. Scott’s Links and Studs) sensed that they had made themselves far more ridiculous in the eyes of the rest of the world by attempting to escape their past and to please each new suitor than they would ever have been made by the name Chacallit and were, therefore, returning to the earlier name in the simple spirit of “enough is enough.” However, I think the Chacallitans may have been moved by nobler sentiments than that. In “Self-Reliance,” Emerson had written:
Traveling is a fool’s paradise. . . . At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. . . . My giant goes with me wherever I go.
Chacallit’s own Transcendentalist, Wilhelm Huber, my great-great-grandfather, a sharp-witted descendant of Inge who refused to be silenced, expressed his abhorrence of Chacallit’s name-changing in remarkably similar terms:
This business of changing the name of our town is a foolish practice. . . . We imagine that if we call ourselves Naples, or Rome, we will become intoxicatingly beautiful, and the Naples Collar-Pin Company will come a-courting, or the Roman Sleeve Garter firm will affiance us, and we will then, at last, be laughingstocks no longer. We tear down our old signs, erect our new signs, and embark next morning on a new life as Naples, but in our mirrors we still see the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that we meant to flee from: our giant, ourselves.
By the turn of the century, Chacallit was again Chacallit, and the town was supplying suspenders, cuff links, collar stays, belt buckles, tie tacks, and the like worldwide.
In Topical Guide 241, Mark Dorset considers Celluloid Collars from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Chapter 1
In Which Lorna Is Born into the Huber Family, of Chacallit, New York
MY GRANDMOTHER, Lorna Huber, was born in Chacallit, New York, fifty miles or so northwest of Albany, in the valley of the Whatsit River, a tributary of the Mohawk. The name of the town has a curious etymology. The first English settlers arrived around 1680, some fifty years after William Oughtred developed the first calculating instrument that could be called a slide rule. These settlers knew the Mohawk name for the place, which meant, loosely, “place where many fur-bearing animals can be taken but the land is really too steeply sloped to allow one to make a proper camp.” However, since the settlers couldn’t pronounce the Mohawk name correctly and were, in the English manner, disinclined to learn to do so, when they were asked where they hailed from they made a bit of comic business out of struggling to pronounce the name, delivering three or four mispronunciations, and then shrugging and saying, “Oh, What-y’-may-call-it.”
The term What-you-may-call-it was, by the middle of the seventeenth century, already well established in English as a humorous substitute for anything the name of which a speaker had forgotten, couldn’t pronounce, had never known, or didn’t consider worth learning. The Oxford English Dictionary, in the entry for what-d’ye-call-’em, lists what-you-may-call-it as a variant, and cited there we find Chapman writing, as early as 1598, “Why hees a what you calt.” In 1600 we find Shakespeare himself writing, in As You Like It, “Good euen good Mr what ye cal’t.”
Apparently human nature and the techniques of comedy were little different in those days from what they are now, because the citizen of “What-y’-may-call-it,” having raised a laugh by lampooning the name of the town, added what is known to stand-up comics as the “topper.” After a suitable pause, the citizen would add, “It’s on the bank of the What’s-it River,” and, presumably, have his listener in stitches.
In time, the town became widely known as What-y’-may-call-it, and then, through clipping and elision, What-y’-ma-call-it, Whatchamacallit, Whatchacallit, and, finally, Chacallit. Similarly, the river came to be called the Whatsit.
The first Hubers in America, Kurt Huber and his sixteen-year-old bride Inge, arrived in the Whatsit Valley from Germany in 1730, at just about the time when the first members of the Studebaker family were settling in Pennsylvania. In Germany, the Hubers had been farmers. History does not record what reasons Kurt Huber had for choosing Chacallit, but, to judge from the poor soil and steep slopes, he certainly can’t have intended to farm there. At the time, fur-trapping was really the only industry, but Kurt seems to have worked as a road builder. A history of Chacallit published in 1866 says of Kurt, “It is to him that the town is indebted for some of its handsomest streets.” That history also says, “He was a bold, fearless man who refused to remove to the fort, where the other settlers fled on account of the Indians.” Inge was known for her caustic wit and dark beauty. An admiring but wary diarist of the time marveled, in a sketch of Inge, that “so sharp a tongue should lurk behind such plump, alluring lips.” Kurt Huber died just two months before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Following his death, many objects of value that had been presumed stolen by Indians during raids were discovered among his road-building tools and supplies, and as a result Inge and her eleven children lived under a cloud for the rest of their days.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the manufacture of gentlemen’s furnishings, which had begun in Chacallit on a very small scale, as little more than a cottage industry, a way for families to supplement their incomes when fur trapping was off, grew steadily in economic importance, and thanks to it, the town grew and prospered. For generations, the Hubers of Chacallit strove to efface the memory of their infamous ancestor Kurt by establishing themselves as a family of unremarkable drudges wholly devoted to the stolid, uncomplaining performance of dull work. The gentlemen’s furnishings industry offered numerous opportunities for work of that type, and as the industry expanded the Hubers filled more and more of the positions in the undistinguished middle of its work force. Now and then Inge’s genes produced an impish, quick-witted beauty or Kurt’s produced a rogue, but most of these were, for the greater good of the family, suppressed or sent away, and the Hubers trudged along at the soft center of Chacallit’s success.
In Topical Guide 240, Mark Dorset considers Places, Fictional: Chacallit, New York; Name, What’s in a; Names, Pronunciation of; Names and Naming: Place-Names; and Technology, Outmoded: Slide Rule from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
OVER THE YEARS, my grandparents’ story has come out little by little. Some of their former neighbors in Punta Cachazuda, Florida, where Gumma and Guppa retired and taught clandestine classes in erotic sculpture, began exhibiting the work they had done under Gumma and Guppa’s tutelage. Newspapers picked up the story, and soon people all over America began “discovering” pieces of erotic jewelry in their closets. The work that Gumma and Guppa and others did in this line has been hailed as some of the most important American folk art of the twentieth century, but it has also been condemned as perverse and worse. I tried, until recently, to ignore it. I confess that my reason was selfish: I wanted to hold on to my child’s-eye-view of my grandparents. I wanted to hang on to Gumma and Guppa. I still clung to the comfortable and familiar notion of Gumma and Guppa that I had developed as a boy. From time to time I received requests from collectors of erotic jewelry for information about those two strangers, Herb and Lorna Piper, pleas for any little anecdote about their work in “coarse goods” — that is, erotic jewelry. I turned down all such requests with the explanation that I couldn’t say anything about their work because I never saw them at it, and I never knew that they had engaged in it until after they were dead. I never bothered trying to explain that I felt I didn’t even know Herb and Lorna Piper.
When, just a little more than a year ago, I received an invitation to attend the opening of the exhibit of American Erotic Jewelry at the Smithsonian Institution, I at first thought that I would decline that too. However, when I read, in the New York Times, that the exhibit had become the target of angry protests before it had even opened, my feelings changed. Accompanying the article in the Times was a photograph of a crowd picketing at the Smithsonian. One man stood in an aggressive posture, with his fists clenched and his chest puffed out, glaring at the camera. He wore a T-shirt with the fig-leaf emblem of the “Prude Pride” movement. Printed across it was the slogan:
I’M PROUD TO SAY
I’M ASHAMED OF MY BODY!
In the article, a spokeswoman for Mothers Against Sex was quoted as saying, toward the end of a disquisition on the pernicious effects of erotic jewelry, “A lot of people don’t realize that there’s an entire community in Florida where senior citizens turn out this perverted stuff. Can you imagine that? I ask you, America, is that how you want your grandmothers to end up — posing naked for some old perverts? It’s sick. I mean, just think of those wrinkled old people — I tell you it’s just sick. You can’t tell me that this has anything to do with artistic expression or freedom of speech. This has to do with only one thing, s-e-x.”
That did it. “Oh, no,” I said to myself. “That isn’t all there is to it. There is much, much more to it than that.”
I determined then that if my grandparents’ story was to be told, I wasn’t going to leave it to the tabloids. I was going to tell it myself, and I was going to tell it as completely as I could. In that attempt, I have drawn on my grandmother’s account, my memories of my grandparents, interviews with friends and relatives, historical documents, supposition, and imagination. Most of what they thought, felt, and experienced went unrecorded. Most of the documents they might have left were destroyed, burned in the Hapgood Brothers’ warehouse fire. I have tried, therefore, to tell the story as it probably happened. The facts may be wrong, but I think the spirit is right.
I AM INDEBTED to many people, institutions, and other sources for their help in preparing this biography, including, in no particular order, the Historical Society of Chacallit, New York; the Boston Athenæum; the Punta Cachazuda Bugle; the erotica and esoterica department at the Smithsonian Institution; the Studebaker National Museum; Asa Hall and Richard Langworth’s The Studebaker Century; Life magazine; and my parents, Bert and Ella Leroy. The book could never have been written without the reminiscences of Herb and Lorna provided by May Castle, whole chunks of which I have included unedited, just as they were transcribed from the tape recordings of our conversations. Thank you, May, for your help. I wish you had lived to read the result. I hope you would have liked it.
Peter Leroy
Small’s Island
June 2, 1987
In Topical Guide 239, Mark Dorset considers Erotica, Unsolicited and Reader Response, Unsolicited from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Someone nudged me. My mother. I looked at her. She nodded ever so slightly. What did that mean? Had she discovered, from my expression, what I had been thinking? Did she know about the jewelry Gumma had left me? Had she, perhaps — She nodded again, in the direction of the pulpit, and gave me a little nudge. The eulogy. Of course. The eulogy.
I got up. I mounted the pulpit in a fog. I looked around at the congregation of mourners. Who among these friends, relatives, and acquaintances knew the truth? Was I the only one? Or was I the last to know? I took my remarks from my pocket. I read them. I had written a little catalog of my grandmother’s kindnesses, as I knew them. When I had written it, I had worried that it would be too much for me to read without breaking down. Now I found that I couldn’t concentrate on it. I read, but I wasn’t paying attention to what I was reading. My eyes were on the paper, but my mind was on the animated copulations of tiny ivory men and women.
Worse, I was getting excited — sexually. I was standing in the pulpit at my grandmother’s funeral, reading her eulogy, and (out of sight of the mourners, thank God) clenching and relaxing my thighs, rotating my pelvis, twisting, and squirming, trying to shift my erection, which was thrust painfully up against the elastic band of my briefs, into a more comfortable position. Still reading, I reached into the side pocket of my pants, reached through the leg hole of my briefs, and pushed the tip of my penis out from under the elastic. That was better, but I was immediately seized by the fear that everyone had noticed, that they had been able to tell from some shift of my shoulders exactly what I had been doing. I scanned the congregation. They were sniffling and blubbering and dabbing their eyes and blowing their noses. I wondered whether my grandmother had imagined this moment and presented me with the problem of her eroticism as she might have presented me with one of the logical puzzles she enjoyed so much. She always wanted to make me think. She always warned me against taking things for granted, against the blindness of assumptions. Was she doing me another kindness, inviting me to solve her puzzle instead of mourning her? I wasn’t sure whether to smile, or blush, or cry.
In the afternoon, after my grandmother had been buried, there was a buffet dinner at my parents’ house. The afternoon passed. The crowd dwindled. My grandparents’ closest friends and admirers remained through the afternoon, and on into the evening, drinking and telling stories. As the evening wore on, no one became more sentimental than my old high-school friend Mark Dorset, who, after a while, as if he’d been quite deliberately working up to a level of intoxication that would allow him to say what he had to say, took me aside and said that he had something to give me, a memento of my grandparents that he had had in his possession since my grandfather had died, three years before.
From his pocket he took what seemed to be a pocket watch. He pressed the stem, and the lid popped open. Inside were three tiny ivory figures, two women and a man, sexually entangled on a miniature bed. “Just look at that workmanship!” said Mark.
I did. Immediately, I could see that this was even better than any of the pieces my grandmother had given me. (I know now that the little trio was the best work they ever did.) In the carving of the figures, I was certain, I could recognize the work of my grandmother’s hand, her fine eye, her loving touch, her sense of detail. In the smooth mechanical animation, I was certain I could recognize my grandfather’s ingenuity, his fascination for the complex and puzzling, his love of impractical gadgets. I stared at the trio and their performance. My throat was tight. My eyes were wet. I was dumbfounded. I was grief-stricken. I was proud.
But I was also envious. Mark’s initiation into my grandparents’ secret had preceded mine. By three years. Why? Mark had a story, of course. I listened to him tell it, and while I listened I tried to wear the amused look of one who knows it all already, who has heard it all before. In truth, though, it was news to me, and it hurt to hear it from someone other than my grandparents. Why had they never told me? Why had they told Mark before me? My fear of the answers to those questions was one of the things that for so long kept me from writing this book.
In Topical Guide 238, Mark Dorset considers Dorset, Mark from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Preface
FOR YEARS, I tried to avoid writing this book. If the choice had been mine alone, I would never have written it. Recently, however, events beyond my control forced me into writing it and forced me, in the writing of it, to confront a moment that ranks high among the unsettling moments of my life, the moment that, I think, marked the end of my overextended egocentric period and so, perhaps, the end of my youth: the moment when I learned that my maternal grandparents were involved in — virtually the creators of — the animated erotic jewelry industry.
The discovery came — actually it was forced upon me by two informants — on the day of my grandmother’s funeral, three years after my grandfather had died. That morning, May Castle, my grandparents’ friend of longest standing, gave me a box, inscribed to me in my grandmother’s hand. Inside the box were twenty-two pieces of erotic jewelry and erotic sculpture. With them was an account, just a few words, written by my grandmother, of my grandparents’ involvement with erotic arts and crafts. I read it quickly, breathlessly, but I had many things to attend to that morning, and I didn’t have much time to think about what it meant before I left for the Episcopal church, where the funeral service was to be held.
Sitting in a pew at the church, half attending to the service, I began to consider my new knowledge. You can imagine how it affected me. It shook me. Not only had I never known anything about this interest of my grandparents’, but the whole notion was so far removed from my idea of them — their personalities, their interests, their talents as I supposed I understood them — that I couldn’t even imagine where it might fit. Eroticism, I realized with some embarrassment, had never played an important part in my mind’s eye’s version of my grandparents’ lives. How I had misjudged them! I had belittled them, diminished their lives in a way that I wouldn’t have wanted mine diminished. Eroticism certainly played an important part in my life; how could I have been so thick-headed and arrogant as to ignore the likelihood that it was as important — or, to judge from the evidence they had supplied me, even more important — in theirs? I was ashamed of myself. I was also flabbergasted. I was struck, with a suddenness and force that felt like a physical blow, by the realization that even now I was wrong in my understanding of them. I had, in the course of an hour or so, come to think that eroticism had “played an important part in my grandparents’ lives.” That couldn’t be anywhere near the truth. If what my grandmother had suggested in her note was true — and the carvings she had included testified that it was — my grandparents had played a leading role in the development of the erotic imagination of their times! It was much too much to handle all at once, at such a time. It was as if my grandmother had in her posthumous letter introduced me to two people I had never met before, people who had been hiding inside my grandparents, people with genitalia. Who were these people? Why did my grandmother want me to meet them?
When I was a child, I called my grandparents “Gumma” and “Guppa.” Originally, the names were just mispronunciations of “Grandma” and “Grandpa,” of course, but as time passed they became terms of endearment, and I continued to use them long after I was able to say “Grandma” and “Grandpa” clearly. I shifted, uncomfortably, to something like “Gram” and “Gramp” for a brief time during adolescence, when childhood leftovers embarrassed me, but I soon returned to “Gumma” and “Guppa,” and once back never strayed again. I think that underlying my persistent use of my childhood names for them was an assertion that my grandparents were, and would always remain, the Gumma and Guppa I had known when I was a child. My Gumma was large and soft, generous, enduringly pretty, pleasant, devoted to the domestic arts, the provider of huge beige-and-white meals — biscuits, boiled onions, chicken, cream sauces, and potatoes prepared in a thousand ways, the best of them a German potato salad that filled the house with the pungency of vinegar and bacon — an amateur logician and mathematician, occasionally a repairer of jewelry, a reader of best-selling novels, mostly historical ones. My Guppa was small and quick, apparently always either amused or puzzled, a talented and hard-working salesman, a tireless home handyman, an amateur inventor, a happy tinkerer. Now, after so many years, and after it was too late, Gumma was, it seemed to me, asking me to get to know them as someone else entirely, as what other people called them: Herb and Lorna.
In Topical Guide 237, Mark Dorset considers Names, Pronunciation of and Growing Up (Slowly, in an Autobiography or Memoir) from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Dedication
For Bill ’n’ Edna
Epigraphs
The idea that one has long held of a person is apt to stop one’s eyes and ears; my mother, for three whole years, had no more noticed the salve with which one of her nieces used to paint her lips than if it had wholly and invisibly dissolved in some clear liquid; until one day a streak too much, or possibly something else, brought about the phenomenon known as supersaturation; all the paint that hitherto passed unperceived was now crystallized, and my mother, in the face of this sudden riot of colour, declared, in the best Combray manner, that it was a perfect scandal.
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, “Within a Budding Grove,” (translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff)
One never knows, do one?
Fats Waller
Venn diagrams, named for the English logician John Venn, who devised them in 1880, depict graphically the relationships defined by logical statements about classes of things and, in the words with which the great Polish-American metamathematician Alfred Tarski began his discussion of operations on classes in his Introduction to Logic and to the Methodology of the Deductive Sciences, “certain operations which, if performed on given classes, yield new classes.” Over the years, it has occurred to me that a similar kind of diagram, the Dorset Diagram if I may be permitted to call it that, can be used to depict the relationships that certain operations establish between people; specifically, the Venn diagram that depicts the product of the multiplication (in the logical sense) of two classes can be used to depict the product of that complex operation (or, to be more accurate, set of operations) that we call love, operations that join two people, bind them, link them. The linking image is particularly nice, I think, because the diagram resembles two linked rings. . . .
Over the years some lovers’ circles become so overlapped that only the thinnest crescents of lunes remain at the outer edges . . . they fill the lens of love so full, . . . become so completely a couple that they belong together in that strong way we acknowledge in things by joining them in speech with ’n’ instead of and, as if the attraction between the things joined was so strong, so magnetic, that they had rushed together, crushing their conjunction between them, collapsing it at both ends: flotsam ’n’ jetsam, Scotch ’n’ soda, ham ’n’ swiss, ham ’n’ eggs, macaroni ’n’ cheese, thunder ’n’ lightning, cares ’n’ woes, death ’n’ taxes, life ’n’ times, time ’n’ tide, stuff ’n’ nonsense, rock ’n’ roll, Laurel ’n’ Hardy, Mutt ’n’ Jeff, mom ’n’ pop, Herb ’n’ Lorna.
Mark Dorset, “The Dorset Diagram and How to Use It” (reprinted in Sociology Made Visible)
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
I WAS LEFT STANDING THERE, alone, in the middle of the gym floor, in the painted circle, baffled. I looked at the manual in my hand. I knew now, for certain, that I was holding the last version. My work was over. There wasn’t even any need for me to resign. Still, I’d gone to a lot of trouble to make my resignation memorable, to give it wit, grace, and style. I started again at the beginning. I delivered my entire speech and read my entire story, to an empty house. The story was—well, let’s be frank—it wasn’t ready. It really needed more work—much more work. The ending had lots of problems. Mr. Winters, waspish ruler of the Young Salts Summer Sailing Camp, was cast adrift in a tiny dinghy by mutinous Salts. It was a fitting end, but hackneyed. Even I could see that. I’d tacked it on in haste, rushed it, and I regretted it. When I finished, I looked up at the empty seats, and I was, I’m willing to admit now, glad that there wasn’t a Tar in them. My resignation speech was another story altogether. I had put plenty of time in on that, worked and reworked it, polished and buffed it. It was ready. Every little pause, every inflection, every nuance was exactly as it should have been. I couldn’t have done it any better if I’d practiced for another week, and that ending was, I’m forced by honesty to say, perfect—just perfect. “So,” I said, “the next time you find a dollar and wonder how to spend it, the way Larry did in the story, I hope you’ll shrug and grin and say what my grandfather would say: ‘If you’re not ready to do something the way it should be done, then you’re not ready to do it at all. If you’re going to buy wax teeth, buy them for the whole gang.’” I’m sure that if there had been any Tars left in the gym, they would have loved it. They would have laughed at the funny parts and applauded me when I finished, and when I passed out the wax teeth they would certainly have come swarming out of the bleachers to gather around me and shake my hand and punch my shoulder and clap me on the back, and I have no doubt, no doubt at all, that if they hadn’t been out there chasing Mr. Summers into the night they would have hoisted me onto their shoulders and carried me around the gym a couple of times, singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Years later, that’s just what happened, at the end of the Larry Peters novel that I called—but you’ve guessed already—Mutiny.
[This concludes “The Young Tars” and Little Follies. The serialization of The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy will continue with the beginning of the Preface to Herb ’n’ Lorna.]
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Porky arrived at the door of the coach’s office and reached for the knob. He stopped. He seemed to be confused by what he saw through the pebbled glass. I decided that I’d better keep going while I had a good head of steam.
“Before I actually resign,” I said, “I’d like to take this opportunity—my lastopportunity—”
Porky leaned closer to the window. He shaded his eyes with his hand. He turned the knob slowly.
“—to read you the story I wrote for you,” I went on. I flipped through my copy of the manual to the “Tales for Tars” section. The Tars were playing the part of an eager audience. It would be fair to say that the gymnasium was hushed.
Porky pulled the door of the coach’s office open. Into the hush came the sound whoomp, then smack, then yow! Then laughter.
“It’s—um—called ‘Mutiny,’” I said. I turned in the direction of the coach’s office. So did everyone else.
“What the hell is going on?” said Porky, into the doorway.
Mr. Summers’s voice came from the office. We could hear the anger in it, but we couldn’t make out much of what he said, just “—discipline—humility—your own business.” Then whoomp, smack, and yow! A Ping-Pong ball bounced through the doorway, and the door slammed shut.
“It starts on—uh—page thirty-nine of the manual,” I said, turning back toward the bleachers, “and—I’d like to—”
No one was paying any attention to me. Porky picked up the Ping-Pong ball and walked back toward the bleachers. His mouth was open.
“I’d like to—um—read it to you,” I said, almost as distracted as my audience.
A group of parents wearing quizzical looks gathered around Porky. He scratched his head and began talking in a low tone. I listened. Everyone was listening. I heard, as well as I remember, “—a nut—some kind of gun—Ping-Pong balls—lined up bare-assed—kind of jostling and jiggling—like a row of piglets at a feeding trough—or maybe more like a row of ‘Spaldeens’—”
Porky’s audience looked toward the door of the coach’s office. I didn’t seem to havean audience anymore. “Well!” I said. “What do you say we get started?” I slapped the manual with my open hand, but no one seemed to hear me. Everyone was still looking toward the door. “Larry had had about as much as he could take of summer camp,” I read, as loudly as I could.
The door of the coach’s office opened, and Mr. Summers stuck his head out. He looked at the cluster of parents and then pulled his head back in. The parents looked at one another.
“Larry had made the mistake of becoming Camp Historian,” I went on, almost shouting.
The door of the coach’s office opened again, and the Precious Metals began filing out. They looked the way they always did after a humility session: humiliated. Their eyes were down, and they shuffled along. Mr. Summers followed, walking stiffly, his demeanor stern.
“Pervert!” called one of the mothers in the front row.
Mr. Summers twitched. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “I must have misheard you—”
“Humiliator!” cried another of the parents.
Other voices rose from the crowd, one by one, and some of the braver Tars joined in, too. Memory can be tricky, of course, but I seem to hear them calling—
“Ridiculer! Mocking your Scribe’s unwillingness to cut corners!”
And all the people assembled in the gym cried, “Shame!”
“Demeaner! Heartlessly belittling your Scribe’s conviction that there is a right way of doing things!”
And everyone cried, “Shame! Shame!”
“Treacherous instructor! Falsely counseling that good enough is good enough!”
And they all cried again, “Shame! Shame! Shame!”
—but maybe I’m wrong about that. Wishful thinking may be rewriting my memory. Maybe they were calling something else, something like:
“Prendergast!”
Another father had cried out, leaning over the railing at the base of the bleachers, shaking his fist.
Mr. Summers looked puzzled. Frankly, everyone looked pretty puzzled. “I’m not quite sure that I understand you—” he began, but the red-faced fury of the man made him close his mouth in mid-sentence, and he began inching along the wall.
Porky whispered into the ear of the red-faced man, who said, “Oh,” and frowned in embarrassment. “Sorry,” he said. “I mean, ‘Pederast!’”
Mr. Summers shook his head and said, “Now, just a minute! ”
But more voices came from the crowd—another, and another, and another. Mr. Summers turned to me. His hair was wild, his eyes were wide. He seemed to want me to tell him what was going on.
I shrugged. “I didn’t do it,” I said. “Honest.”
A murmurous bunch of parents began advancing from the bleachers. Mr. Summers took one wild look around the gymnasium and broke into a run. In a moment he was up the stairs and out the door to the parking lot. A spooky silence filled the gym for a moment.
“Well,” I said, returning to the manual and “Mutiny.” “Where was I?”
My words were lost in a wild outburst. Everyone surged toward the door through which Mr. Summers had fled—everyone, that is, but me.
In Topical Guide 234, Mark Dorset considers Shame and Shaming and Good and Evil from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
I PUT the Tars through their paces. With every moment that passed, I felt myself drawing closer to the completion of a phase of my life, a phase that I would think of thirty years later as characterized in a significant and memorable way by my involvement with the Young Tars. My excitement and happiness grew. I began to feel the pride that comes with the satisfactory completion of something, a feeling that has since become one of the sustaining emotions of my life, the feeling that makes me rub my hands together, grin, sigh, and say to myself, “At last it’s finished, and it’s perfect—well, as close to perfect as I can make it.”
I didn’t try to make my feelings show, but they influenced, inevitably, my tone of voice, my gestures, and my carriage, for I was not then any more than I am now able to keep my emotions out of my style. The message in the style I used with the Tars was as clear as the message in the style I used with Mr. Summers. Without quite understanding what I was doing, I was using style to communicate an idea, the idea that things were reaching some kind of conclusion, something like perfection, a pleasure of a yet-to-be-determined kind. The Tars saw it, understood it, and returned it. The rehearsal was shipshape. The Tars were spiffy. Our ship was coming into port.
When we had finished the rehearsal, and the last echoes of the Tars Hymn died away, I held my hands up for silence. The idea that something was up hung in the air, and I got the quiet I wanted.
“This is the time when we would usually end the rehearsal and call Mr. Summers and the Precious Metals out to start the regular part of the meeting,” I said, heart pounding, palms sweating. “But tonight I have kind of a surprise for you. You remember that I told you this would be the last version of the Tars Manual,” I said.
I held it over my head.
“Well I meant it.”
A resounding cheer.
“And now I’m going to prove it to you.”
Silence.
“I want everybody to turn to the last page in the manual.”
Flipping of pages.
“The very last page.”
When everyone had turned to the last page, I began reading.
“Wait a minute, Peter,” Porky interrupted. “Are you really going to resign now, or is this just practice?”
“I’m really going to resign now,” I said.
“Well, this may be kind of a technical point,” said Porky, “but if you’re really resigning, shouldn’t you do it in the real meeting? This is just the practice for the meeting, isn’t it?”
“Not any more,” I said, beaming, enormously grateful to Porky for playing the straight man this way. I flipped back to the beginning of the manual and read:
I looked up at Porky and grinned.
“That’s good,” he said. “That’s very good. Very, very good. I’m gonna get Mr. Summers out here,” he said, chuckling. “I’ve got to see what he thinks of this. Just wait a minute, Peter, okay?”
“If I wait, I might chicken out, Porky,” I said. “I’ve got to keep going.”
“All right,” said Porky, jumping from the bleachers and trotting across the floor, “but try to stretch it out.”
From the pocket of my bell-bottom Tars Trousers, I took my spiral-bound notebook. I flipped it open and began reading from it a revised, final version of the remarks I had first prepared months earlier. “You know,” I read, adopting a puzzled look, to indicate that the world was sometimes just too illogical, too crazy a place for me to understand, “I always thought Mr. Summers was making a mistake when he made me the Scribe.” This was received with a little uneasy chuckling. I continued in my practiced all-kidding-aside tone: “After all, I only got the job because I happened to be carrying a notebook. I won’t make that mistake again.”
I tossed my notebook over my shoulder as I had tossed the court-martial procedures. A little more uneasy chuckling.
“Now that I’m going to resign, I want you to know that, all things considered, I liked being Scribe, but I have to admit that I’ve got better things to do than change the order of the traits again—”
There was laughter at this, we-know-just-what-you-mean laughter.
After a pause, I added, “—and again—”
They roared.
After a longer pause, I said, “—and again.”
I brought down the house.
In Topical Guide 233, Mark Dorset considers Words on Paper: Their Power and Dialect, Slang, Idiolect from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
17
ON THE NIGHT of the last meeting of the Young Tars, I arrived at the school very early. Porky let me in, and we went upstairs to the office together, where I ran off copies of the manual on the mimeograph machine. Porky helped me collate and staple them, and we carried them to the gym, where Porky took a position at the door, so that he could give a copy to each Tar as he arrived. I took my position in the circle at the center of the floor. I paced nervously within the circle, taking care not to leave it.
When most of the Tars had arrived, I called for attention, and after the usual (and, according to the latest and final version of the manual, required) shushing, elbowing, and rude noises, I got it.
“I know you’re all unhappy about getting another version of the manual,” I said.
There was a rowdy uproar at this, with raspberries.
“All right, all right,” I said, holding my hands in the air to signal for quiet. “I promise you—”
I was drowned out by the groans and hoots of boys who had been made too many promises of the sort they knew they were going to hear. I laughed, and they laughed with me—well, they laughed, anyway.
“I promise you,” I shouted above them, “that this is absolutely the last Tars Manual you will ever receive.”
Wild whooping and screaming greeted this announcement.
I said, “We’re going to conduct this meeting strictly by the manual.”
I held my copy of the manual high.
“A Tar does things by the manual,” I called out.
Mr. Summers walked in just then, carrying his Ping-Pong bazooka, and made his way down the steps to the gym floor. When he was within ten feet or so of me, I saluted him. I tried to put into my salute the tone of sarcasm, of mockery, of insolence, that I had put into my saying “Aye, Sir,” the week before.
Mr. Summers returned my salute with what looked to me like a nasty glance, but I smiled.
“Precious Metals,” he called out. “I want you in the coach’s office for a humility session.” The Precious Metals scrambled down from their seats in the bleachers and waddled across the floor to the coach’s office. Mr. Summers turned to me. “Humility is something you could use a good dose of, Peter,” he said.
“Aye, Sir,” said I.
“Impudence takes many forms, Peter, as I see you’ve learned. Learn this too: Pride goeth before a fall.”
“Aye, Thir,” said I. I couldn’t resist, and I was new at this nasty game. My understanding of subtlety was not well developed.
Mr. Summers sneered. He handed me a sheet of paper. “I want this added to the manual,” he said. He paused. “Don’t rewrite the whole thing—just stick this on the end.” He twisted his mouth into a grin. “It’s the official Tars court-martial procedure,” he said.
I took the paper from him, saluted again, and said, “Sir, it’s—”
He turned and walked to the coach’s office, herded the last of the Precious Metals inside, and slammed the door.
“—too late,” I said. I crumpled the sheet of paper into a ball and tossed it over my shoulder.
In Topical Guide 232, Mark Dorset considers Words on Paper: Their Power from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Hi! It’s Candi Lee Manning, Eric Kraft’s irrepressible publicist!
I’ve been given the thankless task of informing you that there is no episode for you to read today.
The Krafts are moving, and they’re taking with them the entire population of Babbington, every character in The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy, and yours truly, along with Mr. Candi Lee (Alec “Nick” Rafter).
It’s chaos chez Kraft, let me tell you! Boxes, boxes, boxes, here, there, and everywhere.
There are going to be some gaps in the serialization.
This is one of them.
Be of good cheer. This move won’t take forever.
I hope.
As consolation, I’m sending you the Personal History theme song: “Indian Summer,” performed by Sidney Bechet:
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
The serialization of The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy is supported by its readers. I sometimes earn affiliate fees when you click through the affiliate links in a post. EK
The illustration in the banner that opens each episode is from an illustration by Stewart Rouse that first appeared on the cover of the August 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions.
www.erickraft.com
www.babbingtonpress.com
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
16
FROM EXHILARATION came inspiration. All I mean by that is that the exhilaration I felt at having stood up to Mr. Summers put me in a state of mind that encouraged the development of an idea that came to me at about the same time. Inspiration is, I think, nothing more than the name we give after the fact to the arrival of those of our ideas that turn out well. On this subject, Porky asked me not long ago, “Where the heck do our ideas come from, after all? What makes them take one form rather than another? You know how it is some days—nothing seems to go right: the computer-controlled microwave deep-fat fryers I ordered will not boil oil no matter how high I set the thermostats, and every time I try to call the manufacturer I get an answering service. My mind isn’t working any better. Every idea I get is like a cold French fry. On other days, the sun shines, life is glorious, people are lined up twelve deep outside Kap’n Klam shops all over America, and my mind leaps and darts. Even bad ideas shimmer in the sunlight like foamy wavelets, you know what I mean? But get this: the interesting ideas, the ideas that are worth pursuing, are as likely to have been dragged out of the sludge of one of those dull days as to have come gliding in on the surf of one of the brilliant ones. Now I ask you this: on which days am I inspired?”
Weeks earlier, I had been in a state of mind that had made me fear demotion, made me fear losing status in the Tars, and I had thought of resigning as a way of saving myself from worse disgrace. Now my state of mind was very different from what it had been then, and the idea had come to me that I could accomplish much more by resigning than merely making the best of a bad situation. The will to work returned because I had a reason to work. I knew what I was going to do. I was going to make the manual perfect, and when it was perfect I was going to make sure that no Scribe-come-lately could change it. I was going to carve it in stone. I was going to bring my journey as Scribe to an end.
First, I made “A Tar does things by the manual” the foremost Trait, and from there on everything fell into place, though it still took an awful lot of work. I spent every night working on the manual, trying as hard as I could to make it exactly what I wanted it to be by the next meeting, including the only one of the Tales for Tars that seemed to me anywhere near ready for the Tars to see, the one I’d found myself working on most often, the one I called “Mutiny.”
In Topical Guide 231, Mark Dorset considers “Inspiration” and Foreshadowing from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Hi! It’s Candi Lee Manning, Eric Kraft’s irrepressible publicist!
I’ve been given the thankless task of informing you that there is no episode for you to read today.
The Krafts are moving, and they’re taking with them the entire population of Babbington, every character in The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy, and yours truly, along with Mr. Candi Lee (Alec “Nick” Rafter).
It’s chaos chez Kraft, let me tell you! Boxes, boxes, boxes, here, there, and everywhere.
There are going to be some gaps in the serialization.
This is one of them.
Be of good cheer. This move won’t take forever.
I hope.
As consolation, I’m sending you the Personal History theme song: “Indian Summer,” performed by Sidney Bechet:
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
The serialization of The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy is supported by its readers. I sometimes earn affiliate fees when you click through the affiliate links in a post. EK
The illustration in the banner that opens each episode is from an illustration by Stewart Rouse that first appeared on the cover of the August 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions.
www.erickraft.com
www.babbingtonpress.com
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
“MR. SUMMERS,” I asked, after the meeting ended, “what happened to Robby? Did he do something wrong?”
“Yes, Peter, he did,” said Mr. Summers, in a voice with the timbre that I’ve long recognized as exactly right for grave pronouncements, one that I’ve often wished I could produce when a situation warrants it, as more and more situations have since I’ve assumed the responsibilities of an adult and, therefore, have required more and more often the services of lawyers and plumbers, professionals who are alike in practicing a mystery in the manner of medieval guildsmen, guarding jealously the tricks of their trade, and charging the client for every second of their time, including time spent correcting their own mistakes. That grave voice combines the voices of the bassoon and cello, and there are times when only that voice will do, as, for instance, when I’m forced to say, “Albertine, I’m afraid we’re going to have to sue the plumber.”
“What did Robby do?” I asked. I had been puzzled by this question throughout the meeting, because the manual didn’t specify any rules that Robby might have broken. Most of the manual was, in fact, given over to the procedures for the meetings, and since Robby’s offense had been committed outside the meeting, in one of the humility sessions, it couldn’t have had anything to do with those procedures. The only other section of the manual that might be construed as a set of rules or laws, it seemed to me, was the list of Tars Traits. “Did he violate one of the traits?” I asked. Then, exhibiting a trait of my own, one that has become more prominent over the years, I attempted a little humor to camouflage the gravity of the situation, as my mother used to add a spoonful of sugar to her spaghetti sauce to diminish the bitterness she found in the taste of tomatoes. “Did he refuse to roll with the swells?” I asked, grinning.
Mr. Summers’s eyes widened. His nostrils flared. His jaw muscles rippled. The veins in his neck stood out. His face reddened. After a long and terrible silence, he said, in a voice made tense by his effort to control it, “What do you mean by that, Peter?”
“I just—I—I didn’t really mean anything—I was just making a joke,” I said.
“Making a joke. Oh, yes. You’re quite the humorist, aren’t you? You weren’t just ‘making a joke,’ Peter. You were being sarcastic, weren’t you?” he said, accusing, not asking. The veins in his neck were more swollen, his face redder.
“Sarcastic?” I asked, shaken.
“Yes,” he said, “sarcastic. It seems to me that often, much too often, there’s a hidden meaning in what you say.”
“I don’t know what you—”
“Oh, yes, you do. Oh, yes, you do know,” he said at once. “You know very well what I mean, Peter. Are you going to tell me you don’t remember the way you said that you and your mother put covers on the manual to try to make it thicker? Hmm? Do you think I don’t know that you were mocking me when you said it would help make the meetings run smoother if the Tars knew what to do before we asked them to do it? Ha!”
The way Mr. Summers was treating me baffled, hurt, and angered me. I knew that I would begin to cry if I didn’t get a grip on myself somehow. “Mr. Summers,” I began, “I—”
“Don’t ‘Mr. Summers’ me that way,” he said, twisting the left side of his mouth in a sneer. “I know what you mean by that. ‘Mr. Summers. Mr. Summers.’ I know what you mean. I know what you mean when you say, ‘Aye, sir,’ too. ‘Aye, sir. Aye, sir.’ It’s all in the way you say it. You’re saying you think there’s something wrong with me. You’re questioning my leadership. You think I don’t know what you think, but I do. I know just what you think—you think you’re pretty smart, that’s what you think. You think you’re a lot smarter than everyone else, don’t you, Peter?”
I was still baffled and hurt, but now anger had taken the upper hand, had taken a firm grip on me, a grip like that of an instructor, say a tennis instructor, who grips one’s arm and pushes it firmly in a direction it does not really want to go. Anger gripped me and pushed me in a direction I didn’t really want to go, pushed me past one of the milestones on the road from childhood to adulthood. In an instant of bitter recognition (which, in memory, resembles heartburn) I saw that Mr. Summers had perverted the relationship that should have existed between us, that he was using his status as an adult, an adult in a position that was supposed to command my obedience and respect, to hurt me, make me feel small, insignificant, and wrong for being what I was. However, some sweet came with the bitter. Mr. Summers’s anger had taught me that I could fight back with humor.
“Aye, sir,” I said. Mr. Summers’s head really seemed about to explode. A wonderful calm came over me. I looked Mr. Summers in the eye, and, drawing on whatever gland it is that secretes chutzpah, I grinned.
“Nobody likes a wise guy, Peter,” he said, his lips trembling. “A Tar does not act like a wise guy.”
“I’ll add that to the traits,” I said.
Instantly, all the blood drained from Mr. Summers’s face. It was, for me, an exhilarating sight. Whatever else might happen, the blanching of Mr. Summers marked a victory, a small victory certainly, one likely to be reversed by a punitive counterattack, but a victory never to be forgotten.
In Topical Guide 230, Mark Dorset considers Humor as a Weapon from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
15
ON MY HONOR as a former Tar, I swear that I will not shirk from shouldering whatever share of the responsibility for the downfall of the Tars I should shoulder. A Tar stands tall, after all, and doesn’t pass the buck. However, I’m not going to be reticent about Mr. Summers’s part in the collapse, either. After all, a Tar is nobody’s patsy and doesn’t get stuck holding the bag.
Pledged as I now am to a full, fair, and frank disclosure, I’m forced to say that Mr. Summers deserves all the blame, since even the blame for my small mutiny must ultimately be laid at his feet.
I WAS NOT the only Tar who decided that he had had just about enough when Mr. Summers introduced the metallic ranks. The original Tars ranks ran from Commodore at the top down through Admiral, Captain, Lieutenant, Ensign, Petty Officer, Seaman, and Bayman, to Swabby at the bottom. When Mr. Summers introduced the notion that a Tar could be “of the First Water” within his rank, none of us minded. It gave us something new to shoot for. A kid who couldn’t meet—or even keep track of—the shifting requirements for advancing from, say, Petty Officer to Ensign could at least aspire to becoming a Petty Officer of the First Water. From my vantage in front of the Tars during the rehearsal period, watching when they took the floor by rank, I may have been the only person other than Mr. Summers and Robby who noticed (and I doubt that Robby noticed much of anything, come to think of it) that only a heavier-than-average Tar ever advanced into the upper ranks, and that within each rank only the chubbiest were ever recognized as being of the first water.
Then Mr. Summers introduced a parallel ranking of metals, from Gold at the top down through Silver, Platinum, Copper, Aluminum, Iron, Lead, and Zinc, to Tin at the bottom, which could be added, he claimed, to any of the regular Tars ranks and even combined with “of the First Water.” There was some grumbling at first over the confusion introduced along with the new ranks, but this subsided after a while, after we had tried the sound of some of the names of metals with the ranks we bore and found that they had a nice ring to them. Some were especially plangent. I was taken with the sound of “Aluminum Commodore of the First Water Leroy,” and I immediately aspired to it.
Soon, however, I saw the truth. The metallic ranks merely reinforced the policy of fat favoritism I’d seen in the basic ranks. No lowly, skinny Swabby ever became a Gold or Silver Swabby; none ever got beyond Lead, and there were lots of thin Tins. No exalted, overstuffed Commodore or Admiral was ranked lower than Aluminum. Mr. Summers referred to Tars of the topmost ranks as the Precious Metals, and during rehearsals he skimmed these boys, the shortest and fattest of the Tars, from the ranks at large, and, shouldering his Ping-Pong bazooka, marched them off to the coach’s office for private instruction in leadership, navigation, esprit de corps, and humility.
The beginning of the end, that important point in any history, a point apparent only in retrospect, came when something occurred that was simply mystifying at first: just as I was about to begin the rehearsal one Thursday night, the door of the coach’s office opened and Robby Haskins walked out, silent and glassy-eyed. He walked across the floor and into the bleachers. He sat there among the rest of the Tars. Mr. Summers said nothing when he emerged with the Precious Metals, but it was clear to all of us that for some reason Robby had been demoted in fact if not in rank. He took the floor with the Swabbies. Though he still wore the uniform of a Commodore, it hung on him like a hand-me-down from an older, fatter brother.
Others of the Precious Metals took over Robby’s duties. When Mr. Summers took to the floor at the beginning of a meeting now, he was surrounded by a swarm of short, fat Tars. He had one short, fat Tar to carry his note cards, another to hold the box of medals and pins that he was going to award, another to carry his ballpoint pen, and so on.
Later, at the trial, Mr. Summers asserted that he had established the Precious Metals as an experiment, because he’d seen that a system of ranks and privileges gave him a means for gaining the undivided attention of boys who, when they sat in his science classroom, often stared out the windows for long periods of time and paid no attention to him at all. He had, he claimed, developed a theory that he could, by using a hierarchy like that of the Tars as a system of rewards and punishments, accomplish something that he had begun to despair of ever accomplishing inside his science classroom: actually teaching something that the children in his charge would remember. To test it on a small scale, he had chosen a group of Tars by weight and set out to teach them humility. He had, he said, tried to explain his theory and methods to some of the other teachers, but they had pooh-poohed it. Several had, he complained, not merely ridiculed his ideas, but had suggested to him, with leers and chuckles, that his theory was nothing but a pederast’s cloak.
In Topical Guide 229, Mark Dorset considers Education: Role of Rewards and Punishments in from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
14
I GREW DEPRESSED. I lost the will to work. I wanted to grab that moving finger and say, “Hold it a minute. Don’t be in such a hurry. There are some messes to be cleaned up before you go rushing on,” but it seemed to be impossible. What was the sense of working on the manual if it would never be what I wanted it to be, would never be perfect, would never reach a point where I could say, “Okay, that’s it! That’s just the way it should be. Now let’s not change anything.” We perfectionists are reluctant to let go of our projects while we see in them the slightest flaw, but if we do pronounce a thing finished at last, we expect it to endure forever, immutably perfect. When the garden is at last laid out and planted just right, we never want to see any weeds. When the fence is completed, we never want to see any rot. When we get the Tars Manual just right, we never want to see another revised edition.
I couldn’t eat. I lost weight at an alarming rate. My parents tried to get me to eat by making meals that appealed to me (scalloped potatoes with ham were a favorite then, but they tasted like paste), or by pushing snacks on me (especially sandwiches made with cream cheese and grape jelly). They also tried to “get my mind off my work.”
Getting one’s mind off one’s work was, in my family, regarded as absolutely essential to mental—and even physical—health. (In later life, I’ve more often felt just the opposite, and have used work as a way of getting my mind off, say, plumbing problems, or taxes, or the barking of the poor dog that, when Albertine and I lived elsewhere, before we moved to the splendid quiet of Small’s Island, some neighbors of ours bought for their children, in an apparent effort to demonstrate how long a dog could be made to bark by leaving it tied on a short tether without food, water, or affection.) In my family, the most desirable way of getting one’s mind off one’s work was to take a vacation, but the most convenient one was to watch television.
“Peter,” said my mother, and I started as if someone had thrown a rock through my window. I hadn’t heard her come up the stairs or come into my room. There she was, beside me, with her hand on my shoulder. “My goodness, Peter,” she said. “You’re a nervous wreck. Didn’t you even hear me come in?”
“No,” I said. “I—I—was trying to work on the—well—on the manual—or—I don’t know—anything.”
“Oh, Peter,” said my mother. “This is terrible. You’re worrying too much about this work. You’ll give yourself the collywobbles.”
“I will?” I asked.
“Of course you will. Now you just set that aside for the rest of the night and come on downstairs and watch television with us. You can make some popcorn, and we’ll watch a show, and you’ll get your mind off your work. ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,’ remember.”
I followed my mother downstairs. My father was sitting in his favorite chair, drinking a beer and watching a comedian, a rubber-faced guy with a crewcut and heavy, black-rimmed glasses, teeter atop a wobbly ladder, holding a bucket of sloshing paint and a dripping brush. I smiled. It was good to be reminded that things could be worse.
I went into the kitchen. From a cupboard I took a package of the popcorn favored in my family at that time, a kind that came in a plastic pouch that was divided vertically into two rectangular pockets. The smaller of these pockets, the one on the right side of the package, held a rectangle of solidified vegetable fat that resembled an elongated bar of soap. The other pocket held just the right amount of popcorn for a family a little larger than ours. I tore open the section that held the fat, and, squeezing from the bottom, ejected the bar from the package into the largest pot from my mother’s set of waterless cookware. I cut off a quarter of a stick of butter, peeled the wax paper from it, and put the butter into a saucepan over a low flame to melt. When the fat began to smoke, I tore open the section that held the popcorn and poured the kernels in. I covered the pot and shook it vigorously until the kernels had nearly stopped popping. I removed the lid then, so that I could watch while the popping of the last tardy kernels made the mass of popcorn rise and fall as if it were breathing, heaving a sigh. I poured the popcorn into a gray earthenware bowl with a pale blue line around the lip. I drizzled the butter over the top in figure eights. I shook salt onto the popcorn from the kitchen salt shaker, part of a ceramic salt-and-pepper set shaped like ears of corn. I had won them at a carnival. I carried the bowl into the living room and put it on the coffee table, a pine table supposed to imitate a cobbler’s bench of colonial times. I sat on the floor beside it and watched, without real interest, while the guy with the crewcut and a woman with a wide mouth and a loud voice tried, with clownish ineptitude, to put floral wallpaper onto the walls of a set that represented a living room similar to ours.
My mother put her hand on my head and stroked my hair. “You mustn’t let little things bother you so much,” she said. “Why, when you’re grown up you probably won’t even remember any of this.”
In Topical Guide 228, Mark Dorset considers Real Reality versus Fictional Reality and Memorious Ones: Peter Leroy, Ireneo Funes, Chris Rea from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
13
“PETER,” called my father from the foot of the stairs. “What are you working on? Homework?”
“No,” I said. “I finished my homework.”
“Are you working on the Tars Manual?”
“No,” I said. “I’ve got that finished too. I’m working on the log.”
“The log? What do you mean?”
“Well,” I said, aware that what I was doing could be considered ridiculous, was likely to be considered ridiculous by anyone I knew, and was certain to be considered ridiculous by my father, “I’m—um—trying to make it a little—better.”
“Better?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Whenever I look back at the early meetings, I see a lot of places where things could have gone better, and I remember things I left out, and I think of things that would have made the meeting smoother or more fun, and the rules have changed a lot since the early meetings, so—”
“Peter,” called my father, “wait a minute, wait a minute.” He began walking up the stairs. “Do you mean to say that you’re changing the log?”
“Well,” I said, made wary by his tone, “yes.”
“You can’t do that,” he said. He stood behind me, looking over my shoulder at the work on my desk. He reached over me and picked up the spiral-bound notebook in which I was writing a revised version of the log. “Peter,” he said, exasperation and surprise driving the anger from him, “you just can’t do this. A log is—well—it’s something sacred, it’s like history. It is history. You can’t rewrite history, can you?”
I didn’t say anything. I just sat there, looking at my desk top, letting my eyes drift out of focus.
“Of course you can’t,” he said. “It’s wrong. It’s—well—it’s just wrong. You know what the poet says, don’t you?” I didn’t answer. “Well?” asked my father. He poked me on the shoulder. “Do you?”
For a moment I thought of saying, “Every day, in every way, we’re getting better and better,” but decided against it. “I guess not,” I said.
“‘The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on,’” he said. “That’s what the poet says.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I have heard that.”
In Topical Guide 227, Mark Dorset considers Self-Improvement from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
11
AT THE NEXT MEETING, I began to see a pattern, a structure, developing. A Tars meeting had three parts: a rehearsal, the meeting itself, and free time.
The rehearsal was, all things considered, my favorite part of the meeting. One might contend that the rehearsal wasn’t really part of the meeting at all, but I would disagree. I think that the rehearsal period stood in relation to the meeting as a preface stands in relation to the work that follows it or as an hors d’oeuvre stands to the meal that follows it. What is the nature of the prefatory relationship? The preface stands apart from the work, hors d’oeuvre, but is related to the work, since it prepares the mind for the work, and the two together—the work and the preface to it—are components of a larger work: the volume in which they both appear. The hors d’oeuvre stands apart from the meal, but is related to the meal, since it prepares the palate for the meal, and the two together—the meal and the hors d’oeuvre—are components of a larger work: the evening’s dining tout compris. The rehearsal period became an important part of the Thursday evenings that were given over to the Tars. I liked the rehearsal because I led the Tars then. They looked to me for guidance since I was the only person in the old gymnasium who had an up-to-the-minute copy of the manual. I was the only one who knew the latest revision of the oath, the only one who knew on any given evening how many traits there were and what their relative importance was. I was the only one who knew the latest system of ranks and privileges. I was often the only one who knew what rank a given Tar held from one Thursday to the next.
While Mr. Summers had the highest-ranking Tars in the coach’s office for their humility session, I kept the other Tars hopping, running through new maneuvers, reciting new rigmaroles, and, above all, polishing and polishing the stable elements. I wish I could say that the rest of the Tars enjoyed this part of the evening as much as I did. They groaned and moaned and hooted and howled each time I handed out a new version of the manual. Since Mr. Summers was moving on while I was trying to perfect the past, he was always a step ahead of me, and at the end of the rehearsal I often had to announce that most of what the Tars had just practiced would be changed next week. I began to worry about a mutiny.
“Next week,” I said, one Thursday, “I’m going to collect your old manuals and give you a brand-new manual with some exciting new changes in it.” Grumbling, groaning, hooting, howling.
“But listen,” I said, impulsively, optimistically. “There’s going to be something special in it. A whole new section called ‘Tales for Tars.’”
I can’t say that this made them any happier, but I can say that it made me miserable. For weeks thereafter I tried to get even one of the tales into a condition that I would consider ready for the Tars to read. I couldn’t seem to do it. Mr. Summers got wind of my promise and began asking about it every week.
“Not ready yet?” he might say. “That’s too bad. You’re not trying to make it too perfect, are you Peter? Remember that a Tar knows when to say ‘good enough.’”
“Aye, sir,” I said.
To the Tars as a group, he said, “I hope that all of you will remember that. I’m sure you’ve probably heard your parents say something like, ‘Anything worth doing is worth doing well.’”
Indeed I had—not my parents, but Guppa. I remembered him in his cellar, raising the last coil he had had to wind for the radio he was building me, and saying, “If you’re not ready to do what has to be done the way it should be done, then you’re not ready to do it at all.”
“Well,” said Mr. Summers, “I certainly don’t want to suggest for a moment that your parents don’t know what they’re talking about. No, sir. A Tar always keeps his ears open when his parents are talking. However, a Tar takes what he hears with a grain of salt. A Tar knows that sometimes good enough is good enough.”
This sounded a lot like my father, who had told me that one of the big lessons in life was “knowing when to quit.”
Mr. Summers looked at me, and he said, “A Tar knows that nobody’s perfect, that perfection is an unattainable goal, and that although he pursues perfection, he will never reach it any more than he will reach the horizon on the vasty sea. He knows that anything he tries to do will fall short of the ideal, and, knowing that, he knows when to quit. He knows when to say, ‘Ahhhh, the heck with it. Nobody else will notice.’”
In Topical Guide 225, Mark Dorset considers Prefaces from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
10
ANOTHER ASIDE. I was surprised and, I must admit, annoyed, to discover, as I described my guilty feelings about working on the “Tales for Tars,” deceiving my father by disguising work I wanted to do as work I had to do, how little my attitude toward work that brings pleasure has changed. I still feel guilty when I’m doing such work, still feel that if I’m having a good time I must not be working hard enough, still feel that work that brings pleasure can’t be real work. One of the most persistent and pernicious of the wrong ideas I learned in school, an idea reinforced by my father’s attitude toward his work at the gas station, and by his attitude toward the avocations my grandfathers pursued—Guppa’s tinkering, Big Grandfather’s boatbuilding—was the idea that work, real work, was not a pleasure. One might derive a little backhanded pleasure from seeing a job done at last (pleasure of the I-keep-hitting-myself-on-the-head-because-it-feels-so-good-when-I-stop variety, the kind of pleasure celebrated in beer commercials: “Hey, you made it through another day on that lousy job! It’s time to pop open a frosty Lethe and forget the whole dirty business!”), but, according to my father and to many of my teachers (I exclude half a dozen magnificent ones), the pleasure didn’t come from the work itself. I’m sorry that they never knew what pleasure comes from working well, that when you’re working as well as you can you’re inclined to giggle, and that when you find yourself, once in a rare while, working better than you ever thought you could, the feeling is so euphoric that a tingle runs across your back and you have a suspicion that you might be growing wings.
In Topical Guide 224, Mark Dorset considers Eureka Moments and Work and Play from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
9
“PETER!” my father called from the foot of the stairs. “What are you doing up there?”
His voice startled me, and I reacted like a guilty party. I pushed aside the paper I was writing on, covered it with my science book, grabbed some other pages of the Tars Manual, and spread them in front of me.
Then I recovered. I reminded myself that I had, at least technically, been doing something of which my father approved. I had been working on the Tars Manual. “I’m working on the manual,” I said. There was, however, a tremor in my voice. I hoped my father wouldn’t notice it.
“Are you really, Peter?” he asked. He must have noticed the tremor.
“Yeah,” I said. “I am.” I decided to take the big step, to see whether my father would accept the reasoning that I had accepted, whether he would legitimize what I was doing. “I’m working on a whole new section. It’s called ‘Tales for Tars.’”
“‘Tales for Tars’?” asked my father. I heard a note of suspicion in his voice.
“That’s right,” I said. I let a long sigh escape me and rubbed my temples as if I had a headache. “This is going to be a section of stories that Tars can read at night, when they’re off watch and hanging around on the afterdeck or lying in their bunks. It’s a lot of work, though, and it’s giving me a headache.” I was using a tone and style that I’d learned from my mother. She used it on the telephone, when she was describing one of the tasks she particularly disliked—cleaning the oven, defrosting the refrigerator, bringing the fall clothes out of the storage closets under the eaves in the attic—and even though she was talking on the telephone, she would include the gesture of rubbing her temples, bringing her right hand to her forehead, masking her eyes, so that she could rub her right temple with her thumb and her left with her middle finger.
“Well, Peter,” said my father (and from the note of sympathy that I could hear beneath the sternness on the surface I knew that I’d been successful, that he’d accepted my writing “Tales for Tars” as a legitimate part of my working on the manual), “sometimes you have to just grin and bear it. I remember when I was on the baseball team, in high school—”
My father went on to describe for me the pain he’d felt when he’d had to run laps and his annoyance, even anger, when the coach demanded, as he always did, one more lap. I listened with a guilty pleasure, because the tales I was writing for the Tars were, of course, about Larry Peters, and the headache I felt was of a different order from the one I got when I had to reorder the Tars Traits, or rewrite the procedure for the Tars meetings.
In Topical Guide 223, Mark Dorset considers Deception; Writing: Difficulty of, Headaches Caused by; and Persistence from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
I SPENT A WHILE teaching the remaining Tars the salute that I had worked out in the evenings, in my room, in front of my mirror, late at night.
When I had first tried saluting, what I saw in the mirror disappointed me, even after an hour of practice, even though I could deliver a crisp salute that seemed to me nearly as good as those I saw delivered by drill teams in the parades for Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, the Clam Fest, and Labor Day. I was disappointed because my salute was nearly as good as theirs, but not as good. I wasn’t sure why my salute fell short of the drill-team ideal, but I could see that it did.
When I tried the salute on my parents and asked them what was wrong, they were no help at all. My father beamed at the sight of me in my uniform, saluting. “Smart!” he said. “Very smart. You’ve got just the right snap there, Peter.”
“But what’s wrong?” I asked. “Something’s wrong, but I don’t know what it is.”
“Why, I don’t think anything’s wrong at all, Peter,” said my mother. “I think you look very dashing. Doesn’t he, Bert?”
“Well,” said my father, chuckling, “I wouldn’t use that word, but I know what you mean, and I’d say you’re right.” He gave me a grin and wink that meant, between men in those days, “Women sure are a funny bunch, but where would we be without them?”
“Why wouldn’t you use the word dashing?” asked my mother.
“Well,” said my father, “it’s not a word I would use, that’s all. I wouldn’t say about a guy, ‘He looks dashing.’ It would sound stupid for me to say something like that.”
“What would you say?” asked my mother.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said my father. “I’d—oh—I don’t know, I probably wouldn’t say anything. Come on, Ella, don’t make an issue out of this.”
“I think he looks dashing,” said my mother. She spun around and walked into the kitchen.
My father snorted, dropped into his chair, and picked up his paper. “There’s nothing wrong with the salute, Peter,” he said. “It’s—”
We looked at each other for a moment.
“It’s okay,” he said, and raised his newspaper.
I went upstairs, saluted in front of the mirror, and went to work, modifying the salute until I was happier with it. In the process, I learned three new lessons.
First, I learned that no one close to me, certainly not my parents, could give me an honest appraisal of anything I did.
Second, I learned that by sufficiently deviating from the norm, one can hide the shortcomings of what one does, for a time, by claiming to be working in a new area entirely. As an immediate consequence of this lesson, I developed a Tars salute, a salute sui generis, a salute outside the standards by which a drill team’s salute would be judged.
Third, I learned that if I got away with the Tars salute, if I was capable of hiding the deficiencies in what I did by appearing to be doing something outside conventional forms, outside conventional criticism, then the real truth of the matter was that no one could give me an honest appraisal of anything I did but myself.
“LET’S TRY IT just once more,” I called out to the Tars in the bleachers. “Right arm straight out to the side. I want you to fling that arm out smartly. Now bend at the elbow and bring your hand forward in a nice smooth arc. Slowly, slowwwwwly. Keep your fingers extended; keep your palm parallel to the floor. Then right in here, everybody do any old thing you want, anything at all. That’s it. Okay, now bring your hand in to the shoulder, that’s it, now whip that forearm up! You’ve got to stop, bang, at forty-five degrees. Now zoom your fingers to your forehead, like a rocket! Let’s try it once more.”
The Tars of the First Water emerged from the coach’s office and shuffled into their positions in the ranks. “That’s all the practice we have time for, Peter,” said Mr. Summers. “We’ve got to start the meeting.”
“Oh,” I said. “Do you think we really have to? Maybe we should just spend this week practicing, and then we could have a perfect meeting next week.”
“No, Peter,” said Mr. Summers. “We have to start the meeting now.”
“Aye, sir,” I said. To the Tars, I called out, “That’s all the time we have for practice tonight. We have to start the meeting. But practice at home during the week, okay? And keep this in mind: ‘Every day—’”
“Peter.”
“Aye, sir. Now, Tars, you remember how the meeting starts. Robby’s going to call you to the floor by rank just the same way we did it last week. Why don’t you just pretend that you’re hanging around and talking the way you were last week, and then as Robby calls your rank, you take to the floor. Good luck.”
I stepped aside, and I was surprised and pleased to see that the Tars took my suggestion quite literally. Not only did they pretend to be chatting and otherwise killing time while waiting for the meeting to begin, but their pretending took the form of duplicating the chats and the forms of killing time that they had employed the previous week. This week, though, they made a much better job of it. They were more polished. Their laughter was more ebullient, their pranks were more boisterous, their confidential whispers were more mysterious, their games were more competitive. We were getting somewhere.
In Topical Guide 222, Mark Dorset considers Young People: Their Revolt Against Institutions, Their Readiness for Everything that Is Heroic, for Martyrdom or Crime, Their Fiery Earnestness, Their Instability and Life Lessons from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
WHEN the Tars began arriving, quite a few of the parents who had driven them to the school came into the gym and took seats in the bleachers. Apparently they had decided that if the meeting was only going to last for thirteen minutes they might as well wait until it was over instead of going home and coming back.
“Attention!” I called out. “I want to talk to all the Tars before the meeting begins. Please! May I have your attention, all you Tars?”
Gradually, the Tars and their parents stopped talking and turned their attention to me.
“Thanks,” I said. “This won’t take long. I just want to go through the meeting procedure with you before we actually start the meeting. I think things will go a lot more smoothly if we all know what we’re supposed to do before we start doing it.”
Laughter. Behind me, Mr. Summers cleared his throat.
I cleared mine, too, and said, “I’ve been working on the Tars Manual all week—”
“Oh, that reminds me, Peter,” said Mr. Summers. “I’ve got some more notes for you. Things to add.”
I turned to look at Mr. Summers. “Things to add?” I said.
“Nothing really important, just part of the development of the Tars,” he said. “You have to learn to take these developments in your stride, Peter. You can’t just sit in the sand like a clam. You’ve got to move on—”
“Like the moving finger.”
He gave me another of those squints. “Yes,” he said. “You could say that.”
He stepped forward and addressed the Tars and parents in a raised voice.
“We all have to learn to leave the past in our wake, to move on, to go where the wind blows us, and roll with the swells. I’d like to say a few words about that before Peter continues. Many of you are in my science classes, so I know that you’ve seen that wonderful film of bean plants growing.”
All of us had. In the fifth and sixth grades, we left our ordinary classrooms for instruction in certain subjects that, I suppose, required talents ordinary teachers did not possess; these included music, art, and science. Everyone, at one time or another, saw the film that Mr. Summers was referring to; it was one of the attractions of elementary science instruction, along with the model volcano that actually erupted and the frank and baffling description of reproduction among bivalves. The bean-plant film had been made by photographing a pair of bean plants at one-hour intervals. The plants sprouted, grew, flowered, and bore beans in a few minutes, dancing jerkily to the ragged rhythms of short-lived phenomena, such as shifts of light and wind.
“You know how those bean plants move this way and that way,” Mr. Summers said, bobbing and weaving in demonstration. “They don’t know where they’re going, but they keep growing! Well, that’s the way it’s going to be for us Tars. We may lean off to the side sometimes.”
He leaned to the side; many of the Tars leaned in a similar manner.
“We may be knocked around by the winds of change.”
He reeled as if buffeted by wind; most of the Tars reeled along with him, and a couple of the parents rolled their shoulders sympathetically.
“We may wander a bit, like a ship without a compass.”
He took a few steps in the manner of a drunk trying to walk a line; there was some movement of Tars toward the floor, presumably to try walking in that manner. I held my hands up to stop them, and they obeyed, reluctantly.
“But we keep growing, like those bean plants! We keep growing and we keep going! That’s what the Tars’ Motto means!” he said.
I cleared my throat. He snapped his head around to give me a keep-your-mouth-shut look.
“—we’re growing, and we’re going! Onward, ever onward!’”
“Ye gods,” I said, under my breath, in just the way my grandmother did when something struck her as too illogical and wacky to understand.
Mr. Summers stood silently for a moment, breathing deeply. Droplets of sweat glistened on his forehead. “Tars of the First Water,” he said at last, “into the coach’s office. Humility session.” They waddled off, and Mr. Summers shouldered his bazooka. “All right, Peter,” he said as he turned to go, “get on with the meeting.”
In Topical Guide 221, Mark Dorset considers Photography: Time-Lapse from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Hi! It’s Candi Lee Manning, Eric Kraft’s irrepressible publicist!
I’ve been given the thankless task of informing you that there is no episode for you to read today.
The Krafts are moving, and they’re taking with them the entire population of Babbington, every character in The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy, and yours truly, along with Mr. Candi Lee (Alec “Nick” Rafter).
It’s chaos chez Kraft, let me tell you! Boxes, boxes, boxes, here, there, and everywhere.
There are going to be some gaps in the serialization.
This is one of them.
Be of good cheer. This move won’t take forever.
I hope.
As consolation, I’m sending you the Personal History theme song: “Indian Summer,” performed by Sidney Bechet:
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
The serialization of The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy is supported by its readers. I sometimes earn affiliate fees when you click through the affiliate links in a post. EK
The illustration in the banner that opens each episode is from an illustration by Stewart Rouse that first appeared on the cover of the August 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions.
www.erickraft.com
www.babbingtonpress.com
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
TODAY, nearly thirty years later, I know just how right Porky was. I am a perfectionist, and my quest for perfection has been the source of some of my happiest productions, some of my worst headaches, and a certain gurgling racket in my stomach that is, I suppose, the flourish announcing an incipient ulcer.
Perfectionism is, according to my old friend Mark Dorset, a characteristic of one of the two basic styles of human endeavor. These styles are, according to Mark, “movin’ on” and “stayin’ put.” Mark ought to know, I suppose. He has been trying for most of his adult life to describe how, and figure out why, people do the things they do. (Perhaps you have in your library How Come You Do the Things You Do?—the book derived from Mark’s public television series of the same name, an analytical tour de force that rambles across a vast range of human endeavor, from cathedral-building to bartending; or perhaps you have on your coffee table Wit, Grace, and Style: Recognizing the Best of Human Endeavor from Its Artifacts, a book filled with beautiful photographs and epigrammatic snippets of text, now in its fourth revised edition, which, employed as a coffee-table object, is as important an element in modern interior decorating as Picasso’s drawing of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.)
Mr. Summers carried the movin’ on style to the point of drifting. Obviously, I work in the stayin’ put style. Here I am, still in Babbington, trying to maintain a crumbling building against decay, against time, still rowing the waters of Bolotomy Bay that I rowed when I was a boy, still walking the streets I walked as a boy, retracing my steps in my memory, still in love with the woman I fell in love with when I was sixteen. Those who stay put, Mark says, are usually perfectionists. We’re the ones who will hold on to a leaky old boat in the belief that someday we’ll get the old tub fixed up just the way she ought to be. We’re the ones who would gladly spend the second half of life in leisurely reconsideration of the first. We like our journeys short. We prefer having the end in sight when we set out, and that keeps us close to home and makes us shy of fog. We often have only one really big idea in an entire lifetime; if it arrives early, we’re likely to spend a lifetime working on it, trying to get it right, trying to fill in all the details, fill every gap, stuff every crack. This idea may come to define us so completely that we are able to work up numberless metaphorical variations on it, find that it reaches every nook and cranny of our life as the KlamKleen dust did, find that it flavors the whole of ourselves, as the flavor of clam appears in every spoonful of a good clam chowder, find that we try to incorporate every experience in the expression of this idea, as a clam (a paragon of stayin’ put behavior if there ever was one) draws into its siphon just about anything that will fit and tries to turn it into clam, a form of being that must seem, to a clam, perfection itself.
WHEN MR. SUMMERS ARRIVED, I explained that I wanted to run through the new procedures with the Tars before the actual meeting began.
“I think it would help make the meeting run smoother if they knew what to do before we asked them to do it,” I said.
Mr. Summers looked down at me and squinted, in a manner that was becoming familiar, examining my expression for any sign of humorous intent.
“You do understand that the first meeting was, well, just the first meeting, don’t you?” he asked. “We had to start somewhere.”
“Aye, sir,” I said. “I know that, but I want the meeting to be perfect.” I stood a little straighter and said with new pride: “I’m a perfectionist.”
“Well, Peter,” said Mr. Summers. “Perfection is something we poor mortals shall never see, I’m afraid.”
“But,” I said, “I figure that if we just try to make each meeting a little better—”
“Oh, no,” he said. “Not that. Not ‘Every day, in every way.’”
“‘Every day, in every way’?” I said.
“Yes,” said Mr. Summers.
“‘Every day, in every way’ what?” I asked.
Another of those squints.
“‘We’re getting better and better,’” said Mr. Summers.
“That’s the idea!” I said.
He twitched, then shuddered as if he had been hit by a Ping-Pong ball from a toy bazooka gun.
“That was my father’s motto,” he said. “He used to say it when he came to the breakfast table in the morning. He’d pound himself on the chest or pound me on the shoulder or squeeze my mother—she was quite a plump armful, my mother—and he’d say, ‘Every day, in every way, we’re getting better and better.’”
“Maybe we should use it as the Tars motto,” I said. “What do you think?”
“I thought the motto was ‘Onward, ever onward.’”
“Oh, sure. But I can just rewrite that part and then retype it all and it will look just as if that was always—”
“No, Peter,” said Mr. Summers. “You know what the poet says, don’t you?”
“Well—” I said, unsure which of the poet’s sayings Mr. Summers might have in mind. “The poet” was a device my father sometimes used, so I recognized it at once. “The poet” might not be a poet at all. My father’s saying, “You know what the poet says, don’t you?” was a way of introducing something he didn’t want to be quoted as having said, like “Don’t fart into a tailwind,” or something the author of which he didn’t know.
“‘The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on,’” Mr. Summers said. “‘Nor all your piety nor wit can lure it back to cancel half a line.’ That’s what the poet says.”
“Well, it’s really not that hard,” I said. “It’s a nuisance, but—”
“No, Peter,” he said.
“But it would give a Tar something to cling to in rough seas.”
“No, Peter.”
“Aye, sir.”
In Topical Guide 220, Mark Dorset considers Projects: The Quest for Perfection in Them and Poetry: Finding Wisdom in from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Hi! It’s Candi Lee Manning, Eric Kraft’s irrepressible publicist!
I’ve been given the thankless task of informing you that there is no episode for you to read today.
The Krafts are moving, and they’re taking with them the entire population of Babbington, every character in The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy, and yours truly, along with Mr. Candi Lee (Alec “Nick” Rafter).
It’s chaos chez Kraft, let me tell you! Boxes, boxes, boxes, here, there, and everywhere.
There are going to be some gaps in the serialization.
This is one of them.
Be of good cheer. This move won’t take forever.
I hope.
As consolation, I’m sending you the Personal History theme song: “Indian Summer,” performed by Sidney Bechet:
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
The serialization of The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy is supported by its readers. I sometimes earn affiliate fees when you click through the affiliate links in a post. EK
The illustration in the banner that opens each episode is from an illustration by Stewart Rouse that first appeared on the cover of the August 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions.
www.erickraft.com
www.babbingtonpress.com
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
8
I ARRIVED at the gym well before the start of the next meeting. The doors to the school hadn’t even been opened yet. I ran around to the boiler-room door and tapped on its wire-reinforced window with a rock to wake Mr. Griswold, the janitor, a huge bear of a man whom I never saw anywhere but in the old school, usually in the basement. Now and then, if I stayed at school late for some reason, I would see him pushing a broom along one of the hallways, pushing piles of a bright green sweeping compound that was stored in the basement in huge pressed-cardboard drums. Once, Babbington Bivalve By-products had delivered to Mr. Griswold a dozen drums of a new product, KlamKleen, that the company hoped would replace the green sweeping compound, which, I suppose, school janitors all over the country then used. KlamKleen was a white powder made from finely ground clamshells. “Another Useful By-product from One of Nature’s Most Versatile Creatures,” the slogan on the barrels proclaimed. The powder rose in choking clouds as Mr. Griswold swept, drifting on the air currents in the old building and penetrating to every nook and cranny, requiring the closing of school for a thorough vacuuming. Eleven unopened drums of KlamKleen still stood in the storage room.
To my surprise, it wasn’t Mr. Griswold who came to the door; it was Porky White.
“Hi, Porky,” I said. “How come you’re here?”
“I’m the night janitor now,” he said. “I talked Grizzly into hiring me so that he could sleep. He pays me half of what he gets paid. I’ve got to get some money together to open a restaurant.”
“I heard about that,” I said.
“Interested in investing?” he asked.
“Well,” I said, “I—”
“That’s okay, Peter,” said Porky. “I was only kidding.”
“But I’d like to invest,” I said. “I’ve never invested in anything before.”
“Thanks, Peter,” said Porky, “but, really, I was only kidding.” He paused. “You don’t really have any money to invest, do you?” he asked.
“I got a savings bond for my birthday,” I said. “Twenty-five dollars. Would that be enough?”
“It’s a deal,” said Porky. He held out his hand, and I shook it. “You’re the first official investor.”
“The first?” I said. “Wow.”
“Hey,” said Porky, “you’re pretty early, aren’t you? The meeting doesn’t start till seven-thirty.”
“I wanted to make sure that I was the first one here,” I said. “I want everything to go the way it should this time.”
“Ahhh,” Porky said, folding his arms over his stomach. “A perfectionist.”
“A perfectionist?” I asked, of myself as much as of Porky. “I guess you’re right,” I said. “I am a perfectionist, I suppose.”
In Topical Guide 219, Mark Dorset considers Investing: “Getting in on the Ground Floor” from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Hi! It’s Candi Lee Manning, Eric Kraft’s irrepressible publicist!
I’ve been given the thankless task of informing you that there is no episode for you to read today.
The Krafts are moving, and they’re taking with them the entire population of Babbington, every character in The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy, and yours truly, along with Mr. Candi Lee (Alec “Nick” Rafter).
It’s chaos chez Kraft, let me tell you! Boxes, boxes, boxes, here, there, and everywhere.
There are going to be some gaps in the serialization.
This is one of them.
Be of good cheer. This move won’t take forever.
I hope.
As consolation, I’m sending you the Personal History theme song: “Indian Summer,” performed by Sidney Bechet:
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
The serialization of The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy is supported by its readers. I sometimes earn affiliate fees when you click through the affiliate links in a post. EK
The illustration in the banner that opens each episode is from an illustration by Stewart Rouse that first appeared on the cover of the August 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions.
www.erickraft.com
www.babbingtonpress.com
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
7
DURING THE NEXT WEEK, I spent all of my spare time and much of the time that I should have spent on homework working on the manual. The source of our problems had become clear during the first meeting. Mr. Summers had many ideas about things that he wanted a Tar to do and be, and he had many ideas about things that he wanted to have happen during a Tars meeting, but his thinking on most of these topics other than the hitting-the-deck and lining-up procedures had ended with the initial idea. The manual stated that a Tar should salute a superior Tar, but didn’t specify how or when. It said that the assembled Tars should recite the Tars Oath to begin each meeting, but there was no oath. Tars were supposed to practice “skills useful in a seafaring way of life,” and “learn salty expressions and gestures,” but these were not described.
Because the manual had so many gaps, Mr. Summers spent most of the meeting nonplussed and spluttering. Whenever he wasn’t certain how to do what the manual said should be done, he would turn smartly on his heel to face me and ask crisply, “Commodore Leroy, what do we do next?” and I would say, “Well, we’ll have those procedures worked out for next week’s meeting.”
Going by the manual, we used only thirteen minutes to get through the meeting. After that, we hung around in the bleachers, ran up and down the stairs, and slid back and forth on the gym floor in our socks until our parents arrived to pick us up.
I was embarrassed for myself, for Mr. Summers, and for the Tars, and I was determined not to let this happen again. Every evening, I spent hours rewriting the manual to fill the gaps and make the necessary repairs. I couldn’t just add things at the end as Mr. Summers had told me to, but I knew it wasn’t right to disobey him, so I included as part of a description of the duties of the Scribe “to retype the manual as often as necessary so that it looks neat and finished.” Mr. Summers never noticed.
I began to see and admire in myself some of the stick-to-itiveness that I saw and admired in my grandfather, but my parents became concerned about my spending so much time alone in my room.
“Peter,” my father called up the stairs one night, “what are you doing up there?”
The suspicion in his voice was unmistakable. I almost gave him the answer that was becoming my automatic response to his calling up the stairs to ask me what I was doing: “Nothing.” More and more of my pursuits in the time after dinner were becoming private. My room had become a sanctum, where privacy was defended by secrecy. This was my island. My parents already resented the isolation I was establishing for myself, already suspected me of spending my solitary time in unhealthy, illegal, or useless pursuits. “Nothing,” as an answer wasn’t enough to satisfy my father, although he wouldn’t have been satisfied by most of the truthful answers either. He didn’t want me to write Larry Peters stories or even to think about writing Larry Peters stories. He wouldn’t have wanted me to lie on my bed daydreaming. He wouldn’t have wanted me to sit in my room with the lights out, watching the neighbors across the street, and I spent quite a bit of time doing that. Often, when I said that I was doing nothing, he would call up to me, “Well, if you’re doing nothing, then come on downstairs and watch television with your mother and me.”
“I’m working on the Tars Manual,” I called back, truthfully.
“Oh,” he said.
Was that disappointment in his voice? Perhaps. He may have been telling my mother that I was becoming a stranger in my own home, that I treated the place as a hotel, that there was no telling what sort of mischief I was getting into up there in my room for hours, that sometimes I sat there with the lights off, that he was tired of hearing that I was doing “nothing,” that he was going to get a straight answer from me or know the reason why.
“How’s it going?” he asked. There was no suggestion of disappointment now. Approval, even pride, came through clearly.
“It’s getting there,” I said, “but it’s a lot of work.”
“Well, don’t keep at it too long. You’ve got to learn when to quit.”
“Aye, sir,” I muttered.
“What did you say?” asked my father.
“I said, ‘I sure will,’” I said.
(I’ve never crawled into bed, but the verb crawled brings to mind such a good image of the utterly exhausted person, too tired to get into bed in the normal manner, too tired even to walk across the room to the bed, dragging himself across the floor like a weary lizard, that I’ve often been tempted to use it even though I don’t know from experience what crawling into bed is like. Now, I think, is the time.)
I crawled into bed. Too tired to sleep, I lay awake in the dark for a long while, my thoughts crawling through the fog of my tired mind, bumping now and then into a figment of my imagination. Just before I fell asleep I came upon an idea, another important lesson from the Tars, the idea that I could get my father to permit me to do almost anything if it was done for, or in the name of, a cause of which he approved. I could even write Larry Peters stories—if they went into the manual.
In Topical Guide 218, Mark Dorset considers Author as God or Magician or Puppeteer or, well, Author and Life of the Mind, The from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Hi! It’s Candi Lee Manning, Eric Kraft’s irrepressible publicist!
I’ve been given the thankless task of informing you that there is no episode for you to read today.
The Krafts are moving, and they’re taking with them the entire population of Babbington, every character in The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy, and yours truly, along with Mr. Candi Lee (Alec “Nick” Rafter).
It’s chaos chez Kraft, let me tell you! Boxes, boxes, boxes, here, there, and everywhere.
There are going to be some gaps in the serialization.
This is one of them.
Be of good cheer. This move won’t take forever.
I hope.
As consolation, I’m sending you the Personal History theme song: “Indian Summer,” performed by Sidney Bechet:
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
The serialization of The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy is supported by its readers. I sometimes earn affiliate fees when you click through the affiliate links in a post. EK
The illustration in the banner that opens each episode is from an illustration by Stewart Rouse that first appeared on the cover of the August 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions.
www.erickraft.com
www.babbingtonpress.com
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
At that moment I understood for the first time that in any organization, whether there are two members or a thousand, there is more to the distribution of power than meets the eye, even the eye of a member. The outward and visible system of ranks may offer no clue to the invisible system of power. I was right about that in general, I think, but I was wrong in supposing that I understood the specific invisible system of power within the Tars organization. (Sometimes, when I bring my young self to mind this way and see the little guy brightening because he’s concocted a half-baked idea, I wish I could reach out across time and tap him on the shoulder and say, “That’s good, Peter, but there’s more to it. Wait and see.”)
I had decided, reasoning from my insight into the nature of power, that whether I wound up carrying the rank of Commodore or Bayman wouldn’t have mattered, so long as I had become—as I had—Scribe. That was, it seemed to me, where the real power lay. I had it, and I was going to use it.
“All right, guys,” Robby called out. “Line up.”
“No, no, no,” I called out. I waved my arms and shook my head and strode to a position in front of Robby. “That’s not the way you do it. Everybody back into the bleachers,” I said. “We’ve got to do this right. We’ve got to do it by the Manual. A Tar does things by the manual.” As soon as I said it, I knew that it belonged in the manual, as one of the traits, say number three.
To the Tars in the bleachers, I said, “Now go back to doing what you were doing just before Robby—just before Commodore of the First Water Haskins—told you to line up.”
There followed some shuffling about, some discussion, and some disagreement among groups of Tars about what they had been doing just before Robby told them to line up, but finally everyone—even the parents who had come to watch—assumed exaggerated versions of the positions they had been in and engaged one another in exaggerated versions of the conversations they had been having.
To Robby, I whispered, “Now you say, ‘All right, me Swabbies, hit the deck!’”
“All right, me Swabbies,” bellowed Robby, “hit the deck!”
“Okay,” I called out to the Tars, “all you Swabbies run onto the floor and line up facing us.”
To Robby, I whispered, “Now you say, ‘All right, me Baymen, hit the deck!’”
“All right, me Baymen,” bellowed Robby, “hit the deck!”
“Baymen,” I called out, “run onto the floor and line up in front of the Swabbies.”
We continued in that fashion, moving up through the ranks, until all the Tars were lined up in front of us, each Tar standing in front of a Tar of the next lower rank. Something struck me. The Tars were also lined up by height and weight. The shortest, fattest Tars were in the front. The tallest, thinnest were in the back, lowly Swabbies. This seemed an odd and amusing coincidence, and I thought of pointing it out to Mr. Summers, but something prevented me. Call it a hunch if you like; it was as if someone had tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Better wait and see, Peter. There may be more to this than you think.”
“All you Tars of the First Water,” called Mr. Summers. “Into the coach’s office.” He pointed toward the door with his toy bazooka. “For a humility session.”
In Topical Guide 217, Mark Dorset considers Power: Distribution of Within an Organization and Frustration Arising from the Impossibility of Traveling Back in Time to Assist One’s Younger Self from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Hi! It’s Candi Lee Manning, Eric Kraft’s irrepressible publicist!
I’ve been given the thankless task of informing you that there is no episode for you to read today.
The Krafts are moving, and they’re taking with them the entire population of Babbington, every character in The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy, and yours truly, along with Mr. Candi Lee (Alec “Nick” Rafter).
It’s chaos chez Kraft, let me tell you! Boxes, boxes, boxes, here, there, and everywhere.
There are going to be some gaps in the serialization.
This is one of them.
Be of good cheer. This move won’t take forever.
I hope.
As consolation, I’m sending you the Personal History theme song: “Indian Summer,” performed by Sidney Bechet:
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
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You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
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Robby brought me a brown paper bag filled with more scraps of paper on which Mr. Summers had written notes for things that he wanted added to the manual. I looked into the bag and pulled out and read one or two of the pieces of paper.
“Mr. Summers,” I said, “some of these are notes about things that are already in the manual. Here. Here’s one about the Tars Traits. I already typed the traits.”
“Good for you,” said Mr. Summers. “They’re in here, then?” he asked. He began flipping through the manual.
“Aye, sir,” I said. “The four Tars Traits, page three.”
“Good, good,” he said, turning to page three and scanning the list of traits.
“Where will I put this one?”
“What does that one say?”
“‘A Tar does what he’s told,’” I read.
“Just add it at the end,” said Mr. Summers.
“But it seems kind of important,” I said. “I mean, it seems more important than ‘A Tar never wears a dirty uniform,’ and that’s the First Trait now. Maybe we should make that the Fifth Trait.”
“You might be right. But it’s all typed, and it doesn’t really matter. Just add it at the end. Take the easy way out.”
I didn’t say anything, because I knew I couldn’t obey Mr. Summers. My mother and I had discarded many sheets of paper in the process of trying to make the manual neat. I liked the look of it, and I would have been a happy Tar if it had been cast in bronze just as it was, but if it was going to change, then it couldn’t change for the worse. I was going to have to retype the whole thing. I told myself that I wouldn’t really be disobeying Mr. Summers. After all, ‘A Tar does what he’s told’ wouldn’t be one of the traits until I had typed it.
“Say, there—chin up, Commodore Leroy,” said Mr. Summers. “Remember what I told you. It’s the journey that counts, not the destination, remember? Enjoy the journey. We’ve got quite a voyage ahead of us. You have to expect some changes along the way. You have to learn to take what fate dishes out without letting it throw you, if you know what I mean. As we Tars travel over the sea of life, we’re going to run into some storms now and then, and we can’t let them make us seasick, can we? We can’t let ourselves be tossed overboard by the tossing waves. A Tar has to keep his feet in a storm, Peter.”
He planted his feet and mimed keeping his balance on a rolling deck. Again there appeared on his face that look of being surprised by one of his own ideas.
“A Tar rolls with the swells,” he said.
“Aye, sir,” I said. I pulled out my notebook and jotted it down, with a note to make it Trait One and renumber the other ones.
The meeting that followed was the first ever conducted according to the manual, and it was a mess. Mr. Summers’s thinking about the conduct of the meetings was, as he had said of all his ideas for the Tars, only a beginning, and I was beginning to see that that meant “vague” and “foggy.”
“Commodore of the First Water Haskins,” commanded Mr. Summers, “call the Tars to order.”
“Okay,” said Robby. I could see that he was going to have to be trained for some time before he met the Tars Standards.
“Aye, sir,” I corrected him.
“Oh, yeah,” said Robby. “Aye, sir.”
“That’s good, Haskins,” said Mr. Summers. “You pay attention to Commodore Leroy. He knows the manual. He knows how to do things the Tars Way.”
Mr. Summers gave me a nod, and I began to feel stirring within me something that I couldn’t identify as either an emotion or an idea, something warm and thrilling, something that made me feel that I was standing steadier, that I could roll with the swells. It was power.
In Topical Guide 216, Mark Dorset considers Traits, of Character, of Personality from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
6
I DID MANAGE to get the manual organized before the next meeting, and with my mother’s help I even managed to get it typed. After I eliminated all the repetitions and notes that seemed too sketchy to include it didn’t amount to much: six-and-a-half pages.
“Maybe we should have used wider margins,” said my mother. “I’ll type up a cover for it, and we’ll add a back cover too. That should thicken it up some.”
The covers helped, but the manual still seemed a skimpy thing, and I hoped that Mr. Summers wouldn’t be too disappointed by it.
The Tars meetings were held on Thursday evenings, in the gymnasium of the school known as “the old school,” because it was the oldest school building in Babbington. When I arrived at the gym, Mr. Summers and Robby Haskins were standing in the circle painted on the floor. Mr. Summers was holding a toy gun. I recognized it at once because I had one myself. It was a model of a bazooka. It fired Ping-Pong balls. An involuntary shudder ran through me at the sight of it, prompted by memories of the nasty game my friends and I played with mine, standing one another against a wall, facing the wall, as targets, and teasing the target to make him flinch in fear between the firing of the gun, whoomp, and the impact, smack, of the Ping-Pong ball, feeble and harmless though the impact was. At those who flinched, we laughed, and the laughter was mortifying. This toy bazooka seemed an odd thing for Mr. Summers to have, and I wanted to ask him why he had it, but I said nothing. The rest of the Tars were in the bleachers, hanging around, waiting for the meeting to begin. I walked onto the floor, carrying the manual and the box of notes.
“Ah,” said Mr. Summers when he spotted me, “here comes Commodore Leroy with the manual.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. I corrected myself: “I mean, ‘Aye, sir.’”
“‘Aye, sir’?” asked Robby.
“Aye, sir,” I said. “A Tar is supposed to say ‘Aye, sir,’ when answering a Tar of superior rank—to indicate agreement, that is.”
“Was that in my notes?” asked Mr. Summers.
“Aye, sir,” I said.
“Well, good,” he said, surprised again by one of his own ideas. “I’d forgotten that. It’s good. Very good. It’s nautical.”
“Aye, sir,” I said.
“Is that the manual you have there?” he asked. His eyes lit up.
“Aye, sir,” I said.
I handed it to him.
“Is this all of it?” he asked.
“Aye, sir,” I said. “My mother and I added covers to make it thicker.”
Mr. Summers looked at me with his eyes narrowed, as if trying to decide whether I was making a nasty joke.
“I should have used wider margins when I typed it,” I said. “It would have been longer.”
“Well, that’s all right,” he said. “This is just a beginning. ‘Onward, ever onward,’ remember that. I’ve got some more notes for you. Commodore of the First Water Haskins, get that bag of notes, will you?”
“Okay,” said Robby.
I corrected him: “‘Aye, sir.’”
“That’s right, Haskins,” said Mr. Summers. “We’ve got to start doing things by the—”
He looked at the pages he held in his hand and thought better of using the word bookfor them.
“—by the manual,” he said.
In Topical Guide 215, Mark Dorset considers Foreshadowing and Jargon; Technical Terminology from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
So, I stopped writing Larry Peters stories, but I didn’t stop thinking about writing them, and as a result the time I spent in bed before I fell asleep became, for me even more than for most adolescents, a time of guilty pleasures, when my thoughts would turn both to girls and to stories. Since I was already developing the tastes that are today so broad that there is almost no girl or woman in whom I do not see some touch of beauty, almost no book in which I do not find some good idea, some admirable phrase, there were very many girls and very many stories for me to think about, and, of course, the aftermath of these thoughts was guilt, since these were forbidden territories through which I wandered in the dark of my attic bedroom.
Not only did I have to bear all the fearful guilt derived from my awakening interest in sex, but I had a growing load of guilt from my awakening interest in my imagination, and that, I could see, was potentially far more dangerous an obsession. Sex occupies a territory of the mind that has been mapped rather well over the ages; during our personal wanderings there, each of us leaves regions unexplored, but the species has poked into every nook and cranny. The territory of the imagination is another story. The universe of the imagination expands much faster than the physical universe. Even at eleven, I could see that my imagination was, much like the foggy future of the Tars, a place without visible boundaries, perhaps with no boundaries at all, a place where I could get lost if I wasn’t careful. My wanderings there, most often while concocting a Larry Peters story, were thrilling but sometimes frightened me a little. When my father warned me to give up thinking about writing Larry Peters stories, it had an effect on me far worse than the effect that he might have produced by saying, “And you, young man, you cut out that masturbating, understand? If you need something to keep your hands busy, there are plenty of things you can do around the house.”
I did try, though. I tried to stop even thinking about writing Larry Peters stories. I thought about girls instead. They were the only thing that could pull me back from the misty unknown. I tried, very deliberately, to anchor myself to memory—to the remembered image of one girl or another—and thereby keep myself from drifting off into the fog of imagination. It rarely worked for long. I would bring to mind Caroline Thurlow, for example, and try to concentrate on the nape of her neck, on the rounded prominence of the vertebra there, the wisps of hair, and find that soon she and I were crawling through brambles, trying to reach the mountain hideout of the gang that was holding Larry Peters for ransom.
Therefore, my mother’s question, “It’s not another of those Larry Peters stories, is it?” aroused in me some guilty embarrassment.
“No,” I said. “It isn’t that. Honest.”
“Well, then, what is all this, Peter?” she asked.
“It’s supposed to be the manual for the Young Tars,” I said. “I have to get it into shipshape order, because I’m the Scribe now.”
“The Scribe!” said my mother. “Why that’s wonderful! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Well,” I said, “I wasn’t sure that I wanted to keep the job. I thought it might be too hard for me.”
“Oh, but you’ve decided to keep it now, haven’t you Peter?”
“Well, I—” I began.
“Good for you, Peter,” she said. “I just think it’s wonderful that you’re in the Tars and that you’re a Commodore, and now Scribe!”
“I know,” I said.
“And you look so good in your uniform. Your father said so, just yesterday.” She glanced at my clock. “Well, it wasn’t just yesterday any more,” she said. “It was the day before yesterday. He said, ‘You know, Peter really looks good in a uniform. Some men can really wear a uniform, and some just can’t. You know what I mean, Ella? Some guys, you put them in a janitor’s uniform and they look like the admiral of the fleet, and other guys, you put them in an admiral’s uniform, and they look as if they forgot their brooms.’
“He’s right,” she said. “I always think your father looks especially nice when he goes off to work in a nice clean uniform, the way he has “Bert” stitched over his breast pocket and “Esso” on the back. You know who really looks good in a uniform though? Dudley.”
My mother looked into the distance.
“During the war,” she said, “he looked really—”
She sat without finishing her sentence. She was still. She looked straight ahead. In the quiet, a long time seemed to pass, and I began to feel as tired as I was.
Yawning, I asked her at last, “Really what?”
“Hmmm?” she asked, as if surprised that I was beside her, surprised that I had spoken.
“Dudley looked really what?”
“Oh. Handsome. Dashing. You should get to bed, Peter.”
“What about all these papers?”
“I’ll put them in a neat pile,” she said. “You get into bed.”
In Topical Guide 214, Mark Dorset considers Imagination from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
5
“PETER,” called my mother from the bottom of the stairs, “are you still up?”
“Yes,” I called back to her. “What time is it?”
“Why, it’s after midnight,” she said. I heard her begin climbing the stairs. I stood and stretched and looked at the clock beside my bed. The face was a blur. I rubbed my eyes. They stung.
My mother appeared in the doorway. She too was a blur. The door frame wobbled a bit, and my mother swayed within it.
“Why Peter!” she said suddenly, clearly alarmed. “You’re asleep on your feet.”
She rushed to me, steadied me, held me in her arms, and guided me to my bed, where she sat me down on some of the papers from Mr. Summers’s box of notes for the Tars Manual.
“This is really too much,” said my mother, holding her hand to my forehead and rocking me gently. “They really are giving you too much homework. It’s terrible! A boy has to sleep!”
“This isn’t homework,” I said. “My homework’s all done. I finished it right after dinner.”
“Oh, Peter,” said my mother, “you’re pushing yourself too hard. Is this a science project or something?”
She looked around the room. I had papers everywhere—in neat piles on the floor, on my dresser, on my desk, on the window sills, on the lamps, on my bed, on my bedside table, tacked to the walls. I had found that there was a lot more to it than typing. The box of notes contained so many contradictions, repetitions, vague ideas, and false starts that I still seemed a long way from typing despite all the work I’d done.
“No,” I said, “it’s—”
She gave me a look in which sympathy was mixed with sternness. When she spoke, her tone was similarly mixed.
“It’s not another of those Larry Peters stories, is it?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “It isn’t that. Honest.”
The writing of Larry Peters stories had been the subject of a good talking-to from my father not long before. New books in the Larry Peters series appeared at a pace too slow to satisfy the desire of an addict like me, so I had begun trying to write stories about Larry on my own. When, full of pride in my undertaking and in myself for undertaking it, I told my parents what I had begun, my mother had at first been pleased.
“Oh, Peter,” she said. “What a wonderful idea. Maybe you’ll be able to sell them to the Larry Peters people.”
The idea that I, an eleven-year-old-kid, might be able to sell stories to the publisher of the Larry Peters series was, I knew, preposterous, and my mother would have agreed that it was preposterous if she’d thought about it, but it was a pleasant dream, so neither she nor I bothered to think about it. We let ourselves dream it, instead.
“Wouldn’t it be fun if one of the adventures was in Babbington?” I said.
“Oh, that would be fun,” said my mother.
“I could put my friends in it, and myself too,” I said. “We could all be in it.”
“You can’t do that, Peter,” said my father.
“What?” I said.
“You can’t do that. You can’t go putting people into stories.”
“Why not, Bert?” asked my mother.
“It’s not legal,” said my father. “You can get arrested for that sort of thing.”
“Oh, Bert,” said my mother.
“Oh, Bert, nothing,” said my father. “People can have you arrested for putting them into a story.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Why? Because they can, that’s all. They’ve got the law on their side.” Emphatically, he stuck his fork into a slice of meatloaf. With his thumb, he pushed the slice off the fork onto his plate. “Pass me the potatoes, Peter,” he said.
“Why would they want to have me arrested?” I asked, passing the mashed potatoes. “My friends would be happy to be in a Larry Peters story.”
“Don’t be so sure,” said my father, wagging his fork at me. “Look, I’ll give you a for-instance. Suppose you put me in a story and you put in this conversation we’re having right now. All right. Now, I’m tired. I’ve had a long day. Whitey’s damned son Porky spent all afternoon trying to get me to put money into some foolish restaurant he wants to open. I’m bushed, and I don’t feel like listening to any more crackpot ideas. So in your story, I’m going to look like a cranky, grouchy, old—” He searched for a noun.
“Killjoy,” my mother offered.
“Grump,” I suggested.
“Yeah,” he snarled. He bent to his meatloaf and potatoes.
“Oh, Bert,” said my mother, “I’m sorry you had a bad day. Tell us about it. Tell us about Porky and his restaurant.”
“Ella,” said my father, “forget the jackass and his restaurant. And you, young man,” he said, in an I-don’t-want-to-hear-another-word-about-it tone, pointing his fork at me, “forget about writing Larry Peters stories. You’ve got plenty of homework to keep you busy, and if that’s not enough, there are plenty of things you can do around the house.”
In Topical Guide 213, Mark Dorset considers Writing: Rough Drafts, Characteristics of: contradictions, repetitions, vague ideas, and false starts from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
4
PRODUCING the notebook earned me my second job, a job within the structure of the Tars this time.
“Now there’s an example for the rest of you,” boomed Mr. Summers. “Commodore Leroy has already got his notebook! Good for you, Commodore Leroy!”
Mr. Summers paused a moment, and I could see that he was thinking.
“You know,” he said, “I think you deserve something special for being so well prepared. You’re going to have a special job. You’re going to take notes. You will be our Scribe.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I’ll keep the log.”
“The log!” said Mr. Summers. “Excellent, Commodore Leroy. The log. That’s exactly what you’ll do: keep the log. I knew you were right for the job. You have a way with words. You’ve got good handwriting, too, and you can spell.”
THE WORK of the Scribe had, I soon learned, two aspects. The keeping of the log was straightforward and really quite simple. All it required was careful observation, the ability to write legibly, and the ability to find the right word, or at least the almost-right word, quickly enough to keep the taking of notes moving along at or near the pace of the meeting. The other part of the job was the compiling, editing, mimeographing, collating, and stapling of the Tars Manual, and this turned out to be far from simple.
When Mr. Summers first presented me with the manual, it was in a box.
“Here, Peter,” he said, handing the box to me. “These are some notes for the Tars Manual.”
“The Tars Manual?” I asked.
“Yes indeed!” said Mr. Summers. “We’re going to have a nice fat manual that tells each and every Tar what to do and how to do it—how to be the best Tar possible, what to do at the Tars meetings, how to raise money for Tars events, how to play Tars games, and so on. We’ll have the Tars Oath in there, and the official Tars Hymn, the history of the Tars, some chanteys for Tars to sing when they’re off watch and just sort of hanging around the quarterdeck or whatever, and much, much more. We are going to have, in one handy place, just about everything a Tar needs to know.”
“Wow,” I said.
“As Scribe,” said Mr. Summers, “one of your jobs will be to get the manual into shipshape condition so that we can have it typed up and mimeographed for each of the lads. Can you type?”
“Not the real way,” I said. “I can’t use all my fingers. But I know how to use a typewriter, and we have an old one at home.”
“Good, good,” said Mr. Summers. “Then you can type the manual too.”
I opened the box. It was filled with papers of many varieties. There were sheets of lined composition paper, typing paper, sheets from a legal-size yellow pad, envelopes, sheets from a telephone message pad, scraps of brown paper bags, file cards, pages torn from a small spiral-bound notebook like mine, matchbooks, paper napkins, and, as Mr. Summers had said, much, much more. On each scrap of paper, Mr. Summers had written something that he wanted included in the Tars Manual.
“Now some of these are just rough ideas,” said Mr. Summers.
He took one from the box and read it to himself. A smile came to his face, the kind of smile one sees on the face of young parents when they look at their infant child while it is sleeping. He shook his head slightly, as if he had to hand it to himself for having conceived so good an idea as whatever idea he had found on the scrap of paper in his hand. He returned it to the box and patted the stack of papers as he might have patted a son on the head.
“This is only the beginning, remember, Peter,” he said. “Think of your work as a journey—”
“Yes, sir,” I said. The fog that had figured so prominently in Mr. Summers’s vision of the Tars’ future was beginning to thicken again. “What should I, um, do with all of this?” I asked.
“Just type it up. That’s all you have to do,” he said. “There’s some pretty good stuff in here, some fine stuff, some really fine stuff, but it has to be typed, that’s all. Nothing to it.”
I looked at the box of papers, on which Mr. Summers’s hand still rested affectionately. What Mr. Summers wanted struck me as more than I was capable of doing, even as something that was in some way wrong for me to do. These were Mr. Summers’s ideas, and from the way he handled them it seemed likely that he wasn’t going to want me messing around with them. I would be a lot better off, I thought, not even to begin messing around with them.
“This job might be too hard for me,” I said.
“Look, Peter,” said Mr. Summers. He gripped my shoulders. “Look out there.” He swept his hand toward the windows again. ”The future is out there. Somewhere. The future of the Tars.” He squeezed my shoulders. I tried to smile. “Who knows where we’ll go from here. Who knows what the Tars might become.” He squeezed harder. “What do you think of that? Exciting, isn’t it?”
“Sure,” I said. “Great.” I smiled, but his squeezing my shoulders was bringing tears to my eyes.
“And wherever the Tars may go, whatever they may do, whatever they may become, they’ll look to their manuals to guide them!”
“Ow!” I cried.
“Oh,” he said, relaxing his grip. “Sorry, Peter. I get a little carried away about the Tars sometimes, I suppose. Still, I just can’t help being enthusiastic about this. Just think of it, Peter,” he said, and in his enthusiasm he reached again for my shoulder. When he saw me flinch, he stopped himself and held his open palms out to show me that he wasn’t going to grab me again. “Hundreds—thousands of Tars, Peter, dressed in their uniforms, standing tall, learning the Tars Oath from a manual that you, Commodore Peter Leroy, typed.”
In Topical Guide 212, Mark Dorset considers Jargon; Technical Terms from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
3
AN ASIDE. From the time I became a Tar, I think I knew, without understanding it, that from a Tar’s point of view the real reason for being a Tar was not to perform the services to the school that the Tars were supposed to perform, not to provide the model of comportment and achievement that the Tars were supposed to provide, not to learn the ways of seafaring men, but to gain a position in a hierarchy, a position above one’s fellows. I say that I knew this from the start because I can recall so vividly the emotions I felt when I thought that I would lose the rank of Commodore, and because I can recall with equal vividness the petty satisfaction I took in producing my notebook, in having this small advantage over the others, an advantage with a value within the structure of the Tars far beyond its worth in society at large.
(I don’t mean to belittle the value of carrying a notebook. Society is a vast edifice with many nooks and crannies where notebooks are necessities. The gas-meter reader couldn’t do his job without his notebook; Albertine couldn’t run the hotel without hers. I only mean that, within most social structures, carrying a notebook does not give one rights and privileges over one’s fellows. One does not expect, for example, when waiting in a line for a movie, that if one flourishes one’s pocket notebook, the others in line will fall away and call out, “Step aside, please. Here’s a guy with a notebook. Let him go to the head of the line.”)
I was eager to use the hierarchy of the Tars to elevate myself above my fellows. I wanted to be declared and certified superior to anyone Mr. Summers could round up who was willing to be certified inferior to me. I was certainly not alone in this desire for rank; if it hadn’t been widespread, there could have been no Young Tars. The first evidence of how well Mr. Summers understood this desire came when he demoted all the girls—in effect—by kicking them out of the Tars and into the newly created Tars Auxiliary. All of us Tars, to our shame, stood taller at once.
One more aside, a related one. Although I attained the rank of Commodore through a fluke, today (the day of my composing this sentence, a still, hot one in my forty-first August, one of those when the bay is oleaginous and the sun buttery), I see that there was a sense in which I earned the rank of Commodore, earned at least the right to keep it: I earned it by enduring the expectation of losing it, and it may be that no other experience so makes us deserve to feel that a thing is ours as enduring the fear that it will be taken from us.
In Topical Guide 211, Mark Dorset considers Digression from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
2
OF COURSE, things rarely happen as we expect they will. I wasn’t demoted. Instead, Robby Haskins was elevated beyond Commodore, to the newly created rank of Commodore of the First Water. (I had, as I mentioned in my demotion speech, become a Commodore by accident, when Mr. Summers confused Robby Haskins’s sizes with mine and ordered a Commodore’s uniform to fit me. Haskins, a short, fat boy, called by some of my schoolmates Blubby Fatskins, had at first tried to get into the uniform that had been made to fit me, but some of the Tars had begun to snicker, and he had quickly abandoned the attempt. Instead, he put on the uniform of a Swabby, the lowest rank; in fact, he put on the Swabby’s uniform that would have been mine if Mr. Summers hadn’t confused our sizes.) Although I thought that creating a higher rank was a neat solution to a difficult problem, and although I was grateful to Mr. Summers for allowing me to keep my rank, I was surprised to find that I was disappointed at missing the opportunity to show that I could take a demotion like a man and eat whatever fate could dish out. I should have realized that the Tars would provide other opportunities.
After Robby’s advancement had been applauded and we had drunk the cream soda and eaten the cupcakes, Mr. Summers called for quiet, had us sit cross-legged on the gym floor, in a rough circle around him, and outlined his vision for the Young Tars.
“Lads,” he said, “today we have begun a great journey, the voyage of the Tars.”
Excitement rippled through the group; this sounded like fun.
“Now, you might be asking yourselves,” he continued, “‘Where are we going on this journey?’ Well, the answer to that question is, ‘It doesn’t matter.’”
There were some puzzled looks; I wore one of them.
“Look at it this way,” he said. “We’ve just left port. We’re somewhere at sea. We’re surrounded by fog, and we can’t see where we’re going. We can’t even see where we’ve been. I say, ‘Great!’ You may think, ‘That’s a crazy thing to say,’ but hear me out. If we can’t see where we’ve been, then we’re not shackled by tradition, are we? No, we’re not. If we can’t see where we’re going, then we’re not limited by the blinders of narrow purpose, are we? No. Well then, what the heck is our destination? Our destination, lads, is the horizon, and the horizon is all around us, so we can’t miss it! On the other hand, the horizon is unattainable, so it doesn’t really matter whether we get there! And that’s my point,” he said.
We all perked up at this, hoping for a break in the fog.
“We’re going to make this voyage together, over the bounding main, through fog and storms, and wherever we go we’re going there together—wherever the winds of fate may blow us!”
He swept his hand outward, in the approximate direction of the row of windows above the bleachers behind me. Most of the Tars followed his gesture with their eyes, hoping, I think, that they might spot something on our horizon. Some twisted around to look in the direction toward which he had gesticulated. A few stood and peered that way.
“Together,” said Mr. Summers. “Together. We’re going ‘Onward, ever onward,’ because that’s our motto. It’s the journey that counts, lads, not the destination, and we’re embarking on that journey together.”
I’m sure that none of us had any real idea what Mr. Summers was talking about, but he certainly made it sound exciting. The idea of a boat trip began to form in my mind, all the Tars on deck, peering into the fog, trying to figure out where we were. This idea was not a metaphor as I understood it; it was quite literal. This seemed to me to be what Mr. Summers was getting at, that the Tars would eventually have a boat, probably quite a large sailing vessel, a schooner, say, on which we would make many an exciting voyage.
“Are you with me?” asked Mr. Summers suddenly.
“Yes, sir!” I shouted at once. My enthusiasm for the ocean voyage that I’d seen through the fog had me primed, and the words shot from me before the others had opened their mouths. Their yesses and you-bets and yeahs were hearty enough, but my “Yes, sir!” was by far the strongest endorsement, and I think the others envied me my quickness.
Mr. Summers was clearly pleased and moved. He swallowed hard and blinked a couple of times. When he spoke again, there was a catch in his voice. “Thanks, lads,” he said. “I’m glad to know you’re with me. Together we can really enjoy the trip.”
He bowed his head, and a reverential silence fell over the assembled Tars. We were, I thought then, mutually awestruck by an ill-defined sense of some kind of mission. After a long moment, Mr. Summers lifted his head, took a deep breath, and brought his hands together sharply.
“Well!” he said. “Let’s get down to work. On a ship, everyone has a job, you know, and I’ve got a job for every one of you, and I want you to know that every job is important. Every job. I mean that. Every Young Tar has a job, and every job is important. As far as I’m concerned, the jobs that all you Tars have to do are equal, whether you’re at the top of the heap, like Commodore of the First Water Haskins, or you’re at the bottom of the heap, like Swabby Heywood.”
Robby Haskins beamed. Bones Heywood, the skinniest boy in the fifth grade, a pale boy with freckles, looked into his lap.
WHEN Mr. Summers began assigning jobs, the fog that hid the Tars’ course began to lift a little. Most of what we were to do involved keeping the school shipshape and our schoolmates in line. Despite what Mr. Summers had said, there were differences among the jobs. Robby Haskins’s job boiled down to keeping his hair combed and standing up straight when he was in uniform, but the Swabbies, Baymen, and Seamen had jobs that actually involved work: cleaning erasers and washing blackboards, picking up papers on the school grounds, washing Mr. Summers’s car, and so on.
I was one of the Tars assigned the task of attempting to keep order among the boys and girls who rode buses to and from school. They were to enter and leave the buses in a safe manner, without jumping. They were to walk to or from the bus, not run. They were not to shout. They were not to make rude remarks about the teachers or the administration. They were not to ridicule the bus driver, and they were not to sneer at the Tar who was monitoring them.
“If anyone breaches these basic rules of good conduct,” said Mr. Summers, “I want to know about it. I want names. I want details. I want to know the time and place of the transgression. I want the names of witnesses. I want each of you to carry a small notebook—”
I was already carrying a small notebook, the one in which I had written my easy-come-easy-go speech, so I perked up at this remark, recognizing an opportunity to distinguish myself. I whipped out the notebook and waved it at Mr. Summers.
In Topical Guide 210, Mark Dorset considers Expectations: Dangers of; Distinction or Status: Desire for; and Fortune Cookie Wisdom from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
1
ON THE NIGHT BEFORE the first official meeting of the Babbington Flotilla of the Young Tars, I paced the floor of my attic bedroom, certain that, the next day, as the first official piece of business at the first official meeting, I would be demoted from the rank of Commodore, probably all the way down to Swabby. The likelihood of my being demoted didn’t worry me half as much as the likelihood that I wouldn’t take it well. I had prepared some remarks for the occasion and copied them into a small spiral-bound notebook that I could carry in my pocket, at the ready in case I needed to prompt myself while I was taking the demotion like a man.
Pacing the floor, reading from the notebook by flashlight, I rehearsed the remarks.
“You know,” I said, adopting a puzzled look to indicate that sometimes, as on this occasion, the occasion of my demotion, the world was just too illogical, too crazy, for me to understand, “I always thought that there must have been some mistake when I became a Commodore.”
Here I paused, for I was certain that there would be laughter, relieved laughter, when the other Tars saw that I wasn’t going to cry or to punch Robby Haskins, who would, I was equally certain, be elevated to Commodore in my place. I continued in an all-kidding-aside tone: “I never thought that I was really worthy of the rank. I hate to be demoted, of course, but I have to admit I’m pleased to see that I was right all along. I wonder why the rest of you took so long to find out.”
I paused again for laughter. I felt reasonably certain that there might be a couple of sighs of relief here too, perhaps a couple of grunts of grudging admiration for my ability to shrug off disappointment, to take whatever fate dished out on the breadline of life.
I shifted, next, to an offhand manner and chummy tone meant to show that we could all relax now, secure in the knowledge that Peter was going to be all right, that he wasn’t going to fall apart over anything like this. I figured that if I got this far in my remarks without having to run from the room, then we would in fact be able to relax, and I would be able to make a good job of the offhand manner and chummy tone. “You know,” I said, “I’m reminded of something my grandfather often says. Every now and then, he’ll say, ‘Easy come, easy go.’ I never really understood what that meant until today. Now I understand what it means, and I’ve got the Young Tars to thank for that.”
I planned another pause here, because I thought that there might be some self-congratulatory applause from the assembled Tars.
“It means,” I went on, “that when you get something you didn’t really work for, you don’t really deserve it, since it came to you so easily. And since you don’t really deserve it, you’re probably going to lose it as easily as you got it. Easy come, easy go. I don’t want to take up too much of your time, and I know that we all want to raise a glass of cream soda to the new Commodore and grab a couple of cupcakes, but let me give you an example.
“Suppose you’re walking along one day on your way to school, and you find a dollar bill on the sidewalk in front of you. You bend over and pick it up. What do you do with it? Put it in the bank? No. Turn it in to the principal? Uh-uh. Stick it into the Red Cross box outside the nurse’s office? Heck, no. I’ll tell you what you probably do. You probably stop at the candy store and spend the dollar buying wax teeth for the whole gang. Later, when you get home after school, you tell your mother how lucky you were.
“‘Hey Mom!’ you shout. ‘I found a dollar on the way to school!’
“‘Aren’t you lucky!’ she says. ‘Where is it?’
“‘Huh?’ you say. ‘Oh, I spent it on wax teeth.’
“She gives you a look you’ve seen before, and suddenly the truth hits you. You realize that the dollar is gone and you’ll never get it back again. You’re left standing there with a mouthful of wax teeth and an empty pocket, wondering how you can sum up the lesson you’ve learned. Well, the next time you find a dollar and spend it on wax teeth, or the next time a mixup in uniforms makes you a Commodore until a new uniform comes in and you’re demoted to Swabby, I hope you’ll shrug and grin and say what my grandfather would say: ‘Easy come, easy go.’”
I was sure there would be applause after these remarks. I planned to drop my head and, with a swift movement I’d been practicing all week, slip a set of wax teeth into my mouth. When I raised my head, shrugged, and grinned, I would, I hoped, ignite a blaze of esteem and good humor in the heart of every Tar. The Tars might, I thought, gather around me to shake my hand and punch my shoulder and clap me on the back. It wasn’t inconceivable, it seemed to me, that they might hoist me onto their shoulders and carry me around the room for a while, singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” There was even at least a slim chance that, in a frenzy of admiration for my gumption and my ability to take the long view of things, the Tars might rise up in a body, demand in a single voice my reinstatement as Commodore, rip the insignia from Robby Haskins’s uniform, and drum him out of the flotilla.
In Topical Guide 209, Mark Dorset considers Anticipation; Pride; Real Objects in Fiction; Life Lessons; Fortune Cookie Wisdom; Wishful Thinking; and Fame, Acclaim, Respect: Desire for from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Preface
“Do you know what it is I dislike about writing?—All the scratchings out and touchings up that are necessary . . . . It’s the power of revising that makes writing such a colorless affair . . . . That’s what seems to me so fine about life. It’s like fresco-painting—erasures aren’t allowed.”
Lafcadio, in Andre Gide’s, Les Caves du Vatican (Lafcadio’s Adventures), translated by Dorothy Bussy
I WOULD NEVER have written this story if Porky White hadn’t insisted on it. Not long after I finished Call Me Larry, Porky threw a party to announce the addition of Frizzlin’ Fritters to the menu at his Kap’n Klam family restaurants. At one point in the evening Porky and I found ourselves standing side by side at the bar, waiting for fresh drinks, eating fritters. On the whole, these fritters were not bad. Like all the other items on the Kap’n Klam menu that are not actually billed as clams (the Baked Stuffed Stuffin’, Marvelous Mush, Krumbs Kasino, and Bubblin’ Broth, for instance), they were flavored with the secret concentrate that Porky had developed, Klamessence. Porky asked me what I was going to work on next.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“Tell the story of the Young Tars,” he said.
I shuddered and said, “No, thanks. That’s one of those dark, gritty bits at the bottom of my life that I’d just as soon forget. Every time I face an audience, there is a moment, just before I start to read, when the memory of that night returns, every detail. My palms start to sweat and I look out at the people sitting there, waiting for me to start, and I find myself wishing that I’d had the foresight to lock the doors so that they couldn’t get out. No thanks.”
“Peter!” he exclaimed. “I really am surprised at you. That’s kind of a narrow, self-centered way of looking at it, isn’t it?”
“Perhaps,” I said, “but remember that this is my personal history—and so forth.”
“Not entirely,” he said. “There are other people in it, aren’t there?”
“Come on, Porky,” I said.
“Come on, nothing. This is important to me. The Tars may have been nothing but dark, gritty bits in your life, but in mine those dark, gritty bits had silver linings.”
“I know,” I said, “but—”
“But me no buts,” said Porky. “Just look around this room.”
I did. Dozens of young men and women, models made up to appear to be of high-school age, the age of most of the help at the Kap’n Klam restaurants, circulated around the room, passing drinks and platters of Kap’n Klam specialties. The uniforms they wore were identical to the uniforms we Tars had worn years ago, just as the ranks that Kap’n Klam workers carried were the ranks we Tars had carried years ago. The Tars had been the inspiration for the nautical touches and organizational scheme that were so much a part of the Kap’n Klam success.
“I’ll make you a deal,” said Porky, his eyes atwinkle. Leaning toward me, grabbing at my shoulder, he said, “I’ll tell you what Klamessence is if you’ll write the story of the Young Tars.”
“Not a fair bargain,” I said.
“What’s not a fair bargain?” asked Albertine. She draped herself on my shoulder and took a sip of her martini.
“I’ll tell him what Klamessence is if he’ll write the story of the Young Tars,” said Porky.
“Is that the story with the ‘prendergast’ in it?” asked Al.
“Yeah,” said Porky, and he chuckled. “Come on, Peter.”
“Oh, go ahead and write it,” said Al. “How long can it take?”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll do it.” For, after all, why not? It does explain why I’m uneasy before an audience and why I no longer carry a pocket notebook.
“Okay, then,” said Porky. “Come here.”
He motioned us into a huddle. Al and I drew closer, so that the three of us formed a tight circle.
“All the items that say ‘klam’ have real clams in them,” said Porky. He raised his right hand. “I swear they do. But all the rest of the stuff has Klamessence in it. That’s the real secret of my success. That’s how I get people who don’t like clams to eat at a Kap’n Klam joint—Klamessence.” He looked over his shoulder, turned back toward us, lowered his voice. “Klamessence is chicken fat—schmaltz. People go into a Kap’n Klam, eat an order of Baked Stuffed Stuffin’ with Klamessence, and leave saying, ‘Gee, I never tried clams before, but they’re good. They taste like chicken.’”
Peter Leroy
Aluminum Commodore (retired)
Small’s Island
September 25, 1986
(Last revision October 16, 1991)
In Topical Guide 208, Mark Dorset considers Writing: Personal Motives for and Attitudes Toward and Terror: Preceding Public Readings of One’s Own Work from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
20
AND THEN, some four years ago, I was sitting in Corinne’s Fabulous Fruits of the Sea one night, talking to Porky White, complaining along familiar lines.
“It still isn’t enough, Porky,” I said. “Now that I’m Roger Drake, I ought to be satisfied, but I’m not. I still keep trying to write that big book about myself, that book as rich and various as a good clam chowder, loaded with useful and interesting information, hilarious anecdotes, recherché allusions, philosophical speculations, intriguing stories, clever word play, important themes, striking symbols, creative sex, intricate diagrams, mouth-watering recipes, big ideas—”
“Yeah,” said Porky, “but you want to know something?”
“What?” I asked.
“I don’t think that the guy I’m listening to now is ever going to do that.”
My heart sank.
“Don’t get me wrong,” said Porky. “I mean just what I said: the guy I’ve been listening to for the last hour is never going to write it. He takes himself too seriously, much too seriously to do what you’re always talking about doing. His ego is too tender, and he protects it too well. He’s too afraid of making a mistake. He’s afraid of making a fool of himself, afraid of falling on his face in print, afraid that people are going to laugh at him.”
There was a danger of my bursting into tears. To hide my face from Porky, I brought my beer mug up and drained it slowly. Porky signaled for two more.
“Let me give you some advice,” he said. “You don’t have to take it.”
“Okay,” I managed.
“What you need,” said Porky, “is a new dummy. You’ve got a dummy called Larry. Now you need another dummy. Let the dummy write the big book.”
Porky held his hand up in a gesture that meant I should hear him out.
“Years ago,” he said, “I used to listen to Bob Balducci on the radio. You probably don’t remember him. He was a ventriloquist, and he had a dummy named Baldy. Baldy used to say the craziest things, insulting things, embarrassing things, stupid things. I don’t remember any of them now, but they were crazy things. He used to break me up. Sometimes, though, Baldy would go a little too far: he’d say something too stupid, or too embarrassing, or too insulting, and you know what he’d say then? He’d say, ‘The big guy made me do it.’”
Porky laughed long and loud at the memory of this remark.
“And you know what Balducci would say to that?” he asked through his laughter, and answered himself at once. “He’d say, ‘Don’t listen to him—he’s only a dummy.’”
He laughed long and loud again, and then he pulled his handkerchief out of his pocket and blew his nose twice. He shrugged.
“Maybe I’m not making myself clear,” he said.
But he had made himself so clear that my heart had begun to go pit-a-pat and I couldn’t speak. I just sat there wearing a wacky grin.
In Topical Guide 207, Mark Dorset considers White, Chester “Porky” as Benevolent Daemon or Tutelary Deity and Author as Puppeteer or Ventriloquist from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
I GOT THE JOB advertised on the back of the clipping that Robert sent me, and for the last nine years I have been the only Roger Drake. Since the series had become dated in its topical references and in the props that the succession of earlier Roger Drakes had used, my first task was to revise all the earlier books, in sequence. Thereby, of course, I got the opportunity to bring the books more in line with what I had imagined them to be, and even to insert here and there some of the episodes that I had imagined occurring in the gaps between adventures. I have also written eight adventures that are entirely my own, and the income from the Larry Peters books that I’ve written, added to what we make from the hotel (which is small for the effort involved) has allowed Al and me to live quite comfortably for the last five years or so, or at least would allow us to live quite comfortably if we had any sense about money at all.
I am often asked whether the Larry Peters books that I have written are autobiographical. They are and they are not. It’s not surprising, I suppose, that the characters in my version of Larry Peters have acquired some of the habits, expressions, and physical characteristics of people that I have actually known. Larry’s friend Rocky King has become more and more like my friend Raskol. Lucinda and Marie exhibit aspects of most of the girls and women I ever had any interest in. Larry’s father and mother seem to be composed of equal parts derived from the depictions of them in the earlier Larry Peters books, my own parents, and both sets of my grandparents. I have also included details and props from my life in Larry’s: the kittens that live beneath the Peterses’ front porch are the very kittens I pursued on my grandparents’ lawn the day that Mr. Beaker introduced Eliza Foote to us, the day that my mother fell out of her lawn chair. The alabaster busts of Peterses that reside in lighted niches in the wall along the staircase are derived from the coconuts my great-grandmother carved to represent Leroys. In that capacious summer during which all the adventures occur, there is room for everything, and nothing changes much once it has been admitted into Larry’s world. So, at the top of the Peterses’ house, my great-grandmother lives forever, unchanging, still strong, playing the part of the matriarch of the Peters bunch, offering the guidance that so often holds the key to the solution of the mystery in each book.
The publisher has complained from time to time that the changes I have made in the series have led to the misperception of the books as being intended for adult readers, rather than for adolescents, and that the “adventures” I write for Larry are not really adventures. Well, I never thought that the Larry Peters books were intended only for adolescents, and I never thought that the adventures were very important. I try, I do try, to include in each episode something that will build suspense, but I find that as I work on, say, the stealthy approach of saboteurs who are bent on destroying the prototypes for next year’s line of Peters knickknacks, my attention is easily diverted to, for example, Larry and Lucinda, who are having an interesting conversation about love and jealousy while they sit on the lowest limb of the apple tree out beyond the gazebo. Larry’s adventures are more likely to be little adventures of his growing-up, which turn out to resemble the little adventures of my own.
Making everything snap together at the end is what makes the writing of each Larry Peters book an adventure for me; it provides the small part of writing them that is play. I’ve tried, most of the time, to make an object or an idea control the book, like a cotter pin, say, that appears and reappears unexpectedly—at the bottom of a drawer, in someone’s pocket, hanging improbably on a gold chain—and snapping into place at the end as the pin that holds the whole gadget together. Not everyone likes that sort of thing, of course, and many of my readers have written quite persuasive letters asking for fewer cotter pins and more laughs.
In Topical Guide 206, Mark Dorset considers Autobiography and Fiction; Reality: Real and Fictional; and Form and Content from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
19
NEARLY EIGHT YEARS LATER, I was earning my living as a writer: writing advertising copy, brochures, recipe booklets, press releases, answers to inquiries, and requests for brochures and recipe books. I was working for the Babbington Clam Council. It was, I told myself, an apprenticeship, and when asked about my work, I was quick to enumerate the many things I had learned from it. I tried not to admit to myself how much I enjoyed the work, how happy I would probably be if I were to stick at it. Instead, I spent my evenings, and stolen hours at work, trying to write that big book, and trying not to believe that Mr. Beaker might have been right, that I would never do it. But the harder I worked, the more confused and uncertain I became. I filled cartons with fragments, but of what complete construction they were fragments was not clear, and often when I should have been wrestling with a big idea I was wandering around Kittiwake Island.
Sitting at my desk one morning, I opened a letter from Robert Meyer, who was still wandering from place to place, accumulating degrees, writing letters, and, by his own account at any rate, breaking hearts. He had enclosed a clipping from the International Herald Tribune, an article about clams based on a press release that I had written.
In the space of a single moment, my life’s work was determined, for on the reverse of the clipping were several classified ads, in one of which a name caught my eye: Larry Peters. The publisher of the Larry Peters series was looking for people to write new installments, not only new adventures for Larry, but installments for other series as well. By responding to the advertisement, I learned that the several series of books for boys and girls published by this house were written by people working from character dossiers and plot outlines that the publisher himself supplied. When I had read the books as a boy, I had believed that they were written by Roger Drake, whose name appeared on the covers, and it never occurred to me that there might be many “Roger Drakes,” that the Larry Peters stories were the product of several hands, that the Roger Drake whose name appeared on each of the books was himself a work of fiction. Those stories that had appeared over the years, those stories of which I had been so fond, in which I thought I had found so much more than met the eye, beneath the text of which I thought I had been able to read a richer text about the way Larry lived with his family and his friends, the way he understood things, the way he felt about things, had been built on a deception.
Only after a careful rereading and a good deal of thought did I understand that underpinning my reading of the Larry Peters adventures, the only foundation beneath them, was what I had wanted to be there, nothing but what I had donated to Larry from my past, from my imagination. To a great degree, the Larry Peters I knew, the Larry Peters I had once wanted to be, had always been my creation, was even, perhaps, me.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
18
ALMOST FOUR YEARS LATER, Albertine and I were sitting in Dudley Beaker’s living room one evening. We had come for dinner, and we had been having a wonderful time. The conversation had been lively, and Eliza had, I think, genuinely enjoyed our youthful volubility. Albertine and I were so full of ourselves and of each other just then that in conversation we never really confronted a subject directly: we could only talk about its relationship to, meaning for, effect on, or even irrelevance to, ourselves.
It was late now, and the four of us had moved from the dining room to the living room, where we sat sipping cognac, which I was trying very hard to learn how to sip, and talking, talking, talking. Mr. Beaker had been, throughout the evening, urging me to take a position that had opened at the Babbington Clam Council, a position as an assistant copy writer. I had restrained myself, throughout the evening, from telling him that a position as an assistant copy writer at the Babbington Clam Council seemed ridiculous to me. Talk had turned to Burton Calder, whose new novel, Burning Wind, had everyone talking, including me. Finally, because the hour was so late and the meal had been so good and I had known Mr. Beaker and Eliza for so long and I had had too much to drink, I confessed.
“You know,” I said, and I paused to gather all their attention, “that’s what I’d really like. I’d like a Burning Wind. I’d like to write a big, fat book, bigger than Burning Wind.” (Just as an aside here let me ask what it is about being young that makes us want to do things that are difficult beyond anything we know, beyond the level of difficulty that we have even learned how to imagine, and in some cases, of which mine is one, makes us so burn to do them that we never let go of the desire to do them until at last we have done them or have failed in the attempt? Albertine’s answer, when I posed this question to her, was, “We were all asses in the past,” but she was busy at the time, going over the accounts, and she may not have given it much thought.)
Mr. Beaker, perhaps because he had endured with equanimity and restraint an evening of youthful ambition and egotism that must finally have had an effect like that of eating too many jelly doughnuts, and because he had endured my coolness toward the work at which he had labored for so long, work that he had hated when he had done it but had come, in the fullness of time, to regard as his apprenticeship, work that had been necessary and valuable, rose, stretched, yawned, looked down at me, and said, deliberately, “Ahhhh, but Peter Leroy will never do that.”
He gave me a twisted smile, drank the last of his cognac, and got our coats while my heart sank and snow fell on my future. We said our goodnights, and we all kept our smiles on, but after that night I never spoke frankly to Mr. Beaker again.
In Topical Guide 204, Mark Dorset considers Reality: Real and Fictional from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
17
ONE SUMMER NIGHT, when my struggles had only begun, Albertine and I were sitting on Big Grandfather’s front porch. We had been spending the summer with Grandfather, in his house. Grandmother had died during the year, and our presence in the house was supposed to cheer Grandfather up, to keep the place from echoing with sorrow and loneliness. We felt that we hadn’t succeeded, and we had become convinced that we couldn’t have succeeded, that we should have known that Grandfather felt the loss of my grandmother too strongly for us to make him forget it for long.
However, of an evening, the three of us would sit on his front porch, on the glider, or in metal chairs that were suspended on springs within metal frames and wheezed when we rocked in them, and I would tell my grandfather stories about things that had happened at work. I was working right down the street, in the boatyard that was once Cap’n Leech’s, then Leech’s son’s, and is now Raskolnikov’s. Crazy and amusing things happened there; crazy things happen wherever pleasure boats are moored near working boats, because people who think that boats are for fun and people who think that boats are for work each think the others are crazy. I was a college student at the time, so of course I thought everyone was crazy. My grandfather and Albertine and I would sit and rock and drink gin-and-tonics, and I’d tell my stories, and sometimes I would make Grandfather laugh. When I made him laugh, I’d add to what I had told him, embellish, improvise, mimic, burlesque to make him laugh again, because, after all, I was supposed to try to cheer him up.
On that night, it had grown late, and the three of us had grown quiet. We would be going upstairs to bed soon. Out of the darkness, Grandfather asked me what I wanted to do with myself. I told him what I had told only Albertine before, that I wanted to write a book, and in the confessional safety of the darkness, the security of this familiar setting and sympathetic audience, I felt myself ready to try to tell him all about the book, the impossibly big book, that I wanted to write.
“That’s good,” he said, before I had a chance to say any of that. “That’s very good. Make sure that there’s a laugh on every page.”
I stopped myself. I took a sudden cheap pity on him, who didn’t need or want it. Instead of telling him anything about the book I wanted to write, I indulged him—or so I thought. I’m not sure now exactly how I answered him, but I must have said something like, “That’s an interesting idea.”
And in the darkness I smiled to myself a shameful, condescending smile, and decided that it would be too difficult to explain to Grandfather why I didn’t want laughs, why laughing seemed to me reprehensible in this miserable world.
In truth, I learned only much later, explaining would have been too difficult because I didn’t understand that the main reason I considered laughter inappropriate was that my circle of serious friends considered it so, walked with their eyes down, their heads bowed by the misery of life. To expect happiness was insane; to want happiness was arrogant and selfish. I had come to regard having a good time, laughing without irony, singing anything but the blues, dancing of any sort as childishly foolish, betrayals of one’s unwillingness or inability to face up to the horror that is Life. To indulge in any of the foregoing whoopee, I had to be drunk, but my drinking, even if it led to laughing, singing, and dancing, was not of the variety that makes a young suburban matron, leading her grinning husband to the door, wonder why she wasted the money having her hair done for this terrible night, makes her turn to her hosts and say, “He thinks he has to drink to have a good time. I’m sorry about the tray of glasses.” No, it was the variety that makes a dark-eyed model stub out her Camel and say to her hosts, before she drags the young painter or poet or sculptor or playwright or filmmaker or novelist off, “Only bourbon dulls his pain.”
I couldn’t have explained to Grandfather then that I wanted the respect of all those very serious people, people for whom it was an axiom that no serious thought could lead to laughter, real laughter, and since I couldn’t explain, I yawned and said, “Are you ready for bed, Al?”
Albertine and I went up to bed, and when we got in and pulled the sheet over us and lay quietly in the dark, I heard Grandfather on the porch, rocking his chair and making the springs wheeze, tapping his foot, and whistling the tune to “Rarotonga,” and then, suddenly, loudly, he began to sing:
Come on, honey, come with me
Sail away, across the sea
To Rarotonga,
Where the nights are longa
And our love will grow much stronga.
Oh, honey, won’t you come alonga,
Across the sea
To Rarotonga—
With me?
A neighbor slammed her window down, as she had done on another evening, when Albertine and I had stayed on the porch too late with friends and I had begun to talk too loudly about the nature of things. Grandfather stopped singing, and I heard him come into the house. In a little while, when he came upstairs, I heard him chuckling, and so ignorant was I of the way life really is that I thought his sorrow must have driven him mad. I didn’t understand at all that the memories accumulated during years of happiness could weigh enough to balance so large a loss, or that the mind will sometimes find a way to free the heart from pain.
In Topical Guide 203, Mark Dorset considers Tears and Laughter; Sorrow and Solace; and Shangri-La; Fantasy Land; Oz; Neverland; Raratonga from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
16
MY ABILITY TO IMAGINE myself as Larry Peters improved with time, and I must admit that I used it now and then to get away. And I have continued to do so. I’m just old enough now—as I write these words I am forty years and thirty-eight days old—to be able to admit without embarrassment that I never really abandoned most of my childhood habits and interests, certainly not the pleasant pastime of slipping into the character of Larry Peters.
For several years, while I finished college and took a master’s degree in molluscan biology, my version of Larry developed without any apparent assistance from me. He simply sat in that comfortable corner of my mind, on Kittiwake Island, which came to resemble Small’s Island more and more, and a life grew around him while I neglected him, as beach grass will grow in sand under the worst conditions. Whenever I rowed out to the island to see what he was up to I was surprised to find how much more I knew about him, and how much more there was to know about him.
From time to time, I began jotting down my thoughts about Larry, conversations that he might have been involved in before the boundless summer in which all the adventures seemed to occur, or after that summer, when he went off to college, or later, when he returned to the island.
Albertine and I married, and, as most people who can read do at some time or other, often in their youth, I began to want to write a book. And, as most people do who begin to want to write a book, especially those who begin to want to write a book in their youth, I wanted to write a book about myself. Unlike many people who want to write books about themselves, I was embarrassed to admit it, even to myself, and so I cast about for a way to write a book about myself without seeming to. I didn’t know exactly what I was going to put into this book if I was going to avoid putting in anything about myself, if I was not going to admit that it was ego that made me want to write a book at all, that my only reason for wanting to write a book was to cry out in an acceptable way, “Look at me! Over here! Look at me! Watch this: no hands! See? Wait, wait! Look at this! I can do it with my eyes closed! Watch!”
Had I simply been willing to admit all that, however, I would have written, had I managed to write a book at all, a chaotic, pointless, formless book, because I hadn’t more than the foggiest, inchoate notion of what I was like. It took nearly twenty years for me to discover what my books should be like, and during all that time I wrestled every day with big, powerful ideas, ideas that were much bigger and stronger than I. How apt that time-worn image for struggling with a big idea is, the image of grappling, grasping, clutching, twisting, trying to hold on to a squirming, powerful, slippery idea that strives to elude you, to get out of your clutches. I wrestled with form and style and tone and argument, and the book grew larger and more diverse, more populous, more anarchic.
What headaches I gave myself over this. What pits of despair I threw myself into. How difficult I was to live with. What a pest I was at parties. More and more often, to get to sleep at night, to escape the big ideas, I would make my way across Murky Bay to trade wisecracks with Rocky and Lucinda and Marie.
In Topical Guide 202, Mark Dorset considers Writing: Beginning and Writers: Their Motivation from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
15
AS TIME PASSED, the snapshot stayed in my mind. I could recover the picture of myself sitting on the dock whenever I wished, just by closing my eyes and willing it to appear. I assumed that it was a memory, but unlike most memories, the picture became clearer with time, more detailed, more precise. I could feel my sensations better, more clearly, as time passed. At the same time, however, much about this memory made little sense to me, and explanations eluded me. Where was I? How did I get there?
I had my suspicions. My maternal grandmother, Gumma, was a believer in recurring dreams that passed from generation to generation, dreams that arose from acts of such power that they inspired emotions too strong to die in a single lifetime. She claimed to have one herself, a dream about rushing along a curving corridor, opening a series of doors, and falling after she opened the last one. She was convinced that this derived from something terrible her grandmother had done. My mother had one, one that I had learned about when I told her, years before, about a dream that I had had while I tossed restlessly during a bout with one of the childhood diseases, something that made me feverish.
It was a dream in which nothing happened. There was a featureless landscape; it might have been a desert or tundra. In the foreground was a post, and from the post a line of some kind dangled. The post, and, even more than the post, the line dangling from it, made me feel miserable, nauseated, frightened, horribly empty, as if something terrible had happened and things would never be right again. When I told my mother about this, I did so reluctantly, because during this restless and feverish time I had, by assembling in a careful, step-by-step, logical fashion the few facts I knew, the rumors, assertions, wild claims, and flights of fancy I had heard, and the mystifying hints in a pamphlet my mother had left in my room, arrived at a clear theoretical understanding—which in form resembled the instruction sheets that came with the model airplanes I had become fond of building, an insert-part-A-into-part-B understanding—of what men and women did when they “went to bed together,” and had discovered, by way of looking for an experimental method to test my theory, masturbation. I had a hunch that my unsettling dream might have something to do with that.
“Oh, Peter,” said my mother. “I have that dream, too.”
“You do?” I asked.
“Oh, yes. But I know why.”
“I think I know why, too,” I said, looking at my hands.
“It’s because of the rowboat.”
“The rowboat?”
She explained a painful memory. One Sunday when she was a little girl, Gumma and Guppa had organized a picnic on one of the islands in the bay. Friends had traveled to the island in boats, and after a while the children had wandered away from the adults to amuse themselves. The amusement for the youngest children consisted of throwing sand and pebbles into a dinghy that Garth and May Castle had used to row from their sloop to the island. The rowboat was tied to a piece of driftwood that the Castles had thrust into the sand. In time, the children succeeded in sinking the dinghy, and they cheered when it settled to the bottom. When it was discovered, none of the adults had been particularly angry, in fact most had thought the incident funny, but my mother had felt ashamed of her part in the business, and she insisted that a sudden wind had arisen and blown the sand and pebbles into the dinghy while the children watched, helpless and aghast. As time passed, she became more ashamed of the lie than of the act it was meant to hide. She thought that the recurring dream showed the piece of driftwood and the line leading into the water. I thought for a while that my sitting-on-the-dock memory might have been a more precise version of my post-and-line dream, but I have never been a believer in such things, so I continued to look for another explanation.
I thought that the dock might be on Small’s Island, but things were not quite right. For one thing, I was not quite myself in this scene. For another, the island was not quite Small’s Island. I was reminded of the eerie feeling Raskol had described so many years before, when he told the Glynns and me about his crawling through a culvert into what he took to be another world. Finally, with all the force of the truth, the explanation hit me. I was, in this snapshot, the young Larry Peters, but not quite the young Larry Peters with whom I was familiar. I was the young Larry Peters as he would have been if I had been the young Larry Peters. Sitting on the dock, I was Larry Peters before the adventures began, before the family had prospered, when Larry’s father was still struggling to make his gewgaw business go, Larry Peters at a time of his life about which Roger Drake had told me nothing, at a time when I was free to construct any Larry I wished. Something else struck me at nearly the same time. The picture of myself as the young Larry Peters that I had in my mind was becoming clearer with time, rather than fading, because it was not a memory: I was making it up.
In Topical Guide 201, Mark Dorset considers Dreams; Sex Education Circa 1953 or 1954; and Guilt from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
14
SOME EIGHT YEARS LATER, on a cold February afternoon during my sophomore year at Hargrove University, I sat in Cranston Library, trying to study for a mathematics examination. The library was overheated; I was sitting in an overstuffed leather wing chair, the type of chair that I have, ever since my days at Hargrove, thought of as the only type of chair proper for a library. Snow was falling outside, and the air in the library was heavy with the odor of wet wool, wet leather, old books, painted steam radiators, and students, many of us dozing over our studies.
I stretched, yawned, and decided to take a break from my work to read a letter from a high school acquaintance, Robert Meyer, a boy who had passed through Babbington High School almost unnoticed, but who had this year done a daring thing for that time, taken a year’s sabbatical from college to be on his own in Europe. As soon as he reached European soil, Robert began writing to everyone who had ignored him in high school. He wrote long, tedious letters full of strained insights, accounts of unlikely sexual encounters, and snatches of the local language. I received at least one a week.
When the first of his letters arrived, I had no idea who Robert Meyer was, and it wasn’t until I began hearing from friends who had also received letters from him that I was able to retrieve a blurry face from my memory of high school, someone rushing past in the hallway, mumbling a greeting, but averting his face and hurrying on, someone still sitting in the stands after a football game, alone, at one end of the upper row of bleachers, while the rest of us headed for the gate, the parking lot, cars, pizza. I looked him up in my yearbook, but his photograph was no more help to me in recalling Robert just a year after we had been in school together than the photographs of my other classmates would be twenty-five years later. Though I was happy to receive any mail, even letters from Robert, they grew wearying after a while, and so when one arrived I delayed opening it for a little longer than I had delayed opening the last. This one had been in my book bag for several days. I tore open the thin blue envelope, unfolded the letter and read.
“Ich bin nun endlich in München und sitze hier in meinem Zimmer bei Frau Brenner in der Schellingstrasse,” the letter began.
The heat, the odors, and Robert Meyer’s prose style put me to sleep nearly at once. I had been sitting with my feet up on a table, and I had leaned backward in the chair until it rocked on the back legs only. When I woke, I was sitting on a dilapidated wooden dock, the sort of dock from which you are certain to pick up splinters in your feet if you walk along it barefoot. Rusty nailheads projected from pilings where boards had once been attached. Other boards, half rotted, hung at odd angles. Beside the dock was a rowboat, a sunken rowboat, resting on the sandy bottom in a foot or so of water. An old line, green with slime, still made the rowboat fast to a piling at the end of the dock. I was barefoot, and I was playing a game with the surface of the water—the same game that I used to play when I let my feet dangle over the stern of the Rambunctious, Big Grandfather’s boat: I was trying to bring the soles of my feet as close to the surface of the water as I could without touching it. It was day, but the day was foggy. It was summer, and I was wearing only a pair of shorts and a short-sleeved shirt. A wavelet touched my heel, which meant I’d lost another round, and I kicked my feet and ran my toes through the water. It was still and warm. I was nine or ten.
Faintly, I began to hear something through the fog. As the sound grew stronger, I thought I recognized it, but I couldn’t be quite sure. It might be only the lapping of waves, but the water was still. It might be laughter, but who would be out in the fog, laughing?
“Are you all right?”
A young woman with dark hair stepped out of the fog and brought her face near mine. I found myself sitting straight in a leather chair, my back pressed firmly along its back, my legs flat along the seat where the dock ought to have been, my lower legs against the edge of the cushion, and from around me I heard a sound that I thought I recognized, a sound that might be laughter, but I saw no people; a sound that might be the lapping of waves, if there were waves inside a building. Certainly I was inside a building, but I was looking at the ceiling, and if the evidence of my eyes was to be believed, the ceiling had been moved around to occupy the plane ordinarily occupied by a wall. Some sort of practical joke? Not likely, I thought. A trick of the mind, the not-quite-fully-awake mind. Transpositions of this sort were, I knew from my several attempts to read À La Recherche du Temps Perdu, not uncommon illusions upon awakening; in the misty margin between sleep and wakefulness Marcel might seem to recognize the architecture and furnishings of his room at home, only to find, as he came slowly to his senses, that the uplifted forefinger of day had rearranged the furniture, the windows, the doorways, and the walls, and transformed his bedroom into a hotel room with a view of the sea.
(Since it has occurred to me just now and is such a fine illustration of the fundamental truths one sometimes finds in fiction, I will mention briefly a comparable anecdote that Porky White told me many years later. He and his wife, Marcella, had traveled to a small lakeside village somewhere in New England for a wedding. The ceremony was intimate and touching, and the party that followed was long and exuberant. Porky retired in wonderful spirits, more than a little soused. “In the middle of the night,” he told me, “I get a message from my unconscious: ‘Porky! Wake up! You have got to take a piss, and you have got to do it right now,’ it was saying. Quiet as I can be, I get out of bed, step out of the bedroom into the dark hallway, turn right, turn right again into the bathroom, walk to the toilet, reach into my shorts and pull out my pride and joy, yawn, and let myself go. Instead of the basso splashing I usually hear under these circumstances, I hear an odd, hollow, splattering sound, and this incongruity wakes me up. I discover that I’m not in my own house, of course, I’m not in my bathroom, and I’m pissing onto the caned seat of a fine old bentwood chair.”)
“Oh, sure,” I said to the young woman with dark hair. “I’m fine. I just dozed off.” I yawned and stretched and rubbed my eyes. I thought that some fresh air might be in order, and I tried to get up. Only then, when my body told me that gravity was pulling from the wrong direction, did I realize that the chair and I were lying on our backs on the floor, and that the laughter was real, directed at me. I scrambled to my feet, righted the chair, and stacked my books and papers, trying not to raise my head all the while, so that I wouldn’t have to see any of the people who were laughing at me. I made my way, with what I hoped was dignified haste, through the doors of the main entrance and out into the bright sunlight. The sun was so bright after the library that I closed my eyes against it for a moment and reeled with a dazzled dizziness. In the iridescent images in my mind’s eye I saw a piece of a persistent memory of part of a dream, no more than a snapshot, but a clear and intriguing snapshot: that moment of sitting on the old dock.
In Topical Guide 200, Mark Dorset considers Fictional Characters: Robert Meyer and Illusions: Upon Waking from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
13
GREAT-GRANDMOTHER LEROY was ill for months, but I didn’t realize how seriously ill she was until Grandfather moved her downstairs from her rooms in the attic. She moved into the room across the hall from what had been my father’s bedroom when he was a boy and was now the bedroom I used when I visited. She never left the bed. For several weeks before she died, she didn’t speak. Sometimes when I visited, I sat beside her bed for an hour or so and talked without even pausing for a response. I knew that she wasn’t going to say anything, so I just talked on and on, quicker and quicker, to keep the silence from settling over her like a shroud. When I ran out of events at school, episodes with my playmates, things I had learned, and things I had heard or seen, I recounted for her episodes from the Larry Peters books, and when I came to those gaps between scenes, between chapters, when the action in one chapter ended and the action of the next, set somewhere else, hadn’t yet begun, I filled those gaps, as, years earlier, I had filled the gaps in my understanding of the Leroy family history when I had recited it for her in her attic rooms, with sawdust—that is, with episodes that I made up on my own, as one uses sawdust to fill the cracks in the bottom of a wooden boat. Throughout all my chatter, Great-grandmother never said a thing.
But then, one afternoon, Great-grandmother suddenly interrupted me, as if she had heard enough at last. I was startled by her voice. I hadn’t expected to hear her talk at all, but I must have had in the back of my mind the idea that if she were to speak, her voice would be as thin and tired as her face had become. Instead, it was nearly as strong as it had always been, and it deceived me into thinking that she had suddenly gotten better.
“Peter,” she said. “I have a present for you.”
“You do?” I glanced around the room. “Where is it?” I asked.
“Upstairs,” she said. “You go up and get it.”
I went upstairs and opened the door to her rooms. Something strange had happened to these rooms while she had been out of them. Left alone, the things there had begun to claim ownership. The chair where Great-grandmother used to sit and carve coconuts to represent Leroys had become the strongest personality in the room now, and it sat in command, dark and heavy, in front of the windows, silhouetted against the curtained light. I looked around, but for a while I couldn’t find anything that looked like a present. Then, on one of the shelves that held the coconuts, I saw a box, nearly cubical. The box wasn’t wrapped, or even tied with ribbon, but it was taped shut, and when I took it from the shelf, I found, written on the top, in pencil, the words FOR PETER.
From the heft and size, I was certain that the box held a coconut. A lump formed in my throat, and tears filled my eyes. I decided at once that Great-grandmother had carved a coconut to represent herself, and that by giving it to me she was telling me that she expected to die. I lifted the lid gravely, slowly, holding my hands symmetrically, palms parallel, fingers extended, raising the lid directly upward and slowly setting it down to one side, for I had begun to serve as an altar boy at the Babbington Episcopal Church and had developed an exaggerated sense of ceremony. Great-grandmother’s coconut heads looked so like one another, and I was so completely prepared to find one carved in Great-grandmother’s likeness and to feel grief at the sight of it, that for a moment or two I didn’t recognize that the coconut represented me. Not only had Great-grandmother carved the coconut in my likeness, but she had carved me laughing, though the faces of the other Leroys were tight-lipped and stern. I hurried downstairs, smiling.
Great-grandmother was chuckling when I came into the bedroom. “I always meant to get around to you,” she said.
“Thanks, Grandma,” I said. “Is it all right if I take it home with me?”
“Of course it’s all right, Peter,” she said. “You can have all of them.”
This gift brought with it a pleasure so buoyant that it was dizzying, almost frightening. I kissed Great-grandmother, and as soon as I left the room where she lay I could feel the lightness of my delight lifting me from the floor, feel myself drifting upward as easily as a soaring bird, up the stairs to her room, where I spent the rest of the afternoon drifting on the air there, so dense with memories and dust, and playing with my heads.
WHEN I CAME DOWNSTAIRS much later, with the head of Black Jacques under my left arm and my own under my right, the door to the room where Great-grandmother lay was locked, and my parents were in the living room with Grandfather and Grandmother, making plans for the funeral.
THAT NIGHT I lay in bed, wakeful and anxious and hurt. Everything seemed wrong. Everything seemed confused. My thoughts were turbid, roiling, like wrack stirred up by a storm. I couldn’t make sense of them, and I couldn’t drive them away. Then, at last, I saw through the murk a heartening yellow light, and after a while I could see that it was coming from the windows of the Peterses’ living room, where everyone was gathered to trade wisecracks after dinner, where no one good was going to die, where things were as they ought to be, and since there was a rowboat handy, I stepped into it, shoved off, and began rowing. With each stroke, my mad and disappointing world receded, and from Kittiwake Island I could hear Lucinda calling me, calling me to come in now, to come in off Murky Bay and join them in the living room, and she was calling me Larry.
In Topical Guide 199, Mark Dorset considers Silence: As Sadness; Silence: As a Vacuum to be Filled; Sawdust: As Filler; Death: As an Absence; Traits, of Character, of Personality; and Rowboat: Man in a from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
12
I THINK THAT MOST READERS of the Larry Peters books dreamed of being a friend of Larry’s, of being found washed up on Kittiwake Island one morning, carried to the big house on an improvised litter, nursed back to health by Marie and Mrs. Peters, and then adopted into the Peters circle. The attitude inspired in me by the Larry Peters books was fundamentally different. I didn’t want to be like Larry Peters; I wanted to beLarry Peters.
I wanted his chum Rocky King to be my chum on exactly the terms that existed between him and Larry. I wanted his brilliant and unpredictable dad to be my dad. I wanted his fussy, cuddly mother to be my mother. I wanted Marie to turn down my sheets. I wanted to sit up at night, after everyone else was asleep, and trade confidences and wisecracks with my saucy sister Lucy. I knew that this was, in all the ways that most people would have considered important, impossible. But I understood even then that there were ways in which it was not only possible but, for me, necessary, necessary in a way that only the things we truly want to do, truly derive pleasure from doing, are necessary, however complex and demanding they may be. If Roger Drake had been able to imagine Larry and all the rest of them and the context for them, surely I could manage to imagine myself as Larry, could imagine a complete and consistent enough set of details to fill the chinks in Mr. Drake’s portrait of Larry with details about myself, to have Larry say what I would say during the breakfast conversations on the mornings when there was no adventure to interrupt, when the Peterses could stretch out and relax, putter in the garden, read the papers, listen to a record, play the piano, go for a swim.
I spent a lot of time within the Larry Peters books, playing at being Larry, but I never thought of myself as escaping into them, never thought of myself as retreating into them to get away from a world that wasn’t what it ought to have been, never thought of myself as making my way across Murky Bay in the hope of finding something better or leaving something worse behind, never, that is, until my great-grandmother died.
In Topical Guide 198, Mark Dorset considers Reality: Real and Fictional; Imagination: As a Means of Escape from Real Reality; Fantasies: Metamorphosis or Transformation; and Death from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
11
MARIE, THE PETERSES’ MAID, made my heart go pit-a-pat the moment she first appeared in one of the adventures, pushing the kitchen door open with a beautifully rounded hip, stepping into the dining room on those long and luscious legs, carrying a tray of blueberry pancakes, just as, I’m sure, she made the hearts of most of the boys who read the Larry Peters books beat faster whenever she appeared. Marie never figured very prominently in the adventures themselves, though she would pop in now and then. Ordinarily, she was left at home when the pace of the action picked up, and we wouldn’t see her again until the end of the book, when the adventurers—tired, possibly injured, but always victorious—returned to Kittiwake Island and sat down to another big meal. Most of my ideas about Marie came from outside the books themselves, from other sources and from my imagination. There were, however, one or two scenes in which Marie appeared that have remained sharp and clear and brilliant in my memory. I am willing to bet a sizable sum that any reader of the Larry Peters books will recall one of those scenes immediately and vividly if I merely end this sentence with the phrase tub of Jell-O.
In The Flying Aspidistras, Kittiwake Island is invaded by a squadron of thugs and goons in the pay of an evil manufacturer of rubber house plants who is planning to move into the gewgaw business, and Marie and Larry are bound hand and foot and set adrift in a leaking rowboat. As the water in the rowboat rises, and Larry and Marie confront the likelihood that the next few minutes will be their last, Marie tells Larry that what makes her saddest is the thought of the many things she hoped to do in the life that she had imagined still stretched out before her like a long highway, with mysterious stretches hidden behind curves or over hills, with forks and crossroads where she might have, on impulse, veered from the broad, well-traveled way and so on.
“Well,” said Larry, “I guess that road into the future has come to a dead end.” He laughed bitterly, and then his voice softened. “I’m sorry that you won’t get to do all those things, Marie,” he said gently.
“So am I,” said Marie. Her voice caught, a shudder ran through her, and she swallowed hard.
“Say,” said Larry, forcing a lighthearted tone into his voice, “suppose you could do just one of those things. What would it be?”
“One?” asked Marie. “Oh, my goodness. One? I don’t know, I—”
“What’s the first one that pops into your head?”
“Oh, well,” said Marie. “The first one that pops into my head? I—oh, I don’t know—I—well—I’ve always thought it would be fun to—you know that big claw-foot tub in my bathroom?”
“Sure,” said Larry. He blushed as soon as he had spoken, for he had on many an evening climbed the apple tree outside the window of Marie’s bathroom in the hope of catching a glimpse of her while she bathed in the claw-foot tub to which she referred, and had, in fact, succeeded on a number of occasions.
“Well, I’ve often thought that it would be fun to draw a nice hot bath in that tub and then stir in—oh, you’ll laugh at me.”
“No, Marie, I won’t,” said Larry. There was so much genuine compassion in his voice that Marie was able to continue without embarrassment.
“Well,” she said, “I’d stir in about—oh, I guess, two or three dozen packages of Jell-O.”
“Jell-O?” asked Larry. His heart had begun to beat at a faster rate.
“What’s your favorite flavor?”
“Raspberry,” said Larry, in a hoarse whisper.
“I’d stir in all that raspberry Jell-O and then slip off my nightgown and settle into the tub.”
“Oh my God,” said Larry. His heart beat pit-a-pat.
“I’d rest my head on the edge of the tub and lie there in the warm water and just relax while the water cooled and the Jell-O firmed around me—”
“Oh,” said Larry. “Pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat,” said his heart.
“—shaping itself to every inch of me—”
“Ah,” said Larry. His heart was beating now with a small, sharp pain, as if a thorn had lodged in it.
“—and perhaps I’d fall asleep. When I woke up, I’d be enveloped by Jell-O, snug in a tub of Jell-O, resilient raspberry Jell-O, molded to me, embracing me as no lover ever could, as not even a hundred lovers could embrace me at once.”
A sound something like a sob came from Larry.
“And then, very softly, I would call out, ‘Help. Help me, Larry.’”
“What?” asked Larry. “What?”
“And you would open the door of the bathroom—”
“I would?”
“—and you’d be holding—now, don’t laugh—”
“What would I be holding? What?”
“A spoon.”
“A spoon. Oh, my God, a spoon.”
“Not a big spoon. A little spoon, a demitasse spoon.”
In Topical Guide 197, Mark Dorset considers Erotic Fantasies: Marie in The Adventures of Larry Peters from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
“What was that?” whispered Larry.
“I didn’t hear anything,” said Lucinda.
“I think someone’s coming,” said Larry. “I’m sure I heard someone laugh out there in the dark.” He switched his flashlight off. He and Lucinda stood silently in the darkness.
“I don’t hear anything,” said Lucinda.
“I’m sure now,” said Larry. “I heard someone laugh, and I heard footsteps, the footsteps of two people, two heavy people, on the gravel outside.” Larry took Lucinda’s hand and squeezed it. “We’ve got to hide,” he said. “I wish I could remember where that ladder was. We could hide in the hayloft above us if we could find the ladder, but I’m afraid we might miss our footing in the dark and make a noise. If only I could risk turning the flashlight on for an instant. Wait a minute! There was a wooden box of some kind around here, wasn’t there?”
“Larry, are you sure someone’s out there? I didn’t hear anything,” said Lucinda.
“Lucy,” whispered Larry. “I’ve found the box! Hurry! Climb in here. If they find us, there’s no telling what they’ll do to us!”
The urgency in her brother’s voice was clear. Lucy moved quickly and soundlessly to the box and climbed inside while he held the lid open. The box was narrow and shallow, just about the right size, Lucy reflected as she climbed in, for a coffin. The thought sent a shiver down her spine. She stretched out in the box and Larry climbed in and lowered the lid.
“There’s not much room in here,” said Larry. “I don’t think I can squeeze beside you. I’m going to have to lie on top of you.”
“That’s okay,” whispered Lucinda. “It’s pretty comfortable. Somebody has put a blanket and pillow in here.”
“That’s a stroke of good luck,” said Larry.
“Hey, what are you doing?” asked Lucinda.
“I’m just trying to find a comfortable position,” said Larry.
“If you make yourself any more comfortable, we’re going to have to get engaged,” said Lucinda.
Larry stifled a laugh. He and Lucinda loved trading wisecracks like this.
“It’s pretty hot in here, isn’t it?” said Larry.
“It sure is,” said Lucinda. “What are you doing now?”
“I’m just trying to get these hot clothes off.”
“Larry, let me out of here!”
“It’s not safe out there, Sis.”
“It’s not safe in here either, Brother.”
Roger Drake, No Laughing Matter: A Larry Peters Adventure
In Topical Guide 196, Mark Dorset considers Box: Unusual Uses for; and Seduction: Ludicrous Attempts at from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
10
LARRY’S SISTER, Lucinda, was as cute as a button and smart as a whip. She and Larry loved trading wisecracks; in fact, I realize, reflecting on the Peterses now and bringing to mind my feelings toward them when I was a boy, that the wisecracking and playful teasing among them was meant to serve as a sign of the love they felt for one another, something I didn’t understand at the time. To me then, it seemed no more than a part of their exciting and unpredictable style, but even if I considered it no more than an element of style, the wisecracking was one of those constants of the Peters household that persisted beyond the adventures, and was therefore one of the truly valuable aspects of the books and of life in the Peters family. There was little wisecracking in my family, and I came to think that there would be a good deal more fun and immeasurably more panache if only there were more wisecracking. The Peterses’ wisecracking seemed to be one of the few things that I might translate from Larry’s life into mine.
“Peter,” said my father one morning while I was musing along the foregoing lines, “would you bring me an ashtray?”
“Ash and ye shall reshieve,” I said.
My father gave me a pained look, and I came quickly to the conclusion that there are, essentially, two kinds of families, wisecracking families and nonwisecracking families, and that it had been my unfortunate lot to be born into one of the latter.
Whenever Lucinda entered a scene, I began to smile as I read, for I knew that something interesting was going to happen. She was a year younger than Larry, but since girls mature more quickly than boys, she easily held her own in their amiable tussles, both verbal and physical. (The ages of the characters in the Larry Peters adventures were never given. The only references to age that I can recall were relative: we were told somewhere in one of the early books that Lucinda was a year younger than Larry and that Rocky was three years older. After considerable reading in the literature, I’ve concluded that Lucinda and Larry, given the different rates at which they matured, were both somewhere in late-early to early-middle adolescence and that Rocky was just postadolescent. I could be wrong.)
Lucinda’s character was wildly variable. She’d act like one of the guys at one time, grow shy and retiring at another, become brazen and sarcastic, headstrong, cautious, and who-knows-what-all by turns. Her appearance was never described in full, and even the fragments that the reader was given now and then, glimpses, as it were, through a curtain parted by a puff of a summer night’s breeze, were vague, more tantalizing than satisfying. This vagueness was, I concluded, deliberate and wise, since the reader was, thanks to the lack of details about her appearance, allowed, even encouraged, to construct his own Lucinda from bits and pieces of girls he knew, or a girl he had merely glimpsed—at the beach, say, dropping a strap of her bathing suit down over her arm, rubbing sun-tan lotion onto her shoulder absentmindedly while she stared out across the surf toward the shimmering horizon, or stretched out on the foredeck of a lean blue sloop, wearing red-rimmed reflective sunglasses, reading a paperback book the title of which one could not make out, or perhaps perched with a group of friends on the varnished handrail atop the railing that ran along the boardwalk, raising her right leg to scratch, just at the edge of the line imprinted by the elastic of her bathing suit, the irregular red welt of a horsefly bite—for these books were in one respect truly masterly pieces of work: they provided a context for the fantasies of adolescent boys, a context so reassuring that the timidity and fear that ordinarily attended those fantasies nearly disappeared when they were entertained within it. One’s parents and other adults, who seemed at times to be regarding one with lancet eyes, eyes that penetrated straight to that abscess where one’s guilty urges maturated, did not go to Kittiwake Island.
If the bond between Larry and Rocky became for me the paradigm of friendship, and it did, what existed between Larry and Lucy made me wish for that special relationship that can exist only between a brother and sister. What is it that makes that relationship what it is? It is, I suppose, partly narcissistic. Here is an interlocutor who understands all your references, who shares your habits of speech, who even sounds a bit like you. Here is a girl who reminds you of yourself. Here is your companion, if your ages are close, as Lucy’s and Larry’s were, in growing up. I didn’t have to envy Larry for his having Rocky, the older male friend, who had seen so much more of the world than Larry had, who could teach him the things that a worldly older male friend can, since I had Raskolnikov, who showed every sign of growing up to be a lot like Rocky, but I envied Larry very much for his having Lucinda, the younger sister, together with whom he was able to learn so much by trial and error, as was the case in No Laughing Matter.
In Topical Guide 129, Mark Dorset considers Families: Types of; Humor: Feeble Attempts at; Fantasy, Fantasies, Fantasizing; and Imaginary Places: Qualities of from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
9
LARRY’S MOTHER was entirely occupied with domestic affairs, although she didn’t actually do much work. Marie did most of the cooking, though Mrs. Peters had several dishes for which she was famous: her chow-chow relish, piccalilli, one-eyed Egyptians, hoppin’ John, and pigs-in-blankets were family favorites. Marie made the beds, did the laundry, ordered supplies for delivery from Murky Bay, and generally bustled around, wisecracking, pushing dust around, and offering down-to-earth advice. Employees of the knickknack works did the heavier maintenance chores. Mrs. Peters was the domestic manager. She organized everything. It was clear to me from the start that although there was a surface dottiness to her character, she made everything in the Peters ménage work. None of the Peterses could be described as level-headed, but Antonia Peters possessed the levelest of the Peters heads. She was the only member of the Peters family who could be counted on, when six or seven things were happening at once, to pick out the one thing that most needed immediate attention. Consider the situation in The Camel’s Back. One morning, after Lucinda has brought the workers from shore to the island on the Peters barge, a resounding crash, coming from who-knows-where on the island, rattles the windows in the big old Peters house. At that moment, the family is gathered in the dining room, eating breakfast.
“My goodness!” cried Mrs. Peters. “What was that?”
“It was a crash of some kind,” said Larry. “Would you pass me the sausages, Dad?”
“Do you think it might have been serious?” asked Mrs. Peters.
“Oh, I doubt it, dear,” said Edgar Peters. He put his fork down and reached for a platter of link sausages. He stopped before actually raising the platter, however. “Did you want the link sausages, Larry, or the sausage patties?” he asked.
“Gee, I’m not sure,” said Larry. “What kind are you having, Sexpot?” he asked Lucinda in the wisecracking tone that brother and sister used with each other.
“I’m going to have one of those cute little links,” she replied saucily. “They’re just about the size of your—”
“I think we should investigate,” said Mrs. Peters. Her brow was furrowed with concern.
“I haven’t had any complaints yet, Green Eyes,” Larry asserted cockily, passing the platter of link sausages to his sister.
“Stop teasing, you two,” said Edgar Peters in the kindly tone he always used with his son and daughter. “Antonia,” he said to his wife, in the reassuring tone he often employed when speaking with her, “I’m sure that if anything serious has occurred, my brother Hector will be here shortly to tell us all about it.”
“The only reason Larry hasn’t had any complaints,” said a tall, handsome young man who suddenly stepped through the doorway to the dining room, “is that he hasn’t had any customers.”
“Rocky!” squealed Lucinda. She leaped from her chair, upsetting her glass of prune juice, and ran to Rocky. She threw herself at the smiling young man, winding her arms around his neck and her long, honey-colored legs around his waist. She began covering his face with kisses.
“Hey, take it easy, Hot Stuff,” said Rocky, cupping her tight pubescent buttocks in his large and muscular hands. “I’ve had a long, hard night.”
“Did you learn anything about that swarthy stranger, Rocky?” asked Edgar Peters, in the sober tone he employed when there was a problem to be solved.
“Dear,” said Antonia Peters, “I really think that before we do anything else we ought to investigate that crash.” There was a petulant tone in her voice, which Edgar Peters interpreted as meaning that she felt she was being ignored.
“Now, dear—” he began, thinking that it might be best to humor her and investigate the crash, so that they could get on to more important things.
“Hey, I heard that too,” said Rocky. With Lucinda still wrapped around him, he made his way to the sideboard, where he took a piece of raisin-bread toast from a silver toast caddy. “There was a lot of dust and debris falling out of the air in the vicinity of the design building.” He winked at Larry and said, “I figured it was one of your projects, Larry.”
“I really think that we—” began Antonia Peters, but just then Hector Peters, Edgar Peters’s brother, burst into the dining room, dragging behind him, covered with dust from head to toe, Ignatz Steinmetz, the brilliant European gewgaw designer who had become, in two short years, one of the most valuable members of the Peters team.
“Edgar!” cried Hector. “We’re ruined!”
“There you are, Antonia,” said Edgar Peters, reaching out to pat his wife’s hand in a reassuring manner. “I told you that if the crash was serious Hector would soon be here to tell us about it.” He turned to his brother, his eyebrows drawn together in a look of grave concern. “It’s serious then, Hector?” he asked.
“Steinmetz,” said Hector Peters, “tell him what you told me.”
“Ruins!” cried the world-renowned designer. “Everything is in ruins!” When he gesticulated, and he gesticulated extravagantly, dust flew from his laboratory coat. His left cheek was badly scraped, and his hands were trembling. “We were working on the new models, and Entwhistle said, ‘How about a cup of coffee, Iggie?’ and I said, ‘Sure, why not?’ and then—kerwhammy! The roof falls in and the whole place is a shambles!”
In Topical Guide 194, Mark Dorset considers Name: What’s in a and Name: Nickname; Moniker; Sobriquet; Epithet; Hypocorism; Cognomen from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Mr. Peters cleared his throat. It often occurred to him that if it wasn’t one thing it was another; if a radiator wasn’t leaking, for example, the wisteria was dying. A little sigh escaped from Mrs. Peters. Hector whimpered and fell to the floor again, rolling over on his back so that Lucinda could scratch his flabby belly, but her attention had returned to the painting.
“It’s very—creative,” Mrs. Peters said haltingly. “Very creative. It must be wonderful to be able to come up with these ideas.”
“It’s intended to keep the mind alive,” said Larry. “Say you walk into the living room, full of the cares of the workaday world, and you glance out the window.” He demonstrated. “Before, you would have seen a familiar view that offered you no escape from your own tedious life because there was nothing interesting in it.”
“You’re telling me,” muttered Lucy.
Mr. Peters shook his head and stared at his shoes. He wondered why young people were so easily bored with life and what he might do to stir up some new excitement.
“Before,” said Larry, “you would have seen nothing but the gray waters of Murky Bay. But now you see something interesting, and you have a whole flock of things to wonder about.” He began suggesting questions, indicating details in the painting as he did so. “What island is that? How did it get there? Who built the hotel? Why would anyone build a hotel on a little island like that? Why was it abandoned? Is anyone living there now? If so, who? And what about that rowboat, that sunken rowboat at the end of the dilapidated dock?”
I read this passage for the first time with a pleasure that only Larry Peters initiates could share, for my familiarity with the conventions of the series led me at once to the conclusion that this painting would in some way offer a clue to the mystery that was going to unfold as the novel progressed, that this was one of the conventional problems in a Larry Peters story, one of the formal elements that shaped a Larry Peters story, and this knowledge made me feel that I was a participant in the unfolding of that story. A hundred pages or so later, my anticipation was rewarded.
Rocky rolled onto the grass and let out a long sigh. “All right, all right,” he said. “Have it your way.”
“Oh, Rocky,” said Lucinda, “it’s not that I don’t want to—it’s just that I’m afraid I’ll get pregnant.”
“I told you Lucy,” said Rocky. “You don’t have to worry about that if the moon is full. Jeez, you’ve got me all frustrated now.”
Lucinda sat up and rested her head on Rocky’s shoulder. Her heart pounded with fear and desire. “Oh, heck,” she thought. “Why don’t I just let him? The moon sure is full. Whenever it peeks through the clouds it lights up that oval island out there as if it were daytime.”
She ran her tongue into Rocky’s ear, and she rubbed her hand across his chest. He held her head with one strong hand and kissed her, thrusting his tongue deeply, violently, into her mouth. With his other hand he tore her shorts open and reached inside, his fingers probing roughly, poking and prying. Lucinda’s eyes opened wide with surprise, with the shock of an unexpected pleasure, and in the moonlight the oval island seemed to flash like the silver underbelly of a gigantic flatfish. All at once Lucinda was struck by the realization that something was very wrong.
“Rocky!” she shouted, pushing herself away from him and wriggling from his grasp.
“Oh, God, what is it now?” moaned Rocky.
“That island!” she cried.
“What about it?” wailed Rocky, striking the grass repeatedly with his fists.
“It’s coming closer!”
Rocky leaped to his feet and peered out over the bay. There was no doubt about it. In the moonlight, he could see a wake behind the island. The entire island was moving toward them, and it was moving fast.
“Come on,” he said. “We’ve got to get help!”
In Topical Guide 193, Mark Dorset considers Art: As Spur to Imagination and Reality: Fictional from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
8
THE READER COULD BE SURE, at the beginning of any Larry Peters book, that Larry would soon be up to something interesting, for Larry shared his father’s ingenuity for creating amusing diversions, devising interesting endeavors. Often, these were obviously derivative: after his father suggested building a raft to chart the Gulf Stream, Larry suggested casting adrift bottles containing questionnaires about the weather conditions and curious local customs of the areas in which they would eventually wash ashore; inspired by his father’s car-rocking idea, Larry developed the “dry land sailboat,” a dinghy on a platform decorated with a cardboard sea, which would fit within one half of a two-car garage and could be rocked by a near relative of the mechanism his father had designed to rock automobiles.
(The “dry land sailboat” was the basis for the subplot in The Thief of Time. In that book, Larry entertained hopes that he and Rocky might go into business for themselves with this device, but, sadly, their hopes were shattered when Harrison Whitehead, one of the world’s most distinguished brummagem designers, a mainstay of the Peters outfit, was killed during the testing of the prototype when the mock-up two-car garage filled with real exhaust fumes from the real car that Larry and Rocky and Lucinda had brought over from the mainland to drive the mechanism. The incident was reported in the Murky Bay Daily News under the headline, “Boating Accident Leaves One Dead.”)
Others of Larry’s projects were more original: his planting most of the island in bamboo and hacking out intricate pathways through it (in Bamboozled) remains my favorite, and I remember with fond admiration his success in persuading Lucinda and several of her pubescent friends to dye their hair auburn and participate in a tableau vivant based on John William Waterhouse’s Hylas and the Nymphs (in That Crazy Redhead).
In each of the Larry Peters adventures, the plot of the adventure itself turned somehow on the latest of Mr. Peters’s or Larry’s inventions, preoccupations, or avocations. For a reader who was familiar with the series and its conventions, one of the pleasures of reading any new volume came from trying to anticipate the way in which Larry’s current interest would figure in the resolution of the mystery, the capture of the crooks, the unmasking of the spies, the rescue of the hostages, or whatever other satisfactory resolution would conclude the story. Take, as an example, The Phantom Island, the eleventh novel in the series. In the first chapter, Larry assembles his family in the living room for the unveiling of a painting that he has executed on one of the living-room windows.
“Well, let’s have a look at it,” said Edgar Peters, with furrowed brow. He threw a protective arm across the shoulders of his wife, Antonia.
Larry arranged his family in a semicircle facing the draped window. Hector, an old mustard-colored dog, followed feebly after them, made his way to a spot just in front of the drapes, groaned, and fell to the floor.
Mrs. Peters spotted some spatters of paint on the rug. She gave a weary sigh. “Oh, Larry, why must these projects always make messes of one sort or another?” she asked.
“Don’t worry, Mom,” Larry said impatiently. “I’ll clean it up. I promise. Lucy, will you do the honors? Just pull the cord over there, and the drapes will part.”
Lucinda fumbled around behind the drapes until she found the cord. She struck a pose of some dignity and tugged gently; the drapes began to open but stopped after an inch or two. She gave a less gentle tug.
“Something’s jammed,” she muttered.
She wrapped the cord around her hand and gave a vigorous yank, and the entire assembly tore loose from the wall and fell to the floor at her feet, along with some plaster.
“Darn it!” she cried, leaping out of the way.
When she stepped on his tail, Hector, the old mustard-colored dog, howled and began to struggle to his feet, whimpering.
“Oh, Heck,” wailed Lucy. “Did I step on you? I’m sorry.”
She reached down to comfort the old fellow, her tiny shorts riding up to expose an eye-catching crescent of the smoothly rounded underside of her tight pubescent buttocks as she did so.
Larry indicated the painted window with a flip of his hand. “Voila!” he said.
In Topical Guide 192, Mark Dorset considers Art: Hylas and the Nymphsand Literature: Adolescent: The Phantom Island from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Mr. Peters was inventive, a leader, a loving father, and more. He was something that most fathers of my acquaintance were not: a dignified man. One could see, too, that he bore as if he were a block of granite the cares that can fall on any family, taking the full weight, so that life should rest lightly on the shoulders of the others. The reader saw this quality at once, at first meeting, when Mr. Peters was introduced in his study in The Shapely Brunette:
Larry knew that he would find his father in the tiny attic study to which Edgar Peters retired when he needed to think and work undisturbed. Larry stopped outside the door and knocked. Everyone on Kittiwake Island knew that Edgar Peters was not to be burst in upon when he was concentrating in his attic retreat.
“Just a minute,” said the voice of Marie, the maid.
Larry waited impatiently, snapping the nails of the thumb and middle finger of each hand together in his eager agitation. From behind the door came muffled conversation, the sound of something scraping along the floor. At last the door opened, and Marie, flushed, breathing heavily, the rounded tops of her ample breasts heaving above the neckline of her little black chintz uniform, stepped out of Edgar Peters’s attic asylum.
“Oh, it’s you Larry,” she said. “Your father is deep in thought. I was just straightening up around him and—”
She turned suddenly and looked back into the little hideaway. She scampered back inside and emerged with her feather duster.
“—dusting,” she finished, flourishing the feather duster. She giggled and started down the stairs.
Larry stepped inside his father’s narrow lair. Gewgaws were everywhere—along the radiator, on shelves, and tossed indiscriminately on the floor. The walls were lined with cartons of letters from correspondents around the world, all on the subject of knickknacks, the bread and butter of the Peters clan. Just inside the door were displayed documents declaring that Edgar Lawrence Peters was a member of the National Institute of Bric-a-brac Designers, an honorary member of the Institut des Fabricateurs des Bibelots, and an honorary fellow of the Royal Academy of Curio Makers. He had won awards from the Gewgaw Fanciers and the Tchotchke Mavens, among others. On the knickknack ladder, Edgar Peters was tops.
Crammed into one corner, positioned to take advantage of the light from the only window, was a rickety table that served Mr. Peters as a desk. To the casual eye, the desk, heaped with market research reports, rough sketches, and prototypes of next year’s line of gimcrackery from the Peters group, suggested a disorganized and haphazard thinker, but Larry knew that his father possessed a fine analytical mind, and that the disarray was deliberate, calculated to disarm visitors.
Dressed in one of the rumpled tweed suits that he wore in the belief that they gave him a learned air, Edgar Peters was mussing his thick sandy hair with one hand and tracing the lines of an intricate sketch with the other.
Larry wanted his father’s attention, but he was reluctant to disturb his concentration, so he stood across the table from him, fidgeting.
Father and son shared the most pronounced Peters family features: a wiry build, a wacky smile, and bright eyes. Larry shared his father’s affectations too: rumpling his hair now and then as if absentmindedly, and dressing in professorial tweeds, usually a herringbone suit, though Larry’s tweeds were often considerably spotted with oil paints, which Larry considered a bohemian touch. Mr. Peters thought the boy lacked polish.
Edgar Peters looked up from his work at last. He peered at Larry over the top of his glasses, as parents of adolescents (parents who wear glasses) will sometimes do. “Oh, Larry,” he said. “What’s up, son?”
Larry chuckled. “You certainly were deep in concentration, Dad,” he said. “You didn’t even know I was here. I’ll bet you never even noticed that Marie was in here, trying to straighten up and do some dusting.”
Mr. Peters reddened, and Larry wished that he hadn’t said anything, for it was apparent to him that his father was embarrassed by his being, as Larry’s mother so often said, “in another world” when he was concentrating on a gimcrack design.
“Yes—well—I—I—” Mr. Peters’s voice trailed off, and he rumpled his hair. “Did you want something, Larry?” he asked.
“Can you spare a minute to take a look at my latest project, Dad?” asked Larry.
Edgar Peters removed his glasses and slipped them into his jacket pocket. He rubbed the spatulate indentations on either side of his nose. “I could use a break,” he said with a weary sigh. “These damned sketches are giving me a headache.” With a sweep of his hand he indicated the plans that covered his desk.
“Aren’t they any good?” asked Larry.
“On the contrary,” said Mr. Peters. “They’re more than good. They’re brilliant, innovative, ambitious.” He let out another weary sigh. “That’s the problem.” He indicated the clutter on his desk. “These are the sketches for next year’s line. Your Uncle Hector thinks we can make bivalves the next knickknack rage, bigger than the little rococo courtiers we’ve done so well with, bigger than the black ceramic panthers, bigger even than the flamingos. Perhaps he’s right, but frankly it’s an enormous risk. Who can really be sure what piece of bric-a-brac people will want next? And these are supposed to be made of glass. I’m not even sure that we can make these in glass. Even if we can, tooling up will cost us a fortune.” From the clutter on the desk he produced a glass clam, a hand-blown prototype. “Here, look at this one,” he said.
He handed the clam to Larry, who examined it closely, racking his brain for something to say about it.
Edgar Peters waited for a bit, expecting that his son would make a comment or ask a penetrating question. When the silence had grown embarrassing, Mr. Peters cleared his throat and spoke in Larry’s stead.
“First,” he said, “will anyone buy a glass clam? I doubt that clams have widespread appeal. Second, look at how complex this is: the valves are actually hinged. Look at this! A glass hinge.” He snatched the clam from Larry and flipped it open, impatiently, breaking the glass hinge. “Can you imagine what these are going to have to sell for? Well, enough of my worries. Tell me what you’ve been up to.”
In Topical Guide 191, Mark Dorset considers Clams as Objets d’Art from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
7
LARRY’S FATHER was everything a boy might hope for, a real paterfamilias, who considered himself in control, who entertained few doubts about himself, who assumed that he was the true head of the Peters ménage. But beyond that, his work made him unusual as fathers go: he was an artist of sorts. His artistic impulses had two manifestations. One was the knickknack business, of course, and that could be considered one of the practical or applied arts; the other, the purer manifestation, was his making life interesting for himself and for his family.
Mr. Peters was able to do many things, and he got many things done. He was well known and admired for many of the things he did, but others of the things that he attempted did not have the results that he or anyone else involved in the endeavor might have hoped for, except that they always resulted in a richer, more various, more interesting life for the Peterses. Within the Peters family, not an eyebrow would be raised if Mr. Peters announced, over dinner one evening, that in the morning everyone would begin building a raft so that the family could chart the course of the Gulf Stream during their vacation, or that he had a plan for a sling that could be hung inside a suburban garage, onto which the suburban motorist could drive his car, and which, thanks to an ingenious system of gears driven by the car’s rear wheels, would rock the motorist’s colicky infant offspring gently to sleep, or that he intended to import minks to the island, where, since there were no predators, they could be allowed to run free and would breed quickly, making the Peterses wealthy beyond imagining.
And yet, as unpredictable and impracticable as Mr. Peters’s schemes may sometimes have been, he had a steady, responsible side too. The business savvy he displayed as the head of a world-renowned knickknack design firm was a world apart from the world of late nights, cheap wine, and strong cigarettes that is so firmly established in the popular notion of bric-a-brac designers. The knickknack business, as portrayed in the Larry Peters books, was a tense, competitive, cutthroat business, much more exciting than most businesses that my father or the fathers of my friends were in or were ever likely to get themselves into. Mr. Peters had moved his family to Kittiwake Island because he needed secrecy, he needed a place where he could develop his designs without his competitors’ learning about them before they were released. However, his competitors were a ruthless, unprincipled bunch who would stop at nothing to steal his designs or sabotage his plans: that’s how the adventures arose.
In Topical Guide 190, Mark Dorset considers Grammar and Usage: The Gerund from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Certainly Rocky impressed Larry and the reader with his strength, his predisposition to act, to do something about whatever situation arose, even if he did not often take the time to consider whether what he was doing was in every respect, in all its ramifications, right. More surprising, however, and, for me at least, more welcome, was the fact that Rocky was continually impressed by qualities of Larry’s that the reader may not have thought impressive, qualities that many readers—this one, certainly—may have possessed themselves but counted as nearly worthless since their playmates and schoolmates considered them of little value, may even have counted them as shortcomings before they saw that Rocky admired them in Larry. Among these was Larry’s indecisiveness, which Rocky took as laudable evidence not merely of Larry’s ability to see all sides of a question and all the consequences of an action, but also of his feeling that he had an intellectual obligation to do so.
“We’ll go in through the French doors,” said Rocky, “get the will out of the safe, make our getaway through the topiary garden, and then call your father from the pay phone back at that godforsaken gas station and beanery we passed out there in the middle of nowhere.”
“I’m not sure that’s the best plan, Rocky,” said Larry, his eyelids lowered in an attitude of thought. “What if the will isn’t in the safe? Or suppose there are two safes in the house? We know that these people are quite rich, and if I were quite rich and had a big house like this, I’d have two safes: one for jewels and one for cash and valuable papers. Now the obvious thing to do would be to put the one for jewels in a bedroom, or in a dressing room, and put the one for valuable papers in the library. But if I’ve learned one thing about Kurt Politzer, it’s that he’s too smart to do the obvious thing. The safe in the library here probably doesn’t have any valuable papers in it at all. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the papers were in the safe in the dressing room.”
Suddenly Larry’s face lit up, and he began shaking his head in an attitude of grudging admiration for their adversary.
“No,” he said. “No. There are three safes. Of course. The safe in the library has nothing valuable in it at all. There is a third safe, and it’s probably tucked away somewhere where no one would expect a safe to be. In the kitchen, maybe. Or in the nursery. Or in a bathroom. I’ll bet that’s it! The safe we want is in a bathroom. I’ll bet I even know which bathroom it is: it’s the guest bathroom, the powder room, and I’ll bet it’s on the ground floor. Perfect, perfect. All the most valuable papers are in a place that most people, certainly most thieves, would think wasn’t safe at all: behind the mirror in the powder room. Oh, there are probably some papers in the safe in the library, some nonnegotiable stock certificates, passports, things like that, so that a thief who broke into that safe wouldn’t look for another one, would just figure that the jewels and other valuables were in a safe-deposit box. Wait! A safe-deposit box!”
Larry snapped his fingers, and a group of dogs began barking.
“Of course, Rocky!” he shouted.
Suddenly, floodlights lit the grounds of the Politzer mansion.
“The will isn’t in the house at all!” said Larry. “It’s in a safe-deposit boxsomewhere!”
“Come on!” chuckled Rocky, with a barely perceptible note of urgency. “Let’s get out of here before those dogs tear us apart.”
Rocky also admired Larry’s academic talents. He never ceased to be amazed at how quick and clever Larry was, not that Rocky was less quick or less clever, but Rocky’s talents and knowledge were more restricted to practical areas: he could overhaul the engine in the Jeep with only a nail file and a can opener as tools, and he could find the best place to get a cheap and decent meal in most of the world’s ports; yet Rocky, although he was older than Larry, seemed to know a lot less about the things one might be expected to learn in school than Larry did. This shortcoming of Rocky’s wasn’t explained, but I decided that it must have to do with that past of Rocky’s about which we knew so little. I supposed that in his past there had been a reform school, from which Rocky had run away before he’d had a chance to pick up much long division or world history. Rocky’s ignorance of what one learned in school gave Larry the opportunity, frequently, to explain something to Rocky that would impress the heck out of him and would make the reader, who was likely already to know what Larry explained, feel all the more like Larry and to think of himself as in some ways a leader or even a protector of big, friendly, uneducated lugs like Rocky.
In Topical Guide 189, Mark Dorset considers Traits, of Personality: Decisiveness, Boldness, Recklessness; School, Attitudes Toward; Teachers, Attitudes Toward; andKnowledge: Practical and Experiential versus Academic and Postulatory from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
6
LARRY’S FRIEND, buddy, copain, comrade, Rocky King, was the perfect pal for someone like Larry—or for someone like me. He was big and strong, older, a young man more than a boy. He had a past about which we knew little, other than the fact that he had lost his parents at an early age and had had to shift for himself, a necessity that had toughened him. When he first appeared on the scene, in that very first book, The Shapely Brunette, it was to come to Larry’s aid, much as Arthur comes to the aid of Guyon in The Faerie Queene (Book II, Canto VIII). Larry was in an out-of-the way section of Istanbul, on the trail of some smugglers:
He walked quickly along the wet streets, his footsteps echoing against the squalid houses on either side. Now and then he thought that he caught sight of a face in one of the windows, spotted a puff of smoke exhaled behind a shutter, or heard a murmured remark as he passed. Then, from an archway to his right, came a small voice, a small voice straining to sound strong.
“Hey, what’s your hurry?” asked the voice.
Larry snapped his head around and saw, in the shadowy archway, the face of a girl no older than he. Her hair was straight, the color of a fawn’s ears, and it needed combing. Her eyes were bright, even in the darkness, but they looked out from deep recesses darkened with kohl. She looked terribly tired, despite her smile, despite the way she tilted her head so that her pointed chin showed to best advantage. She reached out toward him.
“It’s cold,” she said. “Wet, too. Why don’t you come inside?”
“I’d like to,” said Larry, “but—”
He stopped himself. He had to be careful. He had almost let slip the fact that he was searching for a gang of Turkish gewgaw smugglers. He had to remember that he couldn’t afford to trust anyone.
“It’s warm inside,” she said. “We can have fun together.”
She spread the shawl that she had wrapped around her, opening it as an angel might spread her wings. In the shadows, Larry could just make out the pale whiteness of her skin. As if in a dream, he moved toward her.
“Hold it, sailor,” said a strong voice behind Larry.
A hand as strong as the voice gripped his shoulder and held him back. Something in that grip, something strangely fraternal, told Larry that the hand that held him back was the hand of a friend, an ally.
“Get lost, sister,” said the unknown friend to the girl in the shadows.
The girl closed the shawl around her, twisted her mouth into a sneer and then spat on the paving stones at Larry’s feet, turned and disappeared through a dark doorway. From the same doorway, a stocky, swarthy, unshaven man emerged. Clearly, this man was no friend. In his hand was a cleaver. Larry heard a metallic click behind his ear, and the strong arm of his unknown protector pushed him to one side, against the stone building. From an open window somewhere above him Larry heard the sharp, staccato notes of a zither. Larry’s mysterious ally was silhouetted against the light from a street lamp, and Larry could see that in one strong hand he held a revolver.
“Get lost, Bud,” snarled the strong but oddly friendly voice of the young man who had come to Larry’s aid.
Larry saw the swarthy man bare his teeth, then retreat into the shadows, and Larry heard a door close.
“Come on, kid,” said the friendly stranger. “Let’s get out of here.”
Later, when they sat in the relative safety of a rough waterfront café, warming themselves over steaming mugs of cocoa, Larry struggled to find the words to thank the young man who had come to his aid.
“I don’t know how to thank you,” he began.
“Forget it, kid,” said the smiling young man.
“I don’t even know your name,” said Larry.
“Call me Rocky,” said the young man, smiling broadly and extending his large and callused right hand across the table.
“Call me Larry,” said Larry, smiling as broadly as he could, reaching across the table to shake Rocky’s hand and knocking the young man’s cocoa into his lap.
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You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
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5
LARRY WAS NEVER BORED. That is, he was never bored within the books. I knew from experience that everyone my age was bored for a significant amount of time every day. It may have been the absence of boredom that made me truly understand how much of Larry’s life was missing from the Adventures of Larry Peters, that made me begin to understand how distorted was the picture of Larry’s life that we, the readers, Larry’s admirers, were allowed to see. It seemed safe to assume, for example, that the Peters family ate dinner every evening, or nearly every evening. Logic told me that not all of these dinners could be interrupted by events that were part of one adventure or another. There had to be dinners when no one had much to say, when Larry poked at his peas with his fork, watched a skin form on his gravy, and didn’t hear his father asking him what he was daydreaming or moping about.
Not only was Larry never bored within the books, but he was always busy. He was always working on one project or another, and taking the trash out was never one of them. Larry seemed very clever to me, as he must have to all readers, as he was intended to seem, and yet for all his cleverness, for all the things he knew, for all his work on one arcane project or another, he managed to be an all-round guy. He could make a good showing in a fight, even against hired thugs, run like a deer when the situation required it, climb cliffs or warehouse walls, tap phone lines, swim, fish, play chess. In fact, I had the idea, an idea encouraged by most of the things that occurred in the books, that there was probably nothing a boy my age might want to do that Larry couldn’t do. If Larry never sang or danced or played the clarinet or baked a soufflé or cast sculpture in bronze or flew an airplane, it wasn’t because he couldn’t, it was simply because he didn’t feel like it or because the occasion for doing so hadn’t yet arisen in one of his adventures. In fact, I now recall that he did bake a soufflé and fly an airplane in The Aerobatic Sous-Chef.
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You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
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4
THE PETERS FAMILY seemed, to me, quite rich, rich in all the ways that I would have considered a family rich at that time. They owned a whole island, after all. They had a maid, about whom I will have more to say later. They owned three boats: a working boat, a barge really, that they used for carrying freight from the mainland, and, in The Missing Garage, used to transport an entire Esso gas station; a sailboat, a lean blue sloop that Larry was permitted to sail by himself and on which Larry’s sister enjoyed sunning herself; and a speedboat, a mahogany Chris Craft speedboat with a twelve-cylinder engine. On the mainland, they owned a small piece of waterfront property in the town of Murky Bay, where they had a dock, a boathouse for the speedboat, and a garage in which they kept a Jaguar Saloon and a war-surplus Jeep.
Everything that the Peterses did was of an order different from anything my family or the families of any of my friends did. My father might spend most of a Saturday changing the oil and filter in our aging Commander, trying to devise a scheme to make my mother’s washing machine stop walking across the cellar floor, or painting the garage, but Mr. Peters was likely to spend a Saturday tied up in the hold of a sinking ship, rappelling down a rock face in pursuit of some bric-a-brac smugglers, or conducting delicate negotiations for the purchase of some fine amber in Lübeck.
And the meals! Every time the Peters family sat down to a meal, it seemed to be the kind of meal that I associated with festivals and celebrations and funerals. If they were having breakfast, they drifted into the dining room one by one, and each filled a plate from a sideboard laden with oatmeal, pancakes, bacon, sausages (sometimes two kinds), coffee, cocoa, milk, juices, sticky buns, crumb cake, crullers, bran muffins, bagels, kaiser rolls, English muffins, toasted rye bread, toasted raisin bread, jelly doughnuts, white mountain rolls, corn muffins, salt sticks, bialys, and fruit. Marie, the maid, would fix eggs any way anyone wanted them. At home, my father usually started the day with white toast, coffee, and a couple of cigarettes. My mother rarely had more than coffee. I usually had a bowl of graham crackers soaked in milk, sometimes a cup of cocoa and toast.
Dinner at the Peterses’ was always a big deal: baked ham, turkey, a roast beef, bowls of potatoes and vegetables, everyone talking away and eating like mad. Of course, they had to eat a lot when they could, because most of the meals at the Peters house were never finished. No sooner would they get their plates heaped with food and eat a few healthy bites than someone would begin shooting at the house from a low-flying plane, an explosion on the mainland would rattle the windows, or Marie would announce the arrival of a mysterious stranger. Dinners were sometimes interrupted in my family, too, but the interruptions seemed to me, at the time, less likely to lead to anything interesting: the heating pipes would begin making metallic knocking sounds, but upon investigation we would find no dark-eyed waif tied up in the cellar, banging on the pipes to rouse some help, only air in the radiators; we’d be startled by a knock at the back door, but it was never a mysterious stranger, only the Mr. Doughboy delivery man, running late on his route; a flash of light would fill the room, and a moment later an explosive crash would rattle the windows, but it would only be a summer thunderstorm, and in those days I didn’t find a summer storm as exciting as an exploding gimcrack factory.
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You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
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3
I RETURNED to the Larry Peters books again and again because the Peters family, Kittiwake Island, Murky Bay, and the ambience of potential adventure were so fecund a ground for the imagination. The adventures themselves became, for me, only the trellises on which each book grew. The stories were there to hold the books together, prop them up, but that function, although useful, perhaps even necessary, wasn’t interesting; it could have been fulfilled by any story, as far as I was concerned, any story at all. The vines that grew on these trellises were much, much more interesting, and part of the interest that I took in them came from the fact that I was partly responsible for making them grow. Certainly the author, Roger Drake, was responsible for planting them and fertilizing the ground they grew in, but it was I who sent tendrils off at unpredictable spots, who sent the vines wandering in several directions, who made them blossom.
I didn’t dislike the adventures, of course, but their attraction faded quickly. They were exciting to read the first time, considerably less exciting the second time, and not particularly exciting at all after that. Exactly the reverse was true of what each book told me about Larry, his home and family, his surroundings, and his friend Rocky King. These were matters that on first reading seemed to be only part of the background for the adventures, and a sketchy background at that, but that became more and more interesting as I read and reread.
The reader was not given much direct information about the personal, the private side of Larry’s life. Now and then, a tantalizing piece of information would pop up in the course of an adventure, but more often there were simply gaps in the narrative that invited one to fill them. For example, in the adventure called Bamboozled, Larry and Rocky and Mr. Peters chase a mysterious prowler across the island, dashing through a labyrinth of bamboo that Larry has planted to baffle such prowlers. During a long and complicated night, the three become separated in the maze and are lost for several hours while the prowler makes his way to the knickknack works, rifles the file cabinet containing the plans for next year’s line of gewgaws, and makes his getaway in the Peterses’ speedboat. When, finally, the boys and Mr. Peters are reunited and realize what has happened, Mr. Peters pounds them on the back, assures them that they did their best, tells them that he’s counting on them to track the prowler down while he and the designers come up with a new line of gewgaws, and then says, “Boys, it will be dawn in another hour or so, and we’ve got quite a day ahead of us. What do you say we get an hour’s sleep, have a swim and a shower, and put away one of your mother’s famous hearty breakfasts?”
That is the end of the chapter. The next chapter opens with Larry and Rocky crouched outside a boathouse, peering through a window at a gang of thugs in the employ of a rival knickknack company. But for me, a great deal happened between the chapters. I had, ever since Mr. Beaker first taught me to read, been in the habit of filling whatever gaps appeared in whatever I was reading. The adventures of Larry Peters seemed to have been written just for someone who had developed this habit, just for me. The books were full of gaps, some small, some big enough to wander in for days at a time. I filled this particular one with a conversation in Larry’s bedroom, a swim, a glimpse of Larry’s sister Lucinda in the shower, a breakfast of blueberry pancakes and sausage, the boys’ good-byes, their running out of gas on the way across Murky Bay, the Coast Guard’s towing them to the town dock, a friend who lent them a jalopy (an amusing fellow who was always trying to get Larry’s sister to go to the movies with him), a dented fender, a flat tire, a Pullman diner, a redheaded waitress with freckles and teary eyes, and much, much more.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
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2
I WAS ENCHANTED by that first Larry Peters adventure, The Shapely Brunette, from the moment I opened the book. On the front endpaper was a map of the area where Larry lived, a seacoast town called Murky Bay. The town of Murky Bay was situated on the shore of the bay called Murky Bay, and in Murky Bay were hundreds of islands, among them one called Kittiwake Island, where the Peters family lived. On the back endpaper was a map of the island itself and the floor plans of the Peters house and the workshops where Mr. Peters and the employees of Peters’s Knickknacks worked in secrecy to develop the gewgaws, trinkets, baubles, bric-a-brac, curios, gimcrackery, and brummagems that were the Peterses’ bread and butter. I spent quite some time with the maps and floor plans before I began reading the book, and I returned to them often while I was reading it. There was something about those maps and floor plans that invited the mind to wander, to meander among the islets as one might in a rowboat, to prowl around the house looking for hidden nooks, to imagine the conversations one might have with a companion while meandering among the islets or hiding in a nook. The maps and floor plans were detailed enough to seem to depict real places, and yet they were vague enough not to impose on me the limitations of reality, since I knew that they didn’t depict real places. They permitted—even invited—the fabrication of imaginary details, and if one accepted the invitation, as I did, reality did not intrude with the stern demands it made from day to day: the invented details had only to fit the empty spaces provided for them and be in keeping with the details that were already there; they did not have to be verifiable. Often, later, while I was rereading one Larry Peters adventure or another, the stories themselves seemed too specific; at such times, I found myself returning to the endpapers, and I began making up new stories for myself. Surely, I thought, these schematics were deliberately designed to encourage this kind of dreaming, and surely the stories were intended only to give one an excuse for sitting still for long hours, imagining new goings-on on Kittiwake Island, imagining the voices across the Peterses’ dinner table, the debates that must have taken place in the knickknack workrooms, and so on.
The frontispiece to that first book showed two boys, Larry Peters and his friend Rocky King, square-jawed American boys, standing side by side in a fierce wind, the collars of their windbreakers or flight jackets up, their hair blowing in a style that became popular in men’s clothing advertisements much later in my life. Rocky was holding a large pair of binoculars to his eyes and peering into the darkness. In that darkness, one could see a lighted window, and in that lighted window, one could make out, if one studied the illustration closely and carefully enough, a shapely woman, presumably the brunette of the title. Larry was reaching for the binoculars, and under the illustration was a line from the book: “Come on, Rocky,” Larry pleaded. “It’s my turn.”
I READ The Shapely Brunette twice that day, and a third time the next day. Then I read every other Larry Peters book that had been published. From then on, I waited impatiently for new books to come out. I was hooked on Larry Peters, and I wanted my friends to share my enthusiasm. I wanted them to read the books, to read them as thoroughly as I had read them, to absorb them as I had, so that we could use them in our friendship, use them as a constant, a given, in our conversation together, add them to the context of our conversations for the same reasons that one adds manure to garden soil: so that the plants will flourish, grow thick and intertwined, flower profusely and brilliantly. But most of my friends didn’t share my enthusiasm for Larry Peters, his adventures, Kittiwake Island, or the habit of mingling reading with dreaming. They didn’t notice everything that I noticed. Most didn’t even recognize, in the frontispiece to The Shapely Brunette, the image of the shapely brunette in the lighted window.
“Wishful thinking,” said Raskolnikov. “That’s just a way of drawing. The artist uses a few quick strokes of the pen to suggest that the shade is down without inking in the whole shade. We had that in art class already. It’s just an artist’s trick. It’s not really meant to represent anything. You only see a woman there because you want to.” He jabbed me in the ribs.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
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1
I WAS BARELY ADOLESCENT when I first encountered Larry Peters, the eponymous hero of a series of books called, collectively, The Adventures of Larry Peters. My maternal grandmother, Gumma, gave me the first book in the series, The Shapely Brunette, as a present and a consolation, when I was sick, confined to bed, on my birthday. I had one of the childhood diseases, but I can’t recall now which one it was: measles, mumps, chicken pox, or the twenty-four-hour virus. These illnesses were not so bad, I thought. The discomfort that they brought was part of growing up, each made one a little more grown up, and the knowledge that one gained from them ranked in the upper third or so of things that were, at that age and time, important to know: if one did not know at first hand what the pain of mumps was like, one was not an initiate into a certain shadowy nook of childhood experience that those outside it wanted to enter. That it might be nice not to have to be initiated into that particular corner of childhood experience at all did not occur to me then. It would have been more painful, at the time, to be excluded from it, and so I welcomed the mumps, the experience of mumps, the knowledge of mumps.
There was even an aspect of illness that I enjoyed. I liked having to stay in bed for hours on end, left to myself, left to amuse myself. At that time, before my mother became an independent businesswoman, she was at home for most of the day, cleaning the house and cooking. She would come into my room from time to time to see if I needed anything, but for most of the day she was busy with her own occupations, and so I had time to myself, time to think, time to let my mind wander, time just to enjoy being alone; and when my mother left the house, as she did for at least part of each day, to go shopping or do other chores or to visit a friend, I had the house to myself. I had formed the habit, at an early age, of reading in bed, so it was a treat to have all day to do it, in my own bed, in my own room, and, best of all, in a silent and empty house. In the morning, my mother would give me breakfast in bed: toast and cocoa, hot cereal with evaporated milk, or graham crackers broken into milk. I would listen to the radio while I ate, usually to a program called “Bob Balducci’s Breakfast Bunch,” which was supposed to originate from a restaurant, Bob Balducci’s, famous for its pancakes and waffles. The program was a variety show, with singers and comedians, and with guests who spoke on subjects that they knew at least something about. All of that was interesting enough, but my favorite part came late in the program, when Bob Balducci and his sidekick, Baldy the Talking Dummy, had the people in the audience—a group that seemed, from his interviews with representatives of it, to consist entirely of grandmothers—stand beside their chairs and perform calisthenics. My mental image of this performance was so vivid and so hilarious that on some mornings it made me laugh until I cried. I was careful to set my tray on my bedside table as soon as Baldy the Dummy announced in his everlastingly ebullient style, “Now it’s time to get up off your (pause) chairs!” I knew that if I didn’t set my tray aside, I was sure to spill my breakfast when I began laughing. When Bob Balducci signed off, I would sit up, with several pillows propped behind me, and read.
At noon, I’d have clam chowder, tomato soup, or chicken noodle soup with saltine crackers that I would either break into pieces and scatter over the top of the soup or eat in single bites that I alternated with spoonfuls of soup, and I would listen to the radio while I ate, listening at this time of the day to soap operas, my favorite of which was “Mary Backstayge, Noble Wife.” After lunch, I would read some more, play with my plaster Babbingtonians, listen to the radio, and doze.
I should explain about those plaster Babbingtonians. At Jack’s Twenty-Four Hour Jokes, on the southwest corner of Bolotomy and Main, one could buy, and most of us between the ages of nine and twelve did buy, model kits called Virtues ’n’ Vices, which contained red rubber molds and plaster of Paris, with which one could cast figures that represented the Cardinal Virtues and the Seven Deadly Sins. I had quite a collection of these figures, most of them imperfect, with holes where bubbles had formed when I filled the mold, or with an arm glued ineptly back on after I had broken it in the unmolding. From the first, I had noticed resemblances between the figures and various people around town. In fact, I found that by making a few simple modifications, working with one of my mother’s emery boards, a Popsicle stick, and some fresh plaster, I could construct, out of Wisdom, Courage, Temperance, Justice, Faith, Hope, Charity, Pride, Covetousness, Lust, Anger, Gluttony, Envy, and Sloth, convincing likenesses of nearly everyone I knew or noticed. A little work with some tempera paint made the likenesses even more convincing. I enjoyed manipulating these model Babbingtonians, pairing them, grouping them, imagining conversations and arguments among them. (Years later, I learned that Jack sold other molds as well, but only to older boys and girls, molds from which one could cast figures of men and women that could be combined in interesting sexual positions. When I learned this, two thoughts came immediately to my mind: first, that it must have taken much greater skill than I possessed to unmold these figures and, second, that modifying them to make them resemble Babbingtonians must have been more complicated than modifying the Virtues ’n’ Vices had been.)
At night, during times when I was ill, I would put on my plaid flannel bathrobe and join my mother and father for dinner, and then I would return to bed to read some more, draw pictures, write notes to friends I wasn’t able to visit or see in school, put my plaster Babbingtonians away, listen to the radio some more—most often to mystery programs—and doze. There are certainly worse ways to spend one’s days.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Preface
Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.
James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name
Are there perhaps other worlds more real than the waking world? . . . Often we have before us, in those first minutes in which we allow ourself to slip into the waking state, a truth composed of different realities among which we imagine that we can choose, as among a pack of cards.
Marcel Proust, The Captive, (translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff)
Eric Kraft . . . looks exactly like my mind’s-eye picture of Peter Leroy: wiry build, wacky smile, bright eyes.
Susan Orlean, “Getting Serial” in The Boston Phoenix
MY RELATIONSHIP with Larry Peters is a complex one. In the simplest terms, I owe my livelihood to him, but, far more than that, I owe to the series of adventure novels in which Larry has appeared for some thirty years—and to their pseudonymous authors—the discovery of an avenue to a feeling of artistic freedom without which I might never have managed to write any of my personal history, adventures, experiences, and observations.
In the pages that follow, I’ve tried to narrate the origin of that relationship and explain its complexity. I fear that in the process I may have slighted the authors of the original Larry Peters books. That was never my intention. Because I know far too well how much effort goes into the writing of even the thinnest books, I would never intentionally belittle anyone who attempts it.
Peter Leroy
Small’s Island
December 10, 1984
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
17
THE WINNER of the name-the-school contest was announced about a week later. Since some ill feeling had developed toward the judges and the school administrators during the long time that had passed since the contest began, Mr. Simone decided that it would be a good idea to make a grand occasion out of the award ceremony. Invitations went out to all our parents to tour the completed school and then gather in the auditorium to learn the winning name and applaud the student who had submitted it.
I was sitting with Raskol, Margot and Martha, Matthew, and Veronica and Stretch; Stretch was on Veronica’s right and I was on her left. My parents were beside me. When Mr. Simone stepped up to the lectern, everything inside my chest and abdomen seemed to vanish, leaving only a cold hollow.
“The time has come at last,” said Mr. Simone. He looked at a sheet of paper, and then he looked out over the audience. “Will Peter Leroy please come up onto the stage?” he said.
Veronica squeezed my hand. I stood. I walked sideways out of the row of seats, and somehow I walked down the aisle and up the stairs to the stage and across the stage to Mr. Simone’s side.
“It wasn’t easy to pick a winner,” Mr. Simone said. “There were many, many good names submitted. I wish you could have seen some of the meetings we held when we were trying to pick a winner. Some of us liked names that had to do with nature and that sort of thing. Others liked names that gave you a sense of Babbington’s past. One that I happened to like was ‘Unfinished School.’” He waited while the adults laughed. “But we couldn’t seem to agree on a name that all of us liked,” he continued. “Finally, I said to the other judges, ‘Look, the school is nearly finished. The kids have been waiting for months. We’ve got to choose. Let’s go through all the names once more and see if there isn’t one that all of us can at least tolerate.’ Well, I’m happy to be able to say to you that there was one name that none of us really hated.” He turned aside and accepted a bronze plaque from Mr. Simon. Then he turned to me. “Peter,” he said, “yours was the winning name. Perhaps you would like to read it to the people.” He handed the plaque to me. In a voice tight with pride and nervousness, I read:
Applause filled the hall. Raskol clasped his hands together and waved them over his head. Veronica and Stretch got up and slipped out the side door. At the door, before they left, Veronica paused, turned, and waved; Stretch gave me a salute and a wink. I held the plaque over my head. I felt the dizzying happiness that I later felt when I turned round and round, guiding my gasoline-powered flying model Piper Cub in a wide circle at the end of its tether.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
16
I TOLD MY PARENTS that I wasn’t feeling well, and I went up to bed right after dinner, at about the time that Jack was dropping Stretch and Veronica off at the high school parking lot. I lay in my bed and tried to form in my mind a clear image of what Veronica and Stretch were doing.
Three buses were waiting in front of the high school when they arrived. They got out of the car, and Jack drove away.
“Which bus should we take?” Stretch asked.
“I don’t know,” said Veronica.
A line of very big boys and girls stood at the door to each of the buses. Boarding the first bus was that sad group of boys and girls who remain awkward throughout adolescence, who never find a cure for their acne, who either can’t lose weight or can’t gain weight, who are too tall or too short, too smart or too outspoken. Since Veronica and Stretch were so out of place, so much younger than the others, they probably belonged on that bus. Boarding the second bus were the clean-cut boys and girls with whom my mother would have wanted me to ride if I had taken Veronica. The third bus, however, was Bus Six.
“Oh look, this is Bus Six,” Veronica said. “It’s the bus Porky White drives. Let’s get on this one.”
They did.
“Let’s sit in the back,” said Veronica.
“Sure,” Stretch said. “Anywhere you want.”
The back of the bus was filled with smoke, loud talking, and boys and girls in leather jackets. Veronica and Stretch walked into the smoke, and one of the boys said, “Get lost, kids. These seats are taken. You’re on the wrong bus.”
“Yeah, I guess we are,” Stretch said. He grabbed Veronica’s sleeve and turned to go.
“Shut up, stupid,” said one of the girls, punching the boy on the shoulder and grabbing Veronica’s other sleeve. “They can sit right here,” said the girl. She pulled them onto the seat beside her, where in fact there was plenty of room for them.
“I think you kids look so cute,” the girl said.
“What’s your name, cutie?” asked another boy. He reached from behind Veronica and put his hands on her shoulders, brought his face next to hers. His breath was dank and sour.
“Veronica,” said Veronica. Her voice sounded a little hollow, but she smiled when she gave her name, and after she had spoken she tilted her head upward bravely and batted her eyelashes.
“And what’s your name, kid?” the boy asked.
Stretch stuck his chin out and said, “Stretch,” in a voice as deep as he could manage.
“That’s it, Stretch, don’t be afraid of him,” said another girl who was leaning over the back of the seat in front of them. “He’s just a big jerk. Knock it off, Sal,” she said to the big jerk.
Sal didn’t say anything to her, but he gave her a weaselly, calculating look. Then he gave Veronica a squeeze, pulling her back toward him. He bent his head downward and in a stage whisper asked her, “Veronica, you want a little drink?”
The girl in front of them looked furious. “If you don’t leave them alone, I’ll never talk to you again, Sal,” she said. Her teeth were clenched, and so were her fists.
“Hey,” said Sal. “Don’t get all upset with me. Stretch and Veronica are here because they want to play with the big kids.” He snapped Stretch’s ear. “Isn’t that right?” he asked.
“Oh, sure,” Stretch said.
“There you are,” said Sal. He flipped his hand in the air in a gesture that meant: “There you have it; there can be no further argument; the evidence that you have just heard is so conclusive that any unbiased observer would agree that the matter is settled.”
The girl pounded her fists once on the back of the seat and said “Ooooh!” She spun forward again, away from Sal, and slumped down so that her head was hardly visible. Sal made with his free hand a gesture, the meaning of which, “F**k you,” I didn’t learn for another couple of months.
By the time the bus reached the skating rink, Stretch and Veronica knew the names of most of the boys and girls around them, their breath smelled of bourbon, and their cheeks were flushed. They emerged as the stars of the evening. They were certainly the best skaters there, and the girls were able to admire Veronica without feeling jealous, since she was so much younger than they, only a child, while the boys were able to toss her around like a basketball, and they lined up for an opportunity to do so. Finally, the lights began to flash, and the skaters drifted off the rink, removed their skates, and boarded the bus. Shortly after Porky pulled out of the parking lot, the lights inside the bus went out. Stretch and Veronica peered into the darkness around them, squinting to try to make out just what the older boys and girls were doing. When Stretch put his hand on Veronica’s thigh, I smiled, stretched out in the cozy warmth of my bed, and fell asleep.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
15
THE SKATING PARTY was scheduled for a Friday night. During school that day, I began to exhibit signs of illness. By the end of the day, I had made all the arrangements. I told Veronica that I was coming down with a twenty-four-hour virus and I was sure that I would begin vomiting at about the time that the skating-party bus left the high school lot. She was terribly disappointed, but she accepted Stretch as a substitute escort, since the party meant so much to her. Stretch was surprised. I gave him the tickets and lent him two dollars to make sure that he and Veronica had a good time.
By the time the school day ended, only one thing remained for me to do. On the way home from school, I sat in the seat right behind Porky, and I told him most—but not all—of the story.
“What?” said Porky. “You mean another guy is taking your girl to the skating party? Hey, don’t worry. I’ll keep an eye on them. I’ll make them sit right up in the front of the bus and I’ll keep the lights on the whole way back. And I’ll drive straight back to the school, too. He’s not going to get away with anything while I’m driving.”
I opened Our Town and Its People and removed from it a new five-dollar bill. “Here, Porky,” I said, handing it to him. “Do me a favor. Take the long way home.”
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Inside, Mrs. McCall helped me lace my skates.
“All right, Peter,” she said at last. “You’re as ready as you’ll ever be.” She stood up and gave me a pat on the shoulder. “Good luck,” she said.
Jack skated to the railing in front of us, all power, skill, muscles, chin, and teeth. “Hey, good morning, Mrs. McCall,” he said. He gave an odd emphasis to the words Mrs. McCall, and he smiled broadly and winked at her.
I told myself to do what Porky had told me, to imagine myself doing what it was I wanted to do. I stood at the railing, closed my eyes, and summoned all the strength of imagination that I could muster, and in a single brilliant instant I was able to imagine everything that was going to happen.
I would say, “Well, here I go!” and I would push myself onto the floor and be startled by the sensation of having lost all control over my feet. My right foot would insist on rolling farther and farther forward while my left rolled slowly backward. I would flail my arms as falling people do, as if imitating the herky-jerky rotation of the wings of an ornithopter. And I would, of course, fall. I would land on my right buttock, hard, my eyes locked on Veronica, and I’d watch her expression shift from surprise to concern to hilarity to embarrassment and back to hilarity. I would scramble to my knees and look over at Mrs. McCall, who would be trying awfully hard not to laugh, and at Jack, who would be roaring, so forgetting himself in his exuberant amusement that he had flung his arm around Mrs. McCall and was kneading her shoulder through the soft angora sweater. I would struggle to my feet and try to make myself move in Veronica’s direction. Try as I might, I would not be able to make myself move on a course that would get me to her side. Weak with laughter, she would finally come to me, put her hand on my waist, and try to show me how to change direction. The smallest movement would upset my balance, and at any moment, even when standing still, I would be on the verge of falling down. I would clutch at her, to keep from falling, and fall anyway, often taking her down with me. I would discover in the tumbles a surprising pleasure, and I would discover in the laughter an analgesic for the embarrassment of not being able to skate, for not being graceful and confident, for being, in that puzzling way, so very much younger than Veronica. I would begin to play for the laughs, and Veronica and I would wind up having a wonderful time. She would begin to anticipate my falls, and she would prove to be so at ease on skates that she could even play the clown. She could fake losing her balance herself, go through a wild parody of my attempts to recover my balance, recover hers at the last instant, make it look as if both of us had recovered, then give me a little nudge and send me sprawling. Jack and Mrs. McCall would be beside themselves with laughter, flinging their arms around each other in uncontrollable glee when Veronica resorted to simply holding me up and guiding me around the rink as if I were stuffed. When Veronica and I finally made our way back across the rink to where they were seated, they would stand and applaud us, Veronica would stop and deliver a graceful swanlike curtsy, and I would bend at the waist and fall in a heap.
“Bravo!” Jack would shout, when I had a grip on the railing again at last.
“Oh, Peter, you were so funny!” Mrs. McCall would say, gasping for breath, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. “I haven’t laughed so much in I don’t know how long.”
“You were hilarious, kid,” Jack would say. He’d pat me on the shoulder and add, “You’re really a good sport.”
Veronica would put her arm through mine and snuggle up beside me, and when I looked at her I would know that she was pleased with me, that she liked being with me, and that it would be quite possible for Veronica and me to be great friends once she’d transferred her lusts to Stretch.
“Here I go!” I announced through clenched teeth. I pushed myself out onto the floor. Porky White turned out to be right; everything happened just as I had imagined it would.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Veronica put her skates on and rolled out onto the floor of the rink. She looked just terrific, skating around the rink as if she were the only one on it, and to my eyes she was. I couldn’t really imagine why she was taking lessons. What could any lessons teach her beyond the things she was doing already? She wore a tiny skater’s dress that hugged her at the top but had a skirt that flew outward whenever she turned, displaying her legs and her panties. I tried to maintain an appearance of detached interest in the sport without betraying the uneasy feeling I got each time Veronica skated backwards past us with her little skirt flipped up over her little bottom. As she skated, I began to understand what Porky had meant when he had said that she was quite a little number, and I began to understand that Veronica was growing up in a way that I wasn’t. At the same time, I became more and more convinced that I would be able to acquit myself quite well when I went out onto the rink. I began to wonder why I had ever worried about being able to skate. Watching Veronica, I could see that it was so much easier than I had imagined, and it was clearly lots of fun, such a delight to zip around like that, to whirl, to spin, to glide along with one leg stretched out in the air behind you. I was going to have a ball.
Then Veronica’s teacher arrived. As soon as I saw him, I knew that he was Jack, the Jack who had been forced to hide in the storage area under the eaves in Veronica’s parents’ bedroom. It took a moment longer for me to recognize that he must be Stretch Mitgang’s older brother. I couldn’t have estimated his age then, but I would guess now that he was twenty-two. He had jet black hair, heavy eyebrows, a clear and piercing gaze, a craggy jaw, a heartwarming smile, and straight teeth. Just watching him glide across the rink made me feel confident; surely Jack must have taught Stretch to skate.
Mrs. McCall put her hand on my knee. “Oh, here’s Jack,” she breathed. “Hi, Jack!” she called out. She waved at him with her other hand, and squeezed my knee so hard that I turned toward her with some alarm, wondering what I had done to upset her.
“Isn’t he cute?” she whispered to me. He didn’t seem at all cute to me. After all, he was a grown man.
“He’s handsome,” I said. “Veronica’s cute.” I paused. Distractedly, I corrected myself. “She’s more than cute, if you know what I mean,” I said. “She’s quite a little number.”
Mrs. McCall looked at me. She seemed to be noticing me for the first time.
“Why, you’re right,” she said. “She is, isn’t she?” She looked out across the rink. For quite a while she said nothing, just watched Jack and Veronica. Jack swooped up behind Veronica and gave her a pat on the rump. Mrs. McCall muttered, “My God.”
For several minutes, we watched Jack and Veronica cavort around the rink. Jack would grasp Veronica between the legs, his large hand forming a seat for her, her tight nates settling into his palm, his fingers reaching up toward the small of her back. I thought that Mrs. McCall might pass out. She breathed in short, shallow draughts, and she had begun languidly to massage my knee, as if she were trying to make up for the pain she had inflicted earlier. At last Jack put Veronica down, and he began directing her through a series of slow, precise exercises. Mrs. McCall sighed and said, “I’m going outside for a cigarette. You want to come?”
“Sure,” I said.
When we reached the parking lot, Mrs. McCall took a package of Kools from her handbag, and asked, “Do you smoke?” Before I could speak she put a hand to her forehead and shook her head. “Of course you don’t smoke,” she said. “What am I thinking of? I must be losing my mind. You’re a little boy.” I looked at the ground. “Oh, I didn’t mean it that way,” she said. “Peter?” I looked up. She let a long stream of smoke out through her puckered lips. She took another long pull at her cigarette and let the smoke out. “You’re very—advanced—for your age,” she said.
“Well, I read a lot,” I said.
She smiled and patted me on the shoulder. “So you think Veronica is quite a little number, do you?”
“Yes,” I said. I felt my ears redden.
“And Jack is handsome,” she added.
“Right,” I said.
“What about me?” she asked. She raised her eyebrows and tilted her head, waiting for an answer.
I knew the answer, if only by imitation. It was a statement that had shocked me when I heard my mother repeat it one Sunday morning at breakfast. She and my father had gone to a party, some couple’s anniversary party, the night before, and my mother was in an effervescent mood that Sunday morning. She actually danced around the kitchen while she made breakfast, humming and singing, and she recounted the entire evening, while my father stared at the paper and drank his coffee and I watched and listened wide-eyed and open-mouthed. I caught my mother’s delight in the memory of the evening before, the dancing, the toast with real champagne, the canapés, the high spirits, the flirting, and though I was shocked I was also proud and pleased when she repeated, giggling, what a man, some other woman’s husband, had said to her.
“You look sexy in that sweater.”
Mrs. McCall choked and burst out laughing. “Oh, thank you, Peter,” she said.
It was the truth. She was, I guess, about thirty-five at the time. She had dark hair and large, bright eyes. She was voluptuous. Her lips were full, and she used a bright red shade of lipstick. She had large breasts, a rounded belly, wide hips, and a lively bottom that could have been the inspiration for the tight skirts that came into fashion a year or two later. The sweater she was wearing, a white cardigan, very snug, with the top buttons open to display her cleavage, did make her look sexy. It was the truth, but I didn’t understand why it was the truth; my notion of sexy went no further than the décolletage of the sweater. I had no appreciation of what the décolletage was designed to inspire, what ultimately it was intended to offer. I wished that I had said nothing. I wished that my mother had said nothing. I wished that I could go home.
Veronica called to me. She was standing in the doorway of the plywood entry. Jack stood behind her with a hand on her shoulder.
“Come on, Peter,” she said. “We can practice together.”
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
14
VERONICA’S ROLLER-SKATING LESSONS were held at a big, drafty indoor rink, a Quonset hut made of corrugated metal. The metal had rusted in spots, and from these spots brown and orange streaks ran down the corrugations. The parking lot was mostly mud, with a clamshell island here and there, and Veronica’s mother cursed under her breath as the car pitched across the lot, tossed like a boat on a day when the bay was choppy. The entrance was a plywood shed stuck onto one end of the metal building. Over it was a sign that had once been brightly painted in red and yellow. The paint had faded and peeled, so that the appearance of the sign belied its claim:
FUNTIME ROLLER RINK
The door was loose on its hinges. The girl at the ticket counter was chewing gum and reading a comic book. Veronica’s mother passed a card to the girl, and the girl cut a notch out of it with a conductor’s punch. Then she looked at me. I had brought ninety-five cents with me. Neither my mother nor I had had any idea what it would cost me to rent skates and skate for a while with Veronica, so my mother had told me to call and ask. I hadn’t wanted to do that, for a reason that persists to this day: I don’t want to appear to be ignorant of the ways of the establishment I’m patronizing. I dislike calling a restaurant, for example, to ask whether they will accept a personal check as payment for a meal. If the answer is yes, I become convinced that when I write out my check at the restaurant, the waiter is sure to say, in a voice that carries to the dimmest and most intimate corners, “Say, I’ll bet you’re the guy who called this afternoon to ask whether we take personal checks, aren’t you?” And if the answer is no, then I’m sure that when I pay with cash or a credit card, something in the way I handle the money or the rapidity with which I produce the card will bring on that booming voice anyway. So, rather than call the Funtime Rink to make the inquiries myself, I got Raskolnikov to call for me. Armed with the information that he procured, I was able to push my ninety-five cents at the girl with some confidence, bothered only by the small fear, which I have never outgrown, that between the time I have learned what to do at the establishment and the time when I actually walk through the door, all the rules will have changed; if I attempt to pay the restaurant bill in cash, the waiter will look at me with shock and embarrassment and whisper, “I’m sorry, sir, but we no longer accept American money.”
“What is this for?” asked the girl.
“Rent skates,” I said. “And skate for an hour.”
“Oh, that’s just right,” she said. “It comes to ninety-five cents.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said, relieved, pretending a familiarity with roller-skating that I did not have, hoping that the girl would assume that I frequented other, larger, more glamorous roller-skating rinks and was, therefore, familiar with the going rates.
“Oh, you must be Peter!” said the girl, clearly not deceived. “Your uncle called this morning to find out how much it was going to ‘set you back’ to go skating here.”
“My uncle,” I said, trying to smile.
“Yes, he told me it was your first time skating, and you wanted to impress your girlfriend, and he wanted to make sure you had a good time. Is Veronica your girlfriend? Veronica’s a really good skater. Is she going to teach you? I’m sure she can teach you a lot.”
“I really just need practice,” I said, weakly. I started for the door that led inside.
“How did your uncle get that nickname, Rascal?” the girl asked.
“Oh, it’s a long story,” I said. I kept on walking.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
13
“HEY, you made the right decision,” Porky told me. “You’re going to have a great time.” I had told him that I had invited Veronica to the skating party and that I didn’t know how to skate. I had not told him that the skating party was part of a plan to swap Veronica for a model airplane. Porky punched my shoulder in the good-natured way that men do when they’re going to start talking about sex. “Do you know what those roller-skating parties are like?” he asked me.
“No,” I admitted.
“Everybody meets at the high school,” he said. “You ride to the roller rink in a school bus, and everyone sings songs and tells jokes and has a wonderful time. In the back of the bus, they might do a little (he made the motions of puffing on a cigarette), a little (he made his hand into a fist and made the motion of drinking from his thumb), a little (he hugged himself and twisted from side to side). Then, at the rink, you skate and skate, and you take breaks for Cokes, and sometimes you walk out to the parking lot for some air, and a little (he made the motions of puffing on a cigarette), a little (he made his hand into a fist and made the motion of drinking from his thumb), a little (he hugged himself and twisted from side to side), and then you skate some more. You can have a hot dog or another Coke. Then everybody gets onto the bus again, and you ride back to the high school. This time, if the kids on the bus take care of the bus driver, he might take the long way home. You know,” said Porky, wearing an odd grin. “I’m going to be driving one of the buses to the roller rink and back. It might be arranged for me to take the long way home.”
I had a good idea what he meant. How? How did I know anything about taking the long way home? It was in the air. Just as a house, especially an old house, has an ambient odor that is only temporarily disturbed by a chowder simmering on the stove or a chicken roasting in the oven and soon returns to its more or less constant composition, of which we, the inhabitants of the house, are ordinarily unaware, noticing it only when we have been away for some time and return and inhale the comfortable odor of home, so a community, especially an old and established community, has an ambient Weltanschauung that may be temporarily disturbed by the arrival of outsiders or by the ideas in an influential book, but eventually returns to its more or less stable composition, of which we, the residents, may be unaware until we have been away and return and hear in a conversation the comforting ideas that were in the air around us when we were at home. One of the ideas in the air when I was a boy was the idea of taking the long way home. It was enough in the air so that I knew approximately what it was about.
I didn’t say anything in response to Porky’s suggestion. I just laughed. He winked and poked me in the side. I confided to him my fears that I might make a fool of myself when I tried to skate.
“Don’t worry about it, Peter,” said Porky. “It’s like anything else: if you convince yourself you can do it, you can do it.”
“You can?” I asked. I was young, but not so young that Porky’s statement didn’t strike me as preposterous. And yet, so strong within me was the irrational hope that he might somehow be right, that all it would take for me to turn in a creditable performance on roller skates was my convincing myself that I could do it, that I was poised for conversion, eager to believe Porky if he could provide even the flimsiest reason for my doing so.
“The thing to do,” Porky said, “is to imagine yourself doing what you’re going to try to do. You close your eyes and picture in your mind what you’re going to do. You picture every detail, from the first moment when your wheels hit the floor to the last spectacular spin and the applause of the crowd, and then when you really start to do it, when you glide onto the floor, you’ll feel as if you’ve already done all of this before, so it won’t be such a big deal anymore. You won’t be nervous at all. I do it all the time.”
I sat up straight. This was it. He was going to give me the evidence.
“Say I’m bowling, and I’ve left myself a tough split. I just take a few seconds to close my eyes and imagine myself making the split. I feel the ball in my hand. In my mind, I start my approach. I can feel the whole thing—my feet sliding toward the foul line, the release—and I can see the pins standing there, the ball rolling toward them, the hook, the way that it strikes the pin just right, the pin kicking across and striking the other. Then I’m ready. A calm spreads through me the way the smell of dinner spreads through a house. I’m ready. I think I can do it, so I can do it.”
It was a raw and drizzly afternoon. Porky and I were sitting in Bus Six, waiting for school to get out. Joy rushed through me. I believed Porky. I knew from the testimony of many people, including my father and Porky’s father, that Porky was a great bowler. If he had tried to convince me that this I-think-I-can technique had won him the love of beautiful women, I would have known that it didn’t work, but bowling was quite another story. It was easy for me to believe that it worked for bowling. And bowling, after all, was a lot like roller-skating.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
12
VERONICA AND STRETCH began spending some time together, but they didn’t seem to be making much progress. Veronica seemed, now that she was getting a closer look, not to see anything attractive in Stretch. I was close to giving up, letting Veronica rob me of my childhood, of my innocence, resigning myself to spending my money on dates and never being able to set enough aside for a model airplane with a real gas engine, when I saw the poster for the roller-skating party. The whole plan came to me at once. I would invite Veronica to the skating party. She would be delighted, flattered, and thrilled. Not only was the roller-skating party likely to be appealing to Veronica for itself, but this was a high-school roller-skating party, sponsored by the junior class to help raise money for the traditional junior class barge for the annual Babbington Clam Fest. Veronica was sure to consider it, as I did, a sophisticated event. I would fall ill on the day of the party. I’d ask Stretch to escort her. At the party, Veronica would fall in love with Stretch and drop me like a hot potato. I would be able to buy the model airplane.
I saw Veronica next in the cafeteria, where she was buying her lunch. She slid her tray along the shelf formed by stainless steel tubes and took a plate of a macaroni dish called American chop suey, a bowl of boiled green beans, and a bowl filled with cubes of green Jell-O. “Do you want to go to the high school roller-skating party?” I called out to her. Veronica stopped and spun around. Her eyes were wide with pleasure. Her mouth was open. Her Jell-O was quivering. She put her tray down on the rack and ran to me and took both of my hands in hers.
“Do you mean it?” she asked.
“Sure I mean it,” I said, with the confidence that a well-wrought scheme could give a boy my age at that time.
“I’ve always wanted to go to one of those skating parties,” she said. She hugged me, right there in the cafeteria, with everyone watching.
“Oh, Peter,” she said. “I can’t wait. I bet I can skate just as well as any of those big girls.”
“You can?” I asked, bemused. The idea of actually skating, it suddenly occurred to me, had not been part of my vision of the evening. As I had seen it, Veronica would be happy enough just to be there, to sit somewhere with Stretch and eat popcorn, drink root beer and orange soda, and watch the high school boys and girls perform intricate and fluid routines that had required most of their high school years to perfect.
“Just wait till you see me skate,” she said.
I looked at my hands, and since they looked awkward just hanging there at the ends of my arms, I began wringing them. I was worried that perhaps Stretch couldn’t skate. If in fact he couldn’t skate, Veronica wouldn’t be likely to fall in love with him at the skating party.
“Oh, no,” said Veronica.
“What?” I asked. She looked concerned.
“You can’t skate, can you?”
I nearly told her that it didn’t matter whether I could skate or not, but I thought better of it in time. I doubt that pride would have allowed me to admit that I couldn’t skate anyway.
“Well,” I said, “It isn’t that I can’t roller-skate. It’s just that I’m—I’m a little rusty.”
I risked looking her in the face. There were signs that she might smile, that all might be well, if I could just say the right thing now.
“But it’s like riding a bicycle or doing multiplication,” I said. “It comes right back to you. I just need some practice. Of course, I won’t be as good as you are, but I’ll bet we’ll look pretty good together.”
Her face had lit up, and she gave me a quick hug. “We can practice together!” she said. She began to hop up and down. “I’ll get my mother to let you come along to one of my lessons. After my lesson is over, you and I can practice together for a while.”
“That would be great,” I said. To preserve the illusion that I would be taking her to the skating party, I was going to have to practice with her. I felt the sinking feeling that I have always felt when I know that I am getting myself in over my head, but I felt at the same time the other emotion that accompanies my diving into the dark waters of overreaching: an intoxicating self-confidence, all the more intoxicating because it is groundless. After all, since I had never roller-skated before, I had no reason to believe that I was not a roller-skating prodigy, awaiting only the sensations that would rush through me when the wheels of my skates first touched the floor to unlock the grace and power that lay within me.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
10
I MAY SPEND a good deal of time in confused indecision about what I ought to do next, but when I have at last seen which way is the right way, I run right along it. The next day, in the cafeteria, when Stretch Mitgang passed Veronica and me, I asked her, “Why does he wink at you like that?”
“Did he wink at me?” she asked. She smiled and looked in Stretch’s direction; then she turned quickly back toward me and twisted the smile into a scowl.
“Yes,” I said. “He winked at you.”
“He’s probably just being friendly, or he’s teasing,” said Veronica.
“Oh, no,” I said. “It’s more than that. He thinks you’re quite a little number.”
“Do you think so?” asked Veronica. The smile returned.
11
“STRETCH! WAIT UP!” I called. I had overheard our teacher, Mrs. Collingswood, talking with Stretch about his work. I knew that he was having a difficult time with everything, but that he was particularly bad at arithmetic. He looked morose.
“Stretch, I’ve got an idea for you,” I said.
“Yeah?” he asked. He still looked morose, but his eyes flickered with a small hope.
“Yeah,” I said. “I think you ought to study with someone and do your homework with someone. If you do that, it will help you keep your mind on your work.”
“I do have trouble with that,” he said. “Are you going to work with me?”
“I’m afraid I can’t,” I said. “I’m too busy with my paper route. I was thinking of Veronica.”
“Veronica?”
“Sure,” I said. “That way, you’ll be doing both of us a favor: me and you. You’ll do better in arithmetic, and you’ll be able to keep an eye on Veronica for me. See, I don’t get to spend much time with her now that I have my paper route. I’m getting a little worried that some other mule might start kicking in my stall, you know what I mean?”
“No,” he said.
“Never mind,” I said. “It doesn’t matter. Just try studying with Veronica and see if it helps.”
“All right,” he said. “I can ask her the problems and she can give me the answers.”
“I think she should ask you the problems instead, and you should figure out the answers,” I said.
“How come?” he asked.
“Because she’s better at arithmetic than you are,” I said. “You’re the one who needs practice.”
He expelled one sharp laugh. “That’s a joke, right?” he asked.
“A joke?”
“Yeah. Say—you’re not making fun of me, are you?”
“Oh,” I said, “now I see what you mean. You mean, what’s the sense of Veronica asking you the problems if you don’t know the answers? Is that it?”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“You and Veronica are going to get along really well, Stretch,” I said. In a corner of my mind, I did a little further development work on my vague hunch about the contributions of Frankie Paretti’s parents to the vacant look that Frankie wore and arrived at a more coherent theory, a theory that allowed me to predict that Veronica and Stretch would be likely, if they were to have a child some day, to have one about as bright as Frankie, a theory that was to be confirmed several years later, during a high school biology class devoted to the work of Gregor Mendel.
“Would you do me a favor when you go to Veronica’s?” I asked.
“What?” asked Stretch.
“I was going to get Veronica some flowers, but I don’t have time now. It’s already late for me to be starting my route. Here’s a dollar. Stop at Anderson’s on the way to Veronica’s and get whatever you think she’ll like, okay?”
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
I began giving outstanding service, or the illusion of outstanding service, every payday and on any other day when an opportunity presented itself. On rainy days, I rolled the newspapers in wax paper. I learned to ask about customers’ children, grandchildren, pets, arthritis, or whatever else interested them. I often apologized for the paper itself, anticipating the complaints of the customers that an issue was too thin, that the news on the front page was all bad, or that three words had been misspelled in a single headline, and I offered to knock a penny off the price of such defective issues and absorb the loss myself on the grounds that it embarrassed me to charge full price for “a rag like this.”
On one occasion, inspired beyond anything I’d done before, I tore the front page of one copy and put it at the front of the stack in my canvas bag. At each customer’s door, I would pull the torn copy from the bag and say, “Oops, can’t give you this one,” then add, with a wink, “I’ll have to give that one to somebody else.” They loved it. Of course, when I got to my last customer, Mrs. Blynman, I had no other copy for her. To Mrs. Blynman I said, “I can’t give you this. It’s torn. I’m going to ride my bike downtown to the Reporter printing plant and get you a fresh copy.”
Mrs. Blynman didn’t say anything. I started down the walk. Suddenly I turned and ran back to her door.
“Oh,” I said. “Before I go, could you call my mother and tell her I might not get home for dinner, Mrs. Blynman?” I asked.
Mrs. Blynman said she would. Again I started down the walk. Again I turned suddenly and ran back to her door.
“And ask her to save me a piece of her birthday cake, would you please?” I said. Mrs. Blynman swallowed hard, insisted on taking the torn copy of the Reporter, and pressed a dollar bill into my hand.
I collected on Thursdays. Each Thursday afternoon, when I got home, I would spread the money out on my bed and count it. I kept a ledger, and I also made a graph that showed how much profit I had made each week. On a slip of paper in the back of the ledger, I calculated how long it would be before I had enough money to take Veronica on a date. I paid Mr. Creeley with the change and with the oldest, dirtiest bills, and I kept the newest, crispest ones for myself. On occasion, when my mother was ironing, I would get my capital out and press it. It was on one of these occasions, while I was ironing my money, that the thought ran through my mind that I had enough to buy a model plane kit with a real gas engine.
How strange it is that one’s mind works independently of one’s efforts to direct it, that the solution to a knotty problem eludes one through hours of concentrated effort and then appears unbidden but certainly welcome while one is running to the dock with the last of the trash cans, hoping that the trash boat will wait. Only when the image of the model plane kit appeared in my mind did I understand that I would rather have a model plane than go on dates with Veronica McCall, and the question returned: “How am I going to get out of this?”
The next morning, while my classmates and I were seated in our classroom, holding manila cards with new schedules on them, puzzling through the schedule and Mr. Simone’s explanation of it, the door opened, and into the classroom walked Stretch Mitgang, the boy who had won at Simon Says on the first day of school, the boy who hadn’t been certain about whether he should stand or sit. He stopped just inside the door and surveyed us. From his bravado, the defiant way he chewed his gum, his slouch, the way he hooked his thumbs in his pockets, I understood why he had come into our classroom. He had been sent back, thrown out of the sixth grade. From the way his eyes rested on Veronica and the way she turned abruptly away from him and tossed her hair, the way she pouted and pretended not to have seen him at all, I understood that Stretch might be the answer.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
9
IF I WAS GOING TO START buying Veronica flowers and candy and taking her out on dates, I was going to need money. I received a small allowance from my parents, quite a small allowance: twenty-five cents a week. Of course in those days—and the days that I’m recalling were those days—a quarter was worth something. Something, but not enough. I was going to have to get a job, and the first thing that occurred to me, doubtless the first thing that would have occurred to any boy my age in a situation like mine, was a paper route. The boy who delivered the Babbington Reporter looked at me with incredulity and glee when I asked him whether he ever thought of retiring from the newspaper business.
He recovered quickly. “Nah,” he said. “It’s too exciting.”
I walked alongside him while he delivered the papers and tried to collect from each customer. The Reporter was published on weekdays only; customers paid twenty-five cents a week for it, delivered. For two or three hours I walked the route with him and worked to persuade him to give it up. My argument ran along the following lines, which I’d based on comments I’d heard Mel Allen make before a broadcast of an old-timers’ game: there comes a time when the veteran has to step aside to give the rookie a chance, has to recognize that the river of life is flowing on and it’s time he drifted on with it, has to recognize that someone else may need the work more than he does, that there are other kinds of work that he can do because he is older, and that it is meet and right that he do that other work, whatever it may be, and let another boy deliver his papers.
“All right,” he said, after he had delivered the last paper. “You win. I’ll sell you the route.”
“Sell?” I asked.
“Sure. Let’s say a dime a customer.”
“Well, I—”
“You have to give me all the money I’m owed, too.”
“Owed?”
“Yeah. Not everybody pays on time. Didn’t you notice?”
“No,” I said. I had been too occupied with the task of convincing him to surrender the route.
“You don’t know much about the newspaper business, do you?” he asked.
“No,” I confessed.
“You’ll learn,” he said. He pulled the strap of his newsboy’s bag over his head and thrust the bag at me. “It’s a deal then, right?”
“Right,” I said. I was so pleased to have the job that I accepted his terms without bargaining, without even considering that bargaining might be possible, establishing that day a habit of thought that has made me pay too much for most of the things I have bought since.
I borrowed, from Guppa, the money to buy the route and pay the bills of all the customers who were late in paying. I was to pay Guppa back at the rate of a penny per customer per week, but I was determined to collect all the old debts in the first week. When I stopped at the home of the first deadbeat on my list and she told me that she couldn’t pay me because she didn’t have the right change, I stood speechless in front of the door for a moment before I remembered that I had change.
“I can give you change,” I said.
“Of twenty bucks?” she asked.
“Oh, no,” I admitted.
“You better try me next week,” she said. She closed the door. I got onto my bike and rode to the next stop on the route.
I soon found, to my surprise and disappointment, that not only did I have a hard time getting my customers to pay me, but even when they did pay me I didn’t get to keep the twenty-five cents that they paid for the Reporter. I had to pay the Reporter, in the person of their agent, Mr. Creeley, who threw the bundle of papers into our driveway every afternoon, four cents for each issue on delivery and somehow get the money from the customers. From the first day, I was sinking into a hole. Fortunately, Porky had an idea about this problem too.
“You’ve got to look at it this way,” he said. “What are your customers paying you for, or I should say, what would they be paying you for if they were paying you?”
“The paper,” I said, trotting all my naïveté out for Porky to chuckle at.
“Oh, no they’re not,” said Porky. He chuckled at my naïveté and tousled my hair. “If they were just paying for the paper, they’d pick up a copy at the corner store, but they don’t. You see, you’re not selling the paper.”
He paused to unbutton his pants and tuck in his shirt, providing, through this business, time for me to wonder what on earth he was getting at, so that when he made himself clear I would say to myself, “Ah-ha! So that’s it.”
“You’re selling service,” he said. “The service of delivering the paper to them. If they’re not paying you, it’s because they think they’re not getting enough service.”
“But I’m never late,” I protested. “And I—”
“I know, I know,” said Porky. “You’re going about it completely wrong. You’re just doing the job the way it’s supposed to be done. You’re not late, you don’t miss a day, you don’t complain, you don’t cause any trouble. They think your job must be easy for you—too easy. You notice I didn’t say that they think they’re not getting good service. I said that they think they’re not getting enough service. You see what I mean?”
I did see what Porky meant. I saw it very clearly, and I took action almost at once. On the next collection day, I delivered all the papers about an hour later than I usually did. I bandaged my right arm from the hand up to the elbow, smeared dirt on my cheek, and put a Band-aid on my forehead. With the paper, I delivered a halting apology for being late. As if reluctantly, I allowed it to be understood, in response to their questions, that an enormous dog had attacked me just as I had begun the route, knocking me off my bicycle and scattering the papers, and that I had lost time picking up a new batch of papers, having my cuts and scrapes bandaged, and getting the first in a long and painful series of rabies shots. Not only did I collect from every customer, but I took home far more in tips than I earned on my markup.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
One of my regular duties as a member of the Young Tars was monitoring the boarding of the school buses at the end of the school day. This responsibility meant that I spent some time each afternoon with Porky White, who was at that time driving a bus for the town of Babbington. I remember well the first afternoon that I spent talking with, or listening to, Porky, while we sat in the bus he drove, Bus Six, waiting along with the other bus drivers for the bell to ring, ending the school day. It was a day early in October, a clear, bright afternoon. Talk had turned, as it is likely to turn in any conversation with Porky, to women. He asked me: “You got a girlfriend, Peter?”
“Well—” I said.
“You can tell me,” he said. He looked over my head, at the other bus drivers, and grinned.
I answered, with a little hesitation, “Veronica McCall.”
“Wow!” Porky said. “I’m impressed. You go right after first prize, don’t you? She’s quite a little number.”
“She’s cute, isn’t she?” I asked. I was glowing.
“Cute?” said Porky. He raised his eyebrows and looked at each of the other drivers in turn. “Hey, open your eyes, Peter. She’s more than cute, if you know what I mean. I bet you’ve got a lot of competition from the other guys.”
“Competition?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. “A guy has got to be eternally vigilant if he doesn’t want to lose his girl. You know, there’s always somebody who wants to take your place.”
“There is?” I asked.
“And it’s when you think that you don’t have anything to worry about that you probably have the most to worry about,” Porky said.
“Why is that?” I asked.
“Well, when you start thinking you don’t have anything to worry about, you start taking her for granted.”
“Oh.”
“You stop sending her flowers—”
“Flowers?”
“You stop saying those sweet nothings she likes to hear—”
“Sweet nothings?”
“And pretty soon you start seeing signs that she’s bored.”
“Bored?”
“Sure. You have to remember to keep up the romantic touches, because when you get right down to it, it’s usually not you they like—what they like is romance.’
“Romance?”
“Of course, Peter. Before you know it, some other guy is sending her flowers, some other guy is whispering sweet nothings to her, and pretty soon another mule is kicking in your stall, you know what I mean?”
“Yeah,” I said. I wondered whether Jack had sent flowers to Mrs. McCall.
“When was the last time you took her out for dinner somewhere with candlelight?”
“I’m only in the fifth grade,” I said.
“Oh, yeah,” said Porky, shrugging. “Well, not dinner, then. When was the last time you took her—”
“I’ve never taken her anywhere,” I said.
“You don’t take her out?” asked Porky.
“No,” I said. I couldn’t decide whether Porky was pulling my leg or whether an important facet of fifth-grade life had been entirely hidden from me. “None of the boys my age take girls out,” I said. Porky smiled and patted me on the head. He winked at one of the other drivers. “Do they?” I asked.
I didn’t know what to think. Certainly none of the boys I knew took girls out. Certainly none of the girls I knew went out. Or did they? Suppose they did go out, but they never told me about it. It might be that they had been keeping this going-out business from me because they knew I wasn’t ready for it. I had an early bedtime, after all, even on weekends. Perhaps the boys and girls who went out didn’t have to be in bed until a couple of hours later than I did, and perhaps they were accustomed to rendezvousing, of a Saturday night, at the Gilded Peacock, where they ate egg rolls and spare ribs and danced the merengue while I was asleep. It was possible, even likely, that they kept their nightlife secret from me out of kindness. They didn’t want me to feel left out. Of course, I was left out, but they couldn’t help that, and if I didn’t know that I was left out, at least I wouldn’t feel left out. It was kind of them to keep all this from me, in a way. Not only was it kind, but it was really quite amazing. To think that they could lead such wild lives after dark and manage to conceal all of it from me. I’d never even had a hint that all this was going on. None of my friends ever betrayed any of it. Veronica certainly never gave the slightest—Veronica. Veronica. Did she want to be part of this, did she want to go dancing at night at the Gilded Peacock? Of course she did. The poor thing. I was going to have to start taking her out.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” and “Call Me Larry,” the first eight novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
8
MORALE in the new school sank daily. The continuing construction made things difficult for everyone. Whenever the site of construction shifted, groups of students would be shifted to clear the area. When the cafeteria floor was being laid, we had to eat lunch in the gym, and the gym classes were held in the corridors. Teachers taped paper over the glass in the classroom doors, but still the thunder of sneakers would distract us now and then. We were never quite sure from one day to another, and even during a single day, where we were supposed to go next. However, for the students the most unsettling part of all this was that since the school wasn’t finished, the choosing of the winner of the name-the-school contest was continually postponed. Not only did we suffer the disappointment of not knowing who the winner was, but, worse still, since the deadline for submitting names was extended again and again, there was the need to come up with more and more names. Some boys and girls developed more or less constant headaches. I ran out of ideas. Over and over again, I tried scrambling the elements of the names that I had already submitted in the hope that I might come up with a winning combination. Like words repeated too often, my names began to sound meaningless and stupid to me, and I decided to ask that all my entries be withdrawn, so that I’d be spared the disappointment of losing or the embarrassment of having one of my ridiculous entries win. I went to see Mr. Simone one day during my lunch period and asked to have my entries back.
“I’m going to pretend that I didn’t hear what you said,” he said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because nobody likes a quitter, my boy.”
“Oh,” I said.
“So you just get those ideas about withdrawing from the contest right out of your head.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. He showed me to the door.
“And as far as I’m concerned, none of this ever happened, okay?” He smiled quickly and held his hand out for me to shake. I shook it, with little enthusiasm, and left.
Several innovations were introduced to raise the spirits of the students. Among these was the Young Tars. Membership in this group was limited to boys and girls who achieved certain academic standards, excelled in athletics, fawned over their teachers, or had influential and insistent parents. The Tars wore nifty sailor suits that caught the fancy of everyone in the school. Well, nearly everyone. The elitist selection process, which the faculty and administration had designed to make other students try their darnedest to earn admission to the Tars, created a large and angry group of students who hated the whole idea of the Young Tars and every now and then a couple of them leaped from behind a privet hedge and beat the bejesus out of a Tar who was on the way home.
The duties of a Young Tar varied from rank to rank and from week to week. Among other things, we directed traffic at street corners near the school; kept boys and girls in line on their way to lunch or recess, when they left school, and while they waited for their buses; ran errands for teachers; clapped erasers; distributed announcements; carried messages; hung exhortatory posters in the halls; interpreted Mr. Simone’s schedule changes for students who were baffled by them; and washed the car of Mr. Summers, the science teacher who was put in charge of the flotilla.
Within the ranks of the Tars, the fawners usually held the higher positions (Commodores or Admirals), followed by the ones with influential parents (Captains or Lieutenants), those who did well at athletics (Ensigns or Petty Officers), and those who did well academically (Seamen, Baymen, and Swabbies). I would have been in the last group, but fortunately for me, when the first uniforms were being handed out, it was discovered that Mr. Summers had ordered one of the two Commodore outfits in my size, instead of a size that would fit Robby Haskins, who was to have been a Commodore. Since this fact wasn’t discovered until all the Young Tars were backstage in the auditorium minutes before we were to be presented to the school as paragons, I became a Commodore by default.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” and “Call Me Larry,” the first eight novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Of adult nudity I knew nothing at first hand. At my grandparents’ house, I had studied, very carefully, the nude photographs of May Castle that I had found in a desk drawer in the bedroom that had once been my father’s. I had seen, briefly, usually looking over another boy’s shoulder, in a book that sometimes materialized in the boys’ room, photographs of nude men and women with black rectangles over their eyes, but these photographs were more puzzling than revealing. The people were always facing not quite the right way, or the photographs had been cropped just a fraction of an inch before the point at which they would have provided the curious viewer with some real information. The pictures implied a great deal, but without the experience that would have helped me to interpret them, with only my imagination to complete a curve, extend a line, illuminate a shadow, or sharpen the fuzzy focus, the possibilities multiplied so quickly and assumed such grotesque forms and enormous proportions that my head began to reel.
The second floor of Veronica’s house was an attic, expanded and made suitable for bedrooms by dormers that ran the length of the house at the front and rear. The stairs led to a small landing, off which there were two doors. One led to Veronica’s parents’ bedroom. The other led to Veronica’s bedroom. Under the eaves, there was space for storage. This arrangement was typical of the houses built in Babbington during the postwar population boom. My house, and the houses of most of the other boys and girls I knew, at least in Babbington Heights, resembled Veronica’s, differing only in rotation and scale.
Access to the storage space under the eaves was provided by sliding doors crudely constructed of thin sheets of pressed wood fibers that were sold under the trade name Masonite, with a simple finger hole drilled through each door to allow one to get a grip on it and slide it in its track to one side.
Slowly and silently, Veronica slid the door in her room open enough so that we could squeeze through. She got down on her hands and knees and crawled in. I followed her.
The floor of the storage area was simply a few pine boards nailed to the joists. To our left as we crawled along, there was no floor at all; the joists were exposed, and below them was the plasterboard of the ceiling below. I knew this because as soon as I put my hand out in the darkness of this tunnel, I missed the boards and felt my hand slip into dark nothingness, but then my hand struck the plasterboard, and I recognized it for what it was from familiarity with the attic at home, where I slept.
Very slowly, Veronica crawled along toward the light that we could see ahead of us, coming from the finger holes in the doors to the eaves storage in Veronica’s parents’ bedroom, from which the voices of Jack and Mrs. McCall came now in low rhythmical waves, sometimes resembling the involuntary grunting sounds one makes when one has been rowing a boat for quite a while and has to put a strong effort into each stroke, at other times more like the startled exclamation one makes when one is taken by surprise by some physical contact, at first frightened and then relieved, as when one feels the impact of a Ping-Pong ball on the back of one’s neck and realizes an instant later that it was only a Ping-Pong ball, nothing more.
After what seemed a very long time, Veronica stopped behind the door, where she could see into her parents’ bedroom through the finger hole. Light fell on her face through the hole. She wore a rapt, curious expression, but there was also in it a trace of anger—no, more than anger. It was a trace, apparent in a certain steadiness in her eyes, a twist in her upper lip, of hatred.
A car door, muffled but unmistakably a car door. The front door. No doubt about it, the front door. “Hello-wo! Hey, where’s my honey?” It was Mr. McCall.
“Oh, my God,” said Mrs. McCall, quite softly, and apparently quite calmly.
“Jesus H. Christ!” said Jack, and I could tell that he said it through clenched teeth.
Veronica turned toward me. I couldn’t see her face at all, but the light behind her lit her dark hair with a thin, golden aureole.
“Quick! Grab your clothes,” said Mrs. McCall. “You hide under the eaves. I’ll get him out of the house, and you slip away.”
I backed up as quickly as I could, and Veronica scrambled toward me. We had barely managed to crouch behind a cardboard carton marked ORNAMENTS, when the door at the other end of the closet slid open, and Jack crawled in, carrying his shoes and socks and pants.
Mrs. McCall called out, “Hi, Honey. I was taking a nap. I’ll be right there.” A couple of minutes later she went downstairs. We heard muffled voices from downstairs, then the front door opened and closed, and the car started and drove off.
Jack slid the door open. Light flooded into the closet. Veronica and I shrank behind the carton and waited. He closed the door. We heard his footsteps on the stairs, rapid footsteps. We heard him open and close the front door. We waited for a minute or so and then slid the door open and crawled out into Veronica’s bedroom.
“I’d better get home,” I said. I started for the door at once. Veronica didn’t say a thing. When I reached the front door, I turned and looked back upstairs. Veronica was standing at the door to her parents’ bedroom, looking in. She turned toward me.
“Come on back, Peter,” she said.
“I really better get home, Veronica,” I said.
“They’re probably not going to be back for a while,” she said.
“I can’t, Veronica,” I said. I was trying not to whine, trying to keep myself from saying, in whatever way, “I’m still a little boy, Veronica.” I said, “I have to go home and study for the social studies test.”
I ran all the way home. In my mind was a burning question, and it was probably the same burning question that was in Jack’s mind while he hid under the eaves: “How am I going to get out of this?”
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” and “Call Me Larry,” the first eight novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
“Come on,” she said, noiselessly, just moving her lips and beckoning with a finger. She led me from the kitchen into the dining room. She started up the carpeted stairs, tiptoeing with great care, keeping to the edge of the stairs nearest the wall. I followed her, my heart pounding, fear gathering in my throat like a cat’s fur ball. Whatever was going on up there, it was, I was certain, none of my business. To get caught even tiptoeing up the stairs like this would mean trouble, and whatever Veronica had in mind for us to do when we reached the top of the stairs was going to mean more trouble. Ah, but curiosity is a powerful force. Ignorance is so bleak a state that we are willing to risk a great deal to get out of it. Ignorance seems cold and wet and gray and foggy; knowledge seems warm and sunny and golden and clear. I followed Veronica as if she were leading me out of the darkness into the dawn.
We reached the top of the stairs. The door to Veronica’s parents’ room, where Jack and Mrs. McCall were, was closed, but Mrs. McCall was speaking, or making sounds, in a falsetto voice, a voice that made me think she and Jack were playing a game. Veronica and I had reached the top of the stairs, and we stood outside the door now. The thought occurred to me that Jack and Mrs. McCall might burst out of the room, intending to continue the game on the stairs or in the living room. Suppose the game involved running up and down the stairs? Veronica tugged my hand, and I realized that I’d been standing for some time on the landing, without moving, staring at the door. Veronica led me to the door to her room. She opened it and pulled me inside.
“Veronica,” I said, as quietly as I could. “Maybe I’ll go home now.”
“Oh, shut up,” she said. “Don’t you want to see them?”
“No, I don’t think—” I began, turning away.
“They’re naked, stupid,” she whispered. She giggled.
To explain the effect that Veronica’s statement had on me, I must describe the toy gun that I had received as a present the preceding Christmas. It was shaped like a bazooka, the antitank weapon that fired a rocket. This bazooka gun, as I called it, fired Ping-Pong balls. The barrel of the gun was in two parts: a larger cylinder in the front slid over a narrower cylinder behind. One loaded a supply of balls into a magazine and then, by sliding the outer barrel forward once, loaded a ball into the inner barrel and filled the space in the barrel behind the ball with air. The ball was pushed by the air all the way to the muzzle, where the ball itself functioned as a stopper because a rubber ring fixed inside the muzzle, a ring with an opening just slightly smaller than the diameter of the ball, prevented the ball from leaving the barrel. However, when one suddenly pulled the outer barrel backward, the air in the chamber behind the ball was compressed, and when the pressure reached a sufficiently high level, the ball was forced suddenly through the opening in the rubber ring and exploded from the muzzle. The firing was accompanied by a wonderfully loud whoomp, and the ball flew out with impressive velocity. Since a Ping-Pong ball has little mass, air resistance would slow its flight quickly, so the gun was actually a reasonably safe toy. (At least it was a physicallysafe toy. It was probably extremely harmful psychologically, but during the time that I’m recalling, children were apparently regarded as immune from psychological harm.) My friends and I devised a nasty little game with this bazooka gun. One player would be chosen as shooter, another as target. The target would stand up against a wall, facing the wall. The shooter would walk several paces away from the target and aim the gun at the back of the target’s head. The object, for the shooter, was to make the target flinch (cringe, shudder, or otherwise respond out of fear) between the time of the whoomp and the time that the ball struck the target’s head. The object for the target was not to flinch. Being a good target was much more difficult than being a good shooter. Raskolnikov was remarkably good at this game, in both roles. I was quite bad at it, especially as target. The worst part was the waiting. The impact of the ball grew more and more forceful in the mind until it was as powerful as a punch from one of the boys in the gang that Spike O’Grady led. When I finally heard the whoomp, I could never help myself: the muscles across my back tightened automatically, my shoulder blades snapped inward, and my neck snapped back, as if I had already received the blow. Then, smack, the ball would strike me, but feebly, harmlessly. The laughs followed. It was the laughter, not the ball, that stung.
Veronica’s remark struck me like the Ping-Pong ball from the bazooka gun. As Veronica and I mounted the stairs and slipped into her room, I began to understand, somehow, somewhere in the back of my mind, that whatever Mrs. McCall and Jack were up to was something that they wouldn’t want me to know anything about, something that I wasn’t supposed to know anything about, and something that in my heart of hearts I didn’t want to know anything about.
“They’re naked (whoomp), stupid (smack),” she whispered. She giggled. That stung.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I knew that.”
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” and “Call Me Larry,” the first eight novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
7
ON THAT AFTERNOON late in September, Veronica and I were walking home together after school. It was a Wednesday, and Veronica ordinarily had a piano lesson after school on Wednesdays, but Veronica’s piano lesson had been canceled. Mr. Getchel, the music teacher, had not come to school because he had cracked a tooth while using his teeth, as my mother had told me never to use them, in an attempt to remove the cap from a tube of toothpaste.
Veronica was quite nervous about the social studies test that we would have the next day, a test based on the first three chapters of Our Town and Its People, a history of Babbington that all fifth-graders were required to study.
“We can study together,” she suggested.
“All right,” I said.
“I’ll ask you questions that might be on the test,” she said.
“I think I should ask you questions instead,” I said.
“How come?” she asked.
“Because I know the answers better than you do,” I said. “You’re the one who needs to study.”
She burst out laughing. “You’re a funny guy, Peter,” she said.
“I am?” I asked.
“You sure are,” she said. “What’s the sense of asking me the questions if I don’t know the answers? I’ll just sit there saying nothing, won’t I?”
“Well—”
“Or else I’ll just answer them wrong, and that isn’t going to get me anywhere, is it?”
“No, I guess it isn’t.”
“But if I ask you the questions, then I’ll learn the answers from you.”
“I guess you’re right,” I said
“Of course I’m right,” she said.
I didn’t want to argue with Veronica, but in a corner of my mind I was beginning to form a vague hunch about how children came to have the vacant look that Frankie usually wore, and that hunch made me wonder whether any child that Veronica bore might not wind up with a version of Frankie’s vacant look.
We turned the corner of Veronica’s block, and she stopped short. A red convertible was parked at the corner, several houses away from Veronica’s. Veronica held a forefinger to her lips. She leaned toward me and whispered, “That’s Jack’s car.”
“Who’s Jack?” I asked.
“He’s—” she began, but she stopped at once. She looked steadily into my eyes for a moment, and I could see from the way she drew her eyebrows together that she was making a decision. Finally she said, “Come with me, but don’t make a sound.”
She led me to the back door of her house. I stood behind while she opened the door, slowly and silently. We stepped soundlessly into the kitchen, and Veronica began closing the door as slowly and silently as she had opened it. From upstairs, as from a great distance, came a shriek from Mrs. McCall, a squealing, crazy sound that might have been made by a madwoman or a frightened piglet. Veronica and I looked at each other. “You want to see?” she asked, whispering into my ear.
“See what?” I wondered. I wanted to go home. I wanted to stay in the kitchen and ignore any sound that came from upstairs. I wanted to see. I wanted to go home.
Veronica tilted her head to one side and raised her eyebrows, calling for an answer. I swallowed, but I said nothing.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” and “Call Me Larry,” the first eight novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
5
AS MR. SIMONE divided us into groups that morning in the auditorium, I began to guess what the groups meant. I couldn’t have guessed then all the implications of the division, but I guessed that the boys and girls in a group would be in the same classroom. Other rumors about the meaning of the groupings circulated through the auditorium, including the idea that one group would be sent to a reform school, and that another contained the finalists in the name-the-school contest, but I decided that the boys and girls who remained with me were going to be my classmates: these would be the boys and girls with whom I’d be closest, at least in school. In the very first division, I was separated from the Glynns and from Matthew Barber. When Mr. Simone finally stopped, I was in a group with all the Ls and the first half of the Ms. Raskol Lodkochnikov was in my group, and so was Veronica McCall.
6
OVER THE NEXT FEW WEEKS, Veronica and I saw a great deal of each other, not only at school, but after school, usually at her house. I was pleased and flattered by Veronica’s attentions, and I enjoyed showing off for her when we studied together. I enjoyed less the domestic tone that Veronica gave to our afternoons. The McCalls’ neighbors, the Parettis, had an infant child, Frankie. Very often, when I arrived, I would find that Veronica had volunteered to give Frankie an airing. Walking side by side, very much as if we were his parents, we would push Frankie around the neighborhood in his carriage. We would stop when someone wanted a look at him, and Veronica would beam when he was praised (which wasn’t often, for Frankie was a singularly unattractive baby, the kind that makes people, when they poke their heads under the hood of the carriage, gasp and say, “Oh, my!”). Veronica worried about whether Frankie was too cold or too warm and whether he was developing as he should. I hid from her my conviction that he hadn’t a brain in his head. Now and then, Veronica, playing at our being Frankie’s parents, would nuzzle me and suggest that perhaps we should have “another baby” so that Frankie wouldn’t be lonesome. My stomach grew cold when she asked me if I thought we should give it a try. At the time, I thought that the coldness was caused only by the prospect of bringing into the world another baby like Frankie, but the truth is that the sexuality Veronica had discovered on the other side of puberty scared me to death. I was to begin to recognize that truth one afternoon late in September.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” and “Call Me Larry,” the first eight novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
4
ANOTHER ASIDE. It is, I think, quite possible that during the next several years, the most important part of our education came from learning to follow Mr. Simone’s schedules, with their complex branchings:
All those who have music on Tuesdays and Thursdays skip ahead to page six for your Monday and Wednesday afternoon schedule. Those with music on Mondays and Wednesdays turn back to page two for your Monday and Wednesday afternoon schedule.
alternative paths:
During the twenty-two minutes allotted for lunch, you may (a) eat lunch, (b) cavort in the school yard, (c) play dodgeball in the gymnasium, or (d) work in the study halls held in rooms 112 or 124, but when the period is over, you must all assemble by group in the auditorium.
and dependent relationships:
If you take wood shop on Tuesdays and Thursdays during the first half of the year, you must study either French [see note on page 12] or the Tonette on Tuesdays and Thursdays during the second half of the year.
It is indisputably true that the generation of students who learned to follow Mr. Simone’s schedules or others like them has produced a large number of adults who are remarkably adept at writing long and intricate computer programs and long and intricate sentences that establish relationships among ideas so widely separated that one wouldn’t have imagined that a chain of reasoning could have been forged long enough to link them. I think that there is a cause-and-effect relationship in there somewhere.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
3
AN ASIDE. So much depends on chance. The coincidence of our having last names that began with the same letter of the alphabet, or at least with letters that were close in the alphabet, meant that certain of us would remain in each other’s company throughout most of every day for the next couple of years. The population of Babbington continued to grow rapidly during that time, and school building could not keep pace with the growth, so Mr. Simone continued to shuffle the students’ schedules to try to squeeze us into what space was available. Each group of twenty-five or so of us would sit in the same classrooms together throughout fifth and sixth grades; we would go to gym at the same time, go to lunch together, go to recess together, write at the same time, draw pictures at the same time, grow anxious about tests and book reports and science projects at the same time and then, when we reached junior high school, during the most overcrowded period for Babbington’s schools, we would arrive at school and leave school at a time unique to our group, since Mr. Simone developed a bafflingly complex system for moving students through the school in groups, a system that became more complicated as the schools became more crowded.
The lives of the boys and girls in one of Mr. Simone’s groups were aligned so precisely after a while that we became closer than most siblings. My age, since I had skipped most of the third grade, should have made me feel a person apart from my classmates, most of whom were a year and a half older than I, some of whom were more than two years older. However, the bond that Mr. Simone created seemed so strong that I decided the difference in our ages didn’t matter; I felt as if I had been aged by being one of them. On that score, I was, as I mentioned above, wrong.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” and “Call Me Larry,” the first eight novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Mr. Simon led us all in a spirited round of Simon Says. The workmen joined in too, making their scaffolding shake, and inspiring rippling laughter among all of us on the floor. A boy named Stretch, a sixth-grader, won. He was a tall boy, dark and muscular, with wavy black hair and thick black eyebrows.
Mr. Simone came to the lectern and stood there for a while, waiting for quiet. After much shuffling, coughing, twisting in seats and shushing, he got it, and he began.
“We all enjoyed that very much, didn’t we?” he asked. There was a scattering of yeses and yeahs, one or two low-toned noes, and one excellent imitation of a fart, which came from Spike O’Grady.
Mr. Simone pushed ahead, apparently deaf to any signs of dissent. “This will be a lot like Simon Says too. I want all of you sixth-graders whose last names begin with Athrough K to stand.” No one stood. We weren’t that stupid.
“Well?” said Mr. Simone at last.
“You didn’t say ‘Simon Says,’” came a voice from the scaffolding. There was thunderous laughter at this, and a group of workmen began slapping at one of their number with their hats, presumably the one who had called out.
“Oh,” said Mr. Simone. “Well, this will be like Simon Says without my saying ‘Simon Says.’ We’ll call it Simone Says. Whatever I say, you will do.” Then his playful tone disappeared, he glared at us and said sternly, “I hope you understand.”
Spike emitted a rasping and resonant noise from the side of her mouth, but, unfortunately, Miss Rasmussen, the girls’ gym teacher, alerted by Spike’s first offense, had taken a position just behind the row where Spike sat, and as soon as Spike began her delivery Miss Rasmussen pounced on her, grabbing Spike by the right ear and pulling her to her feet. She dragged Spike from the auditorium in this fashion, and all of us became silent and attentive. I found myself involuntarily reaching for my ear, as if it were sore. Mr. Simone began giving orders.
“All those of you who are in the sixth grade and whose names begin with A through K stand up, or, if you are already standing, remain standing, and, of course, if your last name begins with L through Z and you are now sitting, remain sitting, or if you are now standing, sit down,” said Mr. Simone. There was some confused mumbling, and a number of sixth-graders who had been sitting stood, a similar number who had been standing sat on the floor or scrambled for vacated seats, and a few looked to the heavens, or to the scaffolding, for help.
One of the sixth-grade boys called out, in an exaggeratedly deep voice, as if it were the voice of God, “Simon says, ‘Sit down, Mitgang.’” Stretch, the dark-haired boy who had won at Simon Says, sat down suddenly, as quickly and surely as he had responded in the game.
“Now all of you who are in the sixth grade and whose last names begin with Lthrough Z stand up,” said Mr. Simone. They did. “All the A-through-K’s move to this half of the auditorium, and the L-through-Z’s move to that half.” After several minutes and a great deal of pushing, shoving, and mock-accidental stepping-on-of-feet, this was accomplished. “Now, all the A-through-F’s move to the front half of their half of the auditorium, and the G-through-K’s move to the back half of their half of the auditorium.” This sort of thing went on for nearly an hour, until Mr. Simone had divided each grade into groups of classroom size.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” and “Call Me Larry,” the first eight novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
2
THE NEW SCHOOL OPENED on schedule, although the building wasn’t finished. On the first day, in the middle of the morning, all of us were herded into the auditorium to hear the principal, Mr. Simon, explain the rules that we would have to follow. It was with nervous anticipation that we shuffled through the hallways to the auditorium, because all of us assumed that once Mr. Simon had finished explaining the rules, he would announce the winner of the name-the-school contest.
Scaffolding was arranged on the sides of the auditorium, and dozens of workmen stood on it, working on a tangle of wires, pipes, and ducts that would, perhaps, be concealed by a ceiling someday. No carpet was on the floor yet, and some of the seats hadn’t been installed, so some of the sixth-graders had to stand in ranks at the back of the hall where the seats should have been. The whine of the workmen’s electric drills and saws and the blows of their hammers echoed in the hall.
Principal Simon stood at a lectern on the stage. When the auditorium was full, he blew into a microphone.
“May I have quiet, please?” he asked, raising his eyes toward the scaffolding and looking around the room. Some of the workmen had heard him and noticed his look. They stopped work, elbowed their co-workers, and began shushing one another, and gradually the noise stopped.
“Thank you,” said Mr. Simon. “We’ll try to get through this as quickly as possible. Then Mr. Simone, our new superintendent of public schools, will talk to you.” Mr. Simon nodded in the direction of Mr. Simone, and a thrill of anticipation ran through all of us, as if we had been wired together. Mr. Simone must be the one who would announce the winner. Mr. Simon shuffled through some papers on the lectern, cleared his throat, and spoke to us with measured simplicity.
“Now, boys and girls, as you can see, the school is not quite finished yet.” Roars of laughter came from the scaffolding, a couple of hoots, and then much shushing. Mr. Simon ignored it and went on. “Because the school is not quite finished, we are going to have to try to stay out of the workmen’s way.” One of the workmen made a remark that no one but his fellows beside him could make out. They roared.
“I have made a list of some of the things that we will have to do to stay out of their way. I hope you will listen very carefully.”
We all listened carefully, even the workmen on the scaffolding.
“Do not walk under ladders,” Mr. Simon began. He went on, citing reasons for not walking under ladders, offering anecdotes that illustrated the misfortune that could befall a person who did walk under ladders, and then went on to another rule. While he spoke, we, and the men on the scaffolding, listened less and less carefully. It was the sort of thing we had heard before. All of us, at least all of the kids, wanted to get to the announcement of the winner of the name-the-school contest. When Principal Simon finally finished, he asked whether there were any questions. Matthew Barber raised his hand, but a much larger boy beside him quickly pulled it down and held Matthew in his seat so that he couldn’t raise it again.
“All right, then,” said Mr. Simon. I took a deep breath and held it. My heart was pounding. All around me, boys and girls took deep breaths of their own and held them. The auditorium was eerily quiet, except for the muffled rumble of our pounding hearts. “In just a minute,” said Mr. Simon, “Mr. Simone is going to—”
I swallowed hard. I wiped my palms on my pants. “This is it,” said Raskol. His jaws were clenched, and he was slowly striking his fists together. A sigh came from somewhere behind me, and Kevin McManus, in front of me, crossed himself and bowed his head.
“—explain your room assignments and your lunch, gym, art, music, and recess schedules to you,” said Mr. Simon. A unanimous groan escaped from us. “Well,” said Mr. Simon, “I know that you’ve been sitting still—or some of you have been standingstill—for a long time. What do you say we have a little seventh-inning stretch? Why don’t we have a game of Simon Says?”
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” and “Call Me Larry,” the first eight novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
“Did you see this?” I shouted when I arrived at Raskol’s with the paper.
“Yeah,” said Raskol. “Margot and Martha burst in here with it in the middle of breakfast. My father was just slipping a soft-boiled egg into his mouth with his soup spoon when they flew into the house, wham, bam, no knocking, no hellos, all squeals and excitement. God, his face got so red and swollen I thought his head was going to blow up—barroom! Egg yolk was dripping from the corners of his mouth. He grabbed that broom handle he keeps beside his plate and smacked it on the table, right on the edge of Little Ernie’s oatmeal bowl. There was oatmeal all over the table, all over Ariane’s slip, and all over me, too. My first thought was, Maybe I should call the cops, but then my second thought was, Maybe I should call an ambulance. But it all worked out all right because my father is such a pushover for those two. As soon as he saw them, he said, ‘Hey, how’re my girls?’ and he wiped his mouth on his sleeve, tossed the broom handle into a corner, and squatted down so that the two of them could jump into his arms. He’s out on the dock with them now, thinking up names. They’ve got about sixty entries already written out.”
“Sixty?” I exclaimed. I had imagined that I would enter one name, one top-notch name, one name that was the product of weeks of satisfying effort, the one name that survived after I had rejected hundreds of others as second-rate or worse, one name of such transcendent aptness that it couldn’t lose. It didn’t strike me as appropriate to send in every name that popped into my head. When I saw the stack of papers that Margot and Martha and Mr. Lodkochnikov had beside them I said as much, taking care to direct my criticisms at the Glynns only, suggesting indirectly but as clearly as I could that Mr. Lodkochnikov probably disapproved as strongly as I did, but was just indulging their childish impropriety because he was a kindly sort.
“No, Peter,” said Margot. “You’re wrong. Martha and I talked this over for a long time, and Mr. Lodkochnikov agrees with us, too, don’t you, Uncle Bunny?”
“Uncle Bunny?” I repeated, soundlessly.
“Well,” said Raskol’s father, shrugging, “I got some reservations—”
“But you mostly agree with us, don’t you,” asserted Martha, “that what it comes down to is this—it’s not the name that pleases you or me that’s going to win; it’s the name that pleases the judges, whose decision is final.”
“There I agree with you,” said Mr. Lodkochnikov.
This was a shattering but indisputable truth. “You’re right,” I admitted.
“And the more names you send in,” said Martha, “the better chance you have of sending in one that they’ll all like.”
“You’re right about that too,” I said. I abandoned immediately the approach that I had intended to take and adopted theirs. Over the course of the next five or six weeks, we submitted, among the four of us (five, counting Mr. Lodkochnikov, whose names went in under Margot or Martha’s sponsorship), more than a thousand names for the school. Margot spent afternoons in the library hunting for ideas for names on old maps of Babbington (“Bolotomy Bay School,” “Musgrave Swamp School”); Martha was especially adept at deriving names from the names of animals and birds (“Herring Gull Elementary School,” “One-clawed Crab Elementary School”); Mr. Lodkochnikov contributed a few, but none of us thought they were likely winners (“Unfinished School,” “School of Hard Knocks”); and Raskol proved to have an uncanny knack for coming up with phrases that linked the school with aspects of everyday life in Babbington (“Slow Leak School,” “Foggy Day School”). Compared to theirs, my names were, well, lackluster. They had the virtue of accuracy, but one was much like another, and none, it seemed to me, offered anything that would make the judges sit up and take notice, nothing that would make them say, “That’s it! That’s the name we want!”
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” and “Call Me Larry,” the first eight novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
1
THIS IS THE STORY of two contests in which I competed in the fifth grade. One, probably the more important, was a competition for the love of Veronica McCall. This was a competition that I sponsored, but I was never a serious contender in it myself at all, which is probably as it should have been, since I didn’t really understand what prize was at stake, did not, to tell a truth that I would have been too embarrassed to tell at the time, even want to understand what prize was at stake, because I did understand that it was a variety of love for which I hadn’t yet developed an appetite.
In the manner of a chowder, which is a complex and subtle mixture of elemental foodstuffs, the emotion that we call love is a bewildering and varied concoction of more elemental emotions: lust, friendship, curiosity, guilt, and fear, among others. Tastes in chowders vary from person to person, from nation to nation, from region to region; one’s own taste in chowder changes over the course of one’s lifetime, and it may even shift from day to day. So it is with tastes in love. Some like theirs chock full of voluptuous scarlet tomatoes; others prefer something rarer, more exotic, heady with saffron; and still others like theirs bland and sturdy, with cream and potatoes.
My tastes and Veronica’s were different because I was two years younger than she, and at the time they were an especially important two years. Those two years represented the Gulf of Puberty, not so wide a gulf, but one where the waters can be treacherous, and where the fog is often so thick that one can’t see from one shore to the other. When I finally began to get a fuzzy notion of what Veronica wanted from a boyfriend (however fuzzy her desires might still have been) I began looking for someone who might be able to take the job away from me.
The other contest seemed much simpler on the surface, but I soon found that I had underestimated its demands. Not long after I had entered it, I found myself wishing that I could withdraw from this one too. It was the contest to name the new school.
Because of a rapid increase in Babbington’s population, a new upper-elementary school was being built at what was almost the geographical center of Babbington, and boys and girls from all over town would attend the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades there. The three small existing elementary schools—two old ones in the old town and one fairly new one in Babbington Heights—would be used only by children in the lower grades.
Work on the new school had begun the year before. During the summer, when it looked for a while as if the school might actually be completed before the fall, the announcement of the name-the-school contest appeared in the Babbington Reporter, and it sent a ripple of excitement through the upper-elementary-school population of Babbington.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” and “Call Me Larry,” the first eight novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Well, when Mitgang’s book appeared, it gave the clam culture reason to think of itself as far sexier than the chicken culture. One might expect that the animosity would, as a result, have disappeared, but any good psychohistorian would be quick to point out that things are rarely as simple as that. The anti-chicken attitude in Babbington mighteventually have disappeared if Seafood and Sex hadn’t brought so many outsiders into the town. These newcomers, remember, had been attracted to Babbington by Mitgang’s descriptions of the clamming culture, so they arrived eager to embrace this culture, to penetrate its mysteries, to become part of it. (I’m told that it wasn’t unusual during this time to see half a dozen new Babbingtonians dogging the steps of a native, trying to learn to walk like a clamdigger ashore.) Sadly, among the aspects of clam culture embraced by the newcomers was the anti-chicken-farming prejudice.
Now here comes the strange irony of all this, the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction part. Most of the land available in Babbington for building the houses that the newcomers would live in was in the northern half of town, away from the bay, the part of town to which the chicken farmers had been driven so long ago. This part of town had come to be known as Babbington Heights. As newcomers moved into Babbington, the chicken farms gave way to tracts of new houses, one very much like another, and most of the chicken farmers collected their money from the developers and went off to the Midwest. The people who moved into the tract houses, lured by the promise of seafood and sex, tried to emulate the Old Babbingtonians but found that the real Old Babbingtonians treated them as if they’d been born and bred in the Heights, as if they’d sprung from generations of chicken farmers.
When my parents finally saved enough money to buy a small house, they moved from my grandparents’ house on No Bridge Road, not far from the heart of Old Babbington, to one of the small houses built on a former chicken farm in the Heights.
Perhaps it was inevitable that the people in the Heights, stung by the rejection of the Old Babbingtonians, should band together and reject the people who rejected them. That is what they did. They turned against the old clam-based culture and developed a nostalgic affection for chicken farming, for a past and a way of life that they had never known. Like most converts, they quickly became zealots. Within a year or two, there was hardly a household in the Heights that didn’t have its small flock in a little homemade coop out in the back yard. Most people kept laying hens, but some specialized in roasters or fryers, one or two kept fighting cocks, and several had flocks of homing chickens, which they would allow to walk around the block a few times in the gathering dusk of a summer evening, summoning them home with elaborate whistle signals when night fell. I admired the ability of the whistlers, and my father became one of the best of them, but I never cared for those chickens. I was friendly with the boys and girls in my neighborhood, but my roots were in the other culture—the bay owned my heart and my imagination.
FIFTH-GRADERS are not noted for their tolerance. When the population growth forced the town to build a new central upper elementary school, and boys and girls from all over Babbington were thrown together in that new central upper elementary school, they quickly took sides, as if they were choosing up for a mammoth game of dodgeball. I had grown up with a foot in each of the cultures; I tried to remain aloof from this tribalism, but it didn’t take long for me to see that—at least for the time being—I couldn’t. I could see the way it was going to be. If I was going to have any friends in school, I was going to have to choose one camp or the other. Veronica certainly saw that this was the case, and she began to grow impatient with my reluctance to choose. Finally, on the day when the winner of the name-that-school contest was announced, just a few minutes before the announcement itself, Veronica put her ultimatum to me, in terms nearly identical to those that Albertine was to use thirty years later. She touched her hand to my cheek and said, “Peter, you’ve got to choose: chicken or clams.” I chose clams, and Veronica chose chicken, and away she went.
YOU SEE HOW DIFFICULT it would have been for me to change that outcome without changing Babbington, my past, my feelings for my family, and so on. However, all of the foregoing seemed to me far too complex to include in the story of a childhood romance.
What to do? The solution that you’ll find in the pages that follow was not the only possible one, but working it out gave me great satisfaction. I compressed everything. Since Mitgang and Seafood and Sex were to blame for my losing Veronica, I cast Stretch Mitgang in Frankie Paretti’s role, and I used sex instead of societal forces as the reason for my losing Veronica. Then, since I really hated to see myself lose, whatever the reason, I had myself drop out of the contest instead. And finally, since my loss to Frankie Paretti still stung a bit after all these years, I cast him as an especially unattractive infant. That the satisfaction I gained from doing this to Frankie was ignoble bothered me only a little, and only for a little while.
Peter Leroy
Small’s Island
June 15, 1984
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” and “Call Me Larry,” the first eight novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
It happened like this:
Before I was born, Babbington was a stable little community, dependent on—and redolent of—the clamming industry, with some small appeal for tourists. No one living in Babbington then would have predicted that within five years a period of rapid growth would begin that would last throughout my childhood. The effects of this growth were broad and deep, both on Babbington and on me.
Most of the reasons for Babbington’s phenomenal growth were not unique to Babbington: the population of the entire United States, indeed of the entire world, was growing rapidly in the postwar years, which these years were, and large numbers of people, especially young fertile couples, were choosing to live in places more or less like Babbington. However, the most important single reason was unique to Babbington, and that reason was Stretch Mitgang.
Mitgang, a sociologist with psychohistorical interests, moved to Babbington just a year or so before I was born. Passing himself off as a psychosocial historiographer, Mitgang undertook a two-year study of the sexual practices of Babbingtonians. His charm and good looks made it easy for him to ingratiate himself with Babbingtonians of all stripes, so he was able to gather reams of data, thousands of anecdotes, tens of thousands of tall tales, and quite a few firsthand experiences. When he had gathered the material he needed, Mitgang disappeared. A couple of years later, he published the results of his research under the title Seafood and Sex: a Study of Life in a Coastal Town.
In his book, Mitgang included the data, history, and logical cement that readers expected, but he also laced the book with anecdotes about Babbington and Babbingtonians that were, for their time, quite frank (and probably exaggerated), and he also included photographs that were, for their time, frank to an extreme (and probably staged). Seafood and Sex has been out of print for years, but if you take the trouble to track down a copy, you will understand why it quickly became a best-seller and why the book itself became a primary reason for Babbington’s rapid growth.
Mitgang waxed Whitmanesque in his enthusiasm for the general good health of the citizens, the “unflagging vigor that they bring to the day’s labor and the night’s delight.” This he attributed to the generally salubrious effects of bracing salt air. He went on to praise the “mesmerizing seductiveness of its women, at once shy and bold, endearingly naive and shockingly inventive, teasing and complaisant.” These qualities he attributed to the aphrodisiac effects of moonlight on the bay. In describing the men, Mitgang returned again and again to their “sturdy thighs, priapic grandeur, and remarkable endurance,” which he attributed to the habit of hard work and to the eating of clams. That did it. As soon as the book was published, outsiders began flocking to Babbington, and the population began an accelerating rise.
The newcomers moved into a town that was already sharply divided culturally. Clamming had always been important to the town, but after the War of 1812, for reasons too complex for me to explain here, chicken farming and processing became an important secondary industry. In the early years of this century, there occurred a series of riots during which clamdiggers attempted to drive chicken farmers out of Babbington. Most historians refer to the period during which these riots occurred as the Chicken Purge; however, the clamdiggers attacked the chicken farmers with, among other weapons, the tongs that they used for harvesting clams from the bay, and because of this unorthodox use of the clam tongs, this unpleasant period is sometimes referred to as—and I apologize for this—the Tong Wars.
Call it what you will, it was an ugly time in Babbington’s history, one that just about everyone would rather forget. But it had such a powerful effect on the culture of Babbington that it can’t be—and, I think, must not be—forgotten. At the time, the clammies claimed that runoff from the chicken farms was fouling the bay, and there was probably some truth to the claim, but it was not the real reason for the animosity that they felt toward the chicken farmers. I think we can find the real reason if we read between the lines of a passage in Our Town and Its People, a social studies text that all fifth-grade Babbingtonians were required to study, a text commissioned by the Daughters of the Tong Wars. Of the chicken farmers that textbook said, in part:
Chicken farming is easy work, suitable for people who cannot do much else. As a group, chicken farmers are a happy-go-lucky lot. Like the birds they raise, they pass most of their lives eating, sleeping, and copulating. They live in blissful ignorance of time and tide.
I infer from this passage that the clammies were simply envious of the chicken farmers. The chicken-farming culture seemed to offer a life that was easier, happier, and more exciting. Their own lives were hard, sometimes miserable, and often dull. But most of all, the chicken-based culture must have seemed sexy.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” and “Call Me Larry,” the first eight novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Preface
To be in any form, what is that?
(Round and round we go, all of us, and ever come back thither)
If nothing lay more develop’d the quahaug in its callous shell were enough.
Mine is no callous shell,
I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,
They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.
I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,
To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand.
Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
A chicken ain’t nothing but a bird.
E. B. Wallace, “A Chicken Ain’t Nothing But a Bird”
(recorded in New York, October 14, 1940, by Cab Calloway and His Orchestra, including Mario Bauza, Dizzy Gillespie, Lamar Wright, Tyree Glenn, Quentin Jackson, Keg Johnson, Hilton Jefferson, Jerry Blake, Andrew Brown, Chu Berry, Walter Thomas, Benny Payne, Danny Barker, Milt Hinton, and Cozy Cole)
THIS STORY WAS CONCEIVED at Corinne’s Fabulous Fruits of the Sea one evening when Albertine and I had dropped by for drinks and stayed for dinner. Al always knows what she’s going to have when we go to Corinne’s, and since she doesn’t eat fish, she always has the same thing: chicken. I study the menu, eliminating things one by one, remain undecided until the last minute, and then nearly always wind up ordering clams. During the important visit that led to my writing this story, we had been sitting at our table for a while, and I had eliminated everything on the menu but two things: chicken and clams.
“Are you having chicken?” I asked Al.
If I remember correctly, she said, “Yes.”
“Maybe I’ll have chicken too.” I said.
She said nothing, I think.
“Or maybe I’ll have clams,” I said.
She said something that I couldn’t quite make out. A waitress, Dianne, one of my favorites, arrived. Al ordered. I hesitated. Albertine said—and I’ll be forever in her debt for this—“You have to choose: chicken or clams.”
An electrifying sensation shot through me, at once frightening and exhilarating. What Albertine had said brought back to me a memory from three decades ago, when I was in the fifth grade. My work on “Take the Long Way Home” began then. Over the intervening months, the story has grown and developed in ways that I couldn’t have predicted, but it is still possible to see that it began with the memory that Al’s statement recalled.
Allow me a little of your time to explain what the memory was, how I changed its essentials, and why I altered them.
When I was in the fifth grade, I competed in two memorable contests. One was a contest to name a new elementary school in Babbington. The other was a contest for the affections of Veronica McCall. I lost both.
As I worked on “Take the Long Way Home,” I changed, among other things, the outcome of one of these contests: the name-the-school contest. In the pages that follow, I win. Why did I change the facts? To tell you the truth, I did it just to please myself. I’ve thought for nearly thirty years that I should have won that contest in the first place. Surely this is one of the motives behind any fiction: the desire to correct the errors of the past. It was easy to change the outcome, so I did.
I would have changed the outcome of the other contest if I could have, but I couldn’t. The reasons for my losing Veronica were so deeply rooted in fact, in history, in the social fabric of Babbington, that to deny them, to try to alter them, would have meant trying to create a new social history, and since that seemed like more than I could do, I decided to stick to the facts.
But what were the facts? These things happened to me in the fifth grade; at the time, I thought that the outcome had a simple cause: I had lost Veronica to a boy named Frankie Paretti. What did I know then about the social forces at work in Babbington? Only as I worked on the story did I come to realize that—in the largest sense—I hadn’t lost Veronica to any one boy. If I hadn’t lost her to Frankie, I would have lost her to someone else, because I really lost Veronica to the sweeping force of social change. As I worked, I kept asking myself, “How did it happen? Why was there such an upheaval in the social structure of Babbington that it produced the tsunami that swept Veronica from me?” Weeks passed before I understood that it was all the fault of Stretch Mitgang.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” and “Call Me Larry,” the first eight novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
28
LESS THAN A MONTH LATER, Mrs. Graham announced one day that Clarissa was going to be leaving Babbington and moving to Sioux City, Iowa, where her father would be devising new uses for setae, snouts, and trotters at Pickled Pork Products, a large and nationally famous company. While Spike was at the front of the room trying to find Iowa on the map of the United States, I looked at Clarissa. She was stroking her muff again.
On Clarissa’s last day, Mrs. Graham threw a party an hour or so before school ended. Clarissa hugged everyone in the class at least once. She and some of the other girls cried and promised to write to each other.
I dawdled after the bell rang, fussing around, helping Mrs. Graham straighten up, because Clarissa had stayed to help her too, and I wanted to say good-bye to Clarissa alone.
When we were finished cleaning up, we walked out to the parking lot. Clarissa’s mother hadn’t arrived to pick her up yet. Mrs. Graham drove off, and we were alone.
“You’ll be late getting home,” Clarissa said.
“Oh, that’s all right,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”
There was a silence. Then she looked at me and said, very softly, “Good-bye, Peter.”
“Good-bye, Clarissa,” I said.
“We had some good times together,” she said. She hugged her muff and looked off into the distance.
“Yes,” I said.
She smiled and poked me with her elbow. “Remember when you tried to make Mrs. Graham think that you knew the times tables?” she asked.
“You mean you knew that I—” I began.
She chuckled. “And remember that Santa Claus suit you wore when you came to my house for dinner?”
“I wouldn’t call it a Santa Claus suit,” I said. I zipped my jacket up tighter.
“And I’ll never forget that joke about the rabbits.” She went into a fit of giggling, and her eyes began to tear.
She stopped giggling and looked hard into my eyes. “Can you forgive me for what I did?” she asked.
“Oh, Clarissa—” I said.
“You still like me, don’t you?” she asked, rotating at the hips, tipping her head to one side. Her cheeks were red with the cold. A cloud of breath hung in front of her while she spoke, then disappeared while she waited for me to answer. She wasn’t smiling now.
“Yes,” I said.
“Will you miss me?”
I looked past her, over her shoulder. “Yes,” I said.
“Will you write to me?”
“I’ll write to you,” I said. “I promise I will.”
“Please don’t forget me.”
“I’ll never forget you,” I said.
She smiled again. “Why don’t you take my picture?” She pointed to my camera, which I was holding by the strap. “You’ll have something to remember me by.”
“Well—” I began.
“Then you’ll always remember me the way I am now,” she said. “You can put the picture on your bedside table in one of those frames that stands up by itself. You can look at it each night and you won’t forget me. Where do you want me to stand?”
I raised the camera to my eye and found her in the viewfinder. I had her walk backwards until all of her fit within the frame. She stood with her feet together, her legs straight, her hands in the muff. She shivered once and then smiled.
I had my finger on the button, but the familiar uncertainty came over me, and I hesitated.
“Are you finished?” she called.
Through the viewfinder, I saw her frown. She wrinkled her nose, and furrows formed across her forehead. She stamped her foot, and I pressed the button at once.
“Got it!” I called back. I brought the camera down from in front of my face and smiled. She smiled back, and I took a slow deep breath to see if anything hurt inside my chest.
Her mother drove into the parking lot and tooted the horn. Clarissa turned and walked away. I wound the cream-colored plastic knob absentmindedly and watched Clarissa walk the length of the parking lot, get into the car, wave to me, and turn away, toward her mother, who drove off.
The next day, I began using film.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” and “Call Me Larry,” the first eight novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
26
I GOT AROUND on crutches fairly well, but it wasn’t really any fun. Most of the kids in Mrs. Graham’s class signed my cast. Spike wrote, “You had it coming to you.” Veronica wrote, “Thanks for everything.” Clarissa signed several times. Each time she wrote, “Can you ever forgive me?”
The play was quite a success. Veronica did a creditable job as Cordelia, Spike was an excellent Regan, and Clarissa was outstanding as Goneril.
To tell the truth, I had wanted all along to play Lear myself, but I knew that no one could do a better job than Matthew, and so I gave the part to him. He was superb.
I played the Fool. Judging from the applause, I was good enough, but some people may have been applauding only out of sympathy for my broken foot.
27
VERONICA’S PARENTS threw a cast party in their playroom. They had set up a number of card tables around the room, covered with white paper tablecloths, and at each place was a fluted paper container of candy, a snapper, a paper hat, a paper plate, a paper napkin, and a paper cup with a fold-out handle. For a while, I felt a little sick, partly because I was reminded of all the birthday parties at which I had eaten too much ice cream and had had to throw up on the ride home, and partly because being in the playroom with Veronica beside me, the closet door right behind me, and Mr. and Mrs. McCall bustling around made me apprehensive, but the camaraderie was infectious, and I soon began to relax and enjoy myself. I was sitting at a table with Veronica, Spike, and Clarissa.
Spike was sitting on my right, and now and then she would pause in the wolfing down of her ice cream and cake, chuckle, and give me a friendly knock on the shoulder or punch in the stomach. I’m quite sure that Spike would have broken my foot when she learned that I had given the part of Cordelia to Veronica if Clarissa hadn’t already broken it. As it was, seeing that my foot had been broken by someone seemed to be enough to satisfy her.
Veronica was sitting on my left. At one point she poked me and pointed downward. She had part of her skirt pulled up, and I saw that she was wearing my underpants. She hadn’t returned them to me even after I had given her the part. When I told her the news, she had given me an extravagant hug, and while she was hugging me she whispered in my ear that she would hang on to them for a while just in case. I pulled back from her and told her not to forget that I had hers. “I guess that makes us even,” she said.
Clarissa was sitting opposite me, smiling and telling whoever passed that she wished she had been able to do a better job as Goneril. She had her muff in her lap, and she stroked it like a pet.
“Say,” I said. “I’d like to make a toast.” The girls sat up straight. They raised their paper cups as I had raised mine.
“To Regan, to Goneril, and to Cordelia,” I said, saluting each of them in turn with my cup. “I’m glad it’s over, and I’m glad we’re friends.”
“To Peter,” they answered, and we touched our raised cups. When we lowered them again, I was looking into Clarissa’s big eyes. The reflection in them of the fluorescent light overhead brought on an annoying itch inside the cast on my foot.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” and “Call Me Larry,” the first eight novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
25
AS SOON AS I had made my decision, everything else looked easy. I read through Mrs. Graham’s notes again and assigned all the other parts. I sat back and took a deep breath. For the first time since I had entered the fourth grade I felt just fine. I needed someone to share this feeling with, and I had someone: Clarissa.
I telephoned her and told her that I had assigned all the parts and that I would like to come over and tell her about them. She sounded excited and pleased, and my heart ached with gratitude toward her for being so good a friend. Though the skies were gray, and a storm really seemed to be about to break, I whistled a happy tune on the way to her house, and the closer I got the happier I felt. I decided to tell her everything. “How lucky I am,” I thought, “to have Clarissa to confide in.”
Clarissa was smiling and blushing when I arrived. We sat at the kitchen table, and I felt relaxed and voluble. I told Clarissa about Spike’s threat, and she seemed quite worried for me. She reached across the table and put her hands on mine. I told her about what had happened in Veronica’s closet, and she blushed, just as I had known she would. I told her about Veronica’s threat, and in her eyes I could see shock and, to myshock, a cold fury.
Then I told her that I had decided to give the part to Veronica.
Clarissa rose from the table slowly, with her hands still resting on it. Her cheeks grew livid.
“What’s wrong, Clarissa?” I asked. “Do you think I should have given the part to Spike?”
She stood and stamped her foot. “You fool!” she screamed.
“Clarissa—”
“You lunatic!” She began stamping her foot repeatedly. She seemed to be losing her mind.
“Please, Clarissa—”
She began inhaling and exhaling rapidly, her breath howling like the wind in a nasty storm. “You treacherous villain!”
“Calm down,” I commanded. I walked toward her with my arms extended, meaning to hold her and pat her on the back.
“You milk-livered coward!” she cried.
“Clarissa!” I expostulated. I was astounded to hear this kind of thing from her. I put my hands on her shoulders.
“You—you—you—” she stammered in her fury, stamping her foot as she spoke.
“But—” I began.
“You!” she shrieked, and when she brought her foot down on mine, her eyes fulgurated.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” and “Call Me Larry,” the first eight novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
24
I WOKE EARLY on Sunday morning and sat upright in my bed thinking the situation over. My two biggest problems were Spike and Veronica. Until I chose one of them to play the part of Cordelia, I wasn’t going to be able to think about the other roles. Thank goodness I didn’t have to worry about Clarissa, too. Several times during my deliberations I felt a sudden rush of affection for her.
Spike wanted the part, and I was quite sure that she would break my foot if she didn’t get it. Veronica wanted the part, and I was quite sure that she would show up at the kitchen door one morning and hand my underpants to my mother if she didn’t get it. Mrs. Graham’s notes weren’t very helpful, since she had recommended giving the part to Wilbur Carpenter.
I tried to imagine how it might feel to have my foot broken with a brick. I tried to imagine how it might feel to explain to my parents how Veronica had gotten my underpants. I went out to the garage and found a couple of boards that fit under my armpits like crutches. I shoved my foot into one of the empty coffee cans that my father accumulated in case he might need them for mixing paint, and I tried hobbling around a bit. It was really kind of fun. My father called out the kitchen door to say that breakfast was ready. While I sat at the table dunking my toast into my cocoa and playing with the blobs of butter that formed on the surface, I pretended, silently, that I was undergoing my parents’ you-have-some-explaining-to-do-young-man interrogation. Veronica and her parents were there too, and Veronica’s underpants, which I had been made to retrieve from my sock drawer, lay with mine in the center of the table. This really wasn’t any fun at all.
I decided to give the part to Veronica.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” and “Call Me Larry,” the first eight novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Clarissa’s father asked me what I would like to drink. Everything seemed so urbane that I thought he was actually asking me what kind of cocktail I would like. “Oh, nothing for me, thank you,” I said, not so much because I thought that I shouldn’t drink a cocktail, but because I was trying to be polite, and I knew that one of the rules of polite behavior was to refuse everything the first time it was offered. He asked Clarissa what she would like. She looked as if she were considering a long list of drinks and then finally said, “I’ll have a Shirley Temple.”
“All right,” said her father. “Sure you wouldn’t like something, Peter?”
“You know,” I said, thrusting my hands into my pockets, “I guess I could use a Shirley Temple.”
Mr. Bud chuckled at this, and I chuckled back, as if I had intended the remark to be funny, but I hadn’t, and I felt like a fool. I tried mightily from then on to show Mr. and Mrs. Bud that I was quite grown-up for my age. I attempted some grown-up talk, drawing on what I heard from my parents. I tried several topics. The first was business.
“How’s the by-product business, Mr. Bud?” I asked, rocking on my heels and taking a swig of my Shirley Temple.
Mr. Bud raised an eyebrow, glanced at Mrs. Bud, and grinned. “Not bad, Peter,” he said. “How’s school?”
Next I tried local politics.
“Do you think there’s a chance that the mayor will come to his senses sometime soon?” I asked, as my father did when he was reading the paper.
Mr. Bud looked startled. “What on earth do you mean?” he asked.
At dinner, I praised Mrs. Bud’s cooking. “Yessir,” I concluded, quoting from a Western I’d seen, “this is the best meal I’ve had in weeks.” This seemed to be pretty well received, so I pushed on, figuring to make the most of the one topic that seemed to be a success. There wasn’t anything else that I could take from the Western, so I borrowed my mother’s highest praise for someone else’s cooking. “You must give me the recipe for these mashed potatoes,” I said. This brought down the house, and Mr. Bud said, “You’re a regular comedian, Peter.”
So I attempted to tell a joke. I began while Mrs. Bud and Clarissa were clearing away the dinner plates and serving dessert. As soon as I had introduced the main characters, three rabbits called Phhht, Phhht-Phhht, and Phhht-Phhht-Phhht, just at the moment when I had succeeded in capturing everyone’s attention, I realized that I had forgotten the punch line. While we ate our dessert, I stretched the joke out with details of the home life of these rabbits, their forebears, the rabbit village where they lived, their hobbies and favorite meals, and the mysterious illness that led to the death of the youngest of them, Phhht, and then struck the middle one, Phhht-Phhht, while my mind raced ahead to try to recover the end of the story.
Mr. Bud finally said, “Peter, maybe you and Clarissa would like to be excused.”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll finish the joke for you later.”
Clarissa and I went into the living room and sat on the sofa. I felt that I had made an ass of myself, and when I heard laughter come from the dining room I was sure of it. To my surprise, Clarissa didn’t seem to think so at all. She slid over beside me on the sofa and linked her arm with mine.
“That was a wonderful story,” she said. “It’s amazing how relaxed you are. I would think it must be hard for you to be in the position you’re in, having to pick the boys and girls to play the parts,” she said.
“It is,” I said. “It really is. In fact—”
“Yes,” she said with a sigh, “it must be terribly hard. I think that I’d just want to crawl into a hole and hide if I had to say to someone I knew, someone I liked, ‘Sorry, but I gave the part to someone else.’”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I sure know I’d hate to hear it. It makes me wish I hadn’t tried out for the part of Cordelia,” she said.
“I thought you just did it for fun,” I said.
“Oh, yes,” she said. I felt her shudder, and she reached across me to take her muff from the end table. “But I don’t even know why I bothered,” she said. “I know I wasn’t as good as the others.”
“Oh, don’t say that,” I said. “You were great.”
“Do you really think so?”
“Oh, yes.”
“But you probably want somebody prettier.”
“Oh no, not necessarily,” I said, too quickly. “Uh, that’s not what I mean,” I added.
“I’ll bet you’d like to have Veronica McCall play Cordelia,” she said.
“Veronica McCall?” I said. “Well, I have to think about everybody who tried out, you know. I have to be fair. I have to think about Veronica, and I have to think about Spike O’Grady.”
“Spike O’Grady?” said Clarissa.
“Of course,” I said. “She tried out, too.”
“Well, I guess you do have to give everybody a fair chance,” she said. Then, after a long pause, she said, “Well, I’ve made up my mind!” After another long pause and a deep breath, she announced, “I’d like to drop out of the competition for Cordelia.”
“Drop out?” I said. “But I thought you weren’t even—”
“Yes,” she said, with a sigh. “That would make your job easier, wouldn’t it?”
“Well, yes—” I began. She turned from me suddenly and buried her face in her muff. I heard something that sounded like a sob, a muffled sob. “Clarissa?” I said.
There was a pause. Clarissa pulled a tissue from her muff and blew her nose. “Yes,” she said, in the smallest of voices.
“Did I hear you crying?” I asked.
“Oh, no, no,” she said, still facing away from me. “Don’t worry about me.” She made a small choking sound.
“Maybe you’re getting a cold,” I suggested.
“Maybe,” she blubbered.
“Peter!” called Mr. Bud. “Your father’s here!”
About halfway home, I remembered the end of the joke. Phhht is dead, and Phhht-Phhht is gravely ill. In a voice cracking with emotion, Phhht-Phhht-Phhht says to the doctor who is examining Phhht-Phhht, “Oh, doctor, you have to save him—I already have one Phhht in the grave.”
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” and “Call Me Larry,” the first eight novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
23
WHEN MY MOTHER AND FATHER and I sat down that night to eat our own dinner, I told them about Clarissa’s invitation. My mother was enchanted. She acquired a rosy glow, and she hugged me several times when she had gotten up to serve a dish or clear the table. My father made several remarks that made him chuckle and made my mother giggle and blush and say, “Oh, stop it, Bert.”
While my mother and I were doing the dishes, I said, as casually as I could manage, “Do you think I should wear a suit?”
My mother stopped working at once. “Of course!” she said. “Of course you should wear a suit! Oh, how cute you’ll look!”
We went into the living room and proposed the idea of my getting a suit to my father, who was sitting in his favorite chair drinking a beer and watching television. He thought, and said, that getting a suit just to go to dinner at a girl’s house, no matter how pretty she was, was going too far. My mother suggested a sports jacket. My father said that I would probably never wear such a thing again for months, and the next time I had a use for it, I would have outgrown it.
“Why can’t he wear the things you just got him?” my father asked.
“All right, but how about a necktie?” my mother asked. “Come on, Bert,” she said, when he hesitated.
“Sure,” said my father, grinning. “I’ll lend him a necktie.”
The next evening, there was lots of excitement over polishing my shoes, putting on my new corduroys and shirt and sweater, and tying my tie. My mother was teary-eyed when I was ready to go, and I wondered if there was something wrong with my outfit. My father drove me to Clarissa’s house.
Riding in the car, going off to dinner at a girl’s house, I felt for a short time like a young sophisticate. The feeling began to fade when my father said, as I got out of the car, “Now, be polite, Peter,” and it vanished completely as soon as Mr. Bud opened the door.
“Well!” he said. “You must be Peter!”
“Yes,” I said. We shook hands. I hoped that he didn’t notice that my hand was trembling.
“You look as if you’re ready for Christmas!” he said. Then he added “Ho-ho-ho!”
There was a mirror in their hall. As Mr. Bud and I walked past it, I took a look at myself. For the first time, I realized that except for my white shirt and brown shoes I was dressed entirely in red and green.
Mr. Bud led me into the living room, where Clarissa and her mother were waiting. Clarissa’s father was a genius of sorts, a restless genius whose innovative ideas for making useful and profitable products from garbage had landed him a spot at Bivalve By-products. It was he who suggested the “Clampact” that was to become so popular: a pair of empty clamshells, gilded, rejoined by a metal hinge, a mirror glued inside one valve, the other filled with face powder. The Buds’ house was larger than ours, and much fuller. Wherever it was possible to have an end table, an occasional chair, a picture, or a piece of ceramic statuary, there was one.
Clarissa and her mother were sitting on the sofa, wearing identical dresses. Clarissa’s mother was wearing stockings, but Clarissa was wearing anklets with her girl-size high-heeled shoes. All of this—Mr. Bud’s manner, his position at Bivalve By-products, the house, the decorating scheme, the matching dresses—made me feel completely out of my league.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” and “Call Me Larry,” the first eight novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
22
I WALKED HOME QUICKLY, through back yards and along lightly traveled streets. The sky was dark, and the wind had begun to rise. If it had been a summer afternoon, I would have said that the rumble in the distance was thunder. When I got home, I dashed inside and went directly to my room, where I sat on my bed holding my camera and wondering what to do.
I heard the phone ring downstairs, but I made no move to answer it. I didn’t want to speak to Spike or Veronica or anyone else who was after a part. My mother came to the foot of the stairs and called up to me. “It’s for you, Peter,” she said.
“It’s not Spike, is it?” I asked.
“Noooo,” she said.
“It’s not Veronica, is it?” I asked.
“Noooo,” she said. She was wearing a playful smile. “It’s Clarissa Bud. She seems very eager to talk to you.”
“Oh,” I said, relieved. “Clarissa.” I went to the hall and picked up the phone. “Hello,” I said.
“Oh, hello, Mr. Leroy,” said Clarissa. “I wanted to speak to Peter.”
“This is Peter,” I said.
“My goodness!” said Clarissa. “I didn’t recognize your voice. You sound so grown-up on the phone. Say something else.”
“Uh—what should I say?”
“That’s amazing!” she declared. “You sound so strong and firm. Of course, that’s the way you sounded this afternoon, when you were on the stage. I was really impressed. I think everybody else was, too.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Oh, yes,” she said. She delivered the words with lots of air, making herself sound out of breath, as if she’d been running. “Well—how have you been?”
“I’m still okay,” I said.
“What do you mean, you’re still okay?” she asked.
“Huh?” I said. I felt as if I’d heard her for the first time. I realized that I’d been preoccupied with the idea of Spike’s breaking my foot with a brick or Veronica’s showing up at the back door with my underpants in her hand. “Oh,” I said. “I—I mean nothing happened to me on the way home from school or anything.”
“Oh, that’s good,” Clarissa said. She sounded bewildered. Then she took a deep breath, and with even more air than before she said, “I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you. I’ve missed you.”
“You’ve missed me?” I asked. “You mean since three o’clock?”
“I feel as if I haven’t seen you for days,” she said. “I miss your smile. You have that cute little dimple.”
“I do?” I said. I tried to drag the phone over to the hall mirror.
“Oh, yes!” she said. “In fact, you have one-and-a-half dimples. One on the right side, and a half on the left.”
“Is that bad?” I asked.
“Oh, no,” she said. “I think it’s cute.”
“Hold on a minute, Clarissa,” I said. “I want to go look in the mirror.”
I started to put the handset down, but I heard her calling to me. “Peter, wait. Don’t go away. I want to invite you to dinner.”
“Dinner?” I asked, and I brightened at once.
“Tomorrow night,” said Clarissa. “I hope you’re not doing anything then.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “I’m not doing anything.”
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” and “Call Me Larry,” the first eight novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Biff jumped up, ran to the stage, and began auditioning for the part of Lear, too.
“‘O, let me be not mad, not mad, sweet heaven!’” he bellowed, tearing at his hair and stumbling around the stage. He lurched downstage toward me and delivered the next line right in my face: “‘Keep me in temper; I would not be mad!’”
“Never, never, never, never, never,” muttered Matthew.
Clarissa walked to the edge of the stage, took Biff by the arm, and led him to the stairs at the side. “You have wonderful enthusiasm, Biff,” she said. Biff left the stage a happy boy.
I sank into my seat and avoided looking at the stage from then on. Clarissa found something nice to say about everyone, but Matthew’s comments on the performances grew more bitter as the auditions progressed. He exercised his most cutting sarcasm on anyone who tried out for the part of Lear. As the afternoon went on, Matthew’s gestures and his bitter laugh grew wilder and wilder, his hair flew out in all directions, his shirt came out of his pants. He seemed to be going nuts.
I occupied myself with writing furiously on a pad that Clarissa had put onto a clipboard for me, keeping my head down and maintaining, I hoped, the appearance of an intense concentration that should not be interrupted, while in fact I was just writing a description of my camera. Nearly everyone in the fourth grade must have tried out for at least one part, and Wilbur Carpenter, whose mother showed up to watch the auditions, tried out for six, including Kent, the Fool, Edmund the B*d, and all three daughters. I had come to think of the auditions as an endless torture. I didn’t realize that they were over until Matthew shook me.
“Peter! Peter!” he said. “Everyone’s waiting to hear who you picked!”
I looked at him beseechingly, and thought of begging for more time, but Clarissa was on the stage and already beginning to speak in her tiny voice. “Peter is going to announce his choices for the various parts,” she said.
I stood and made my way to the stage. I faced the audience.
“Well—” I said.
I looked at my notes.
“Well—” I said, again. I just stood there for a while, hoping that we might have a fire drill.
“Well what?” Biff called out.
“Well—ahhhhhh—well done!” I said.
I looked at my clipboard and flipped through the pages. I said, “Um—you know—ah—while I was watching the auditions—I—uh—couldn’t help thinking that—that watching people try out for parts is—um—a lot like taking a roll of snapshots.
“You really can’t be sure which of your snapshots is the best one on the roll until you get the film back from the camera shop, isn’t that true?” Since they were disposed to agree with anything I said, there was a lot of enthusiasm for this idea. I thought of saying a few words about the intriguing X-ray machine down at the Buster Brown store, which let you see a picture of the bones in your feet right through your shoes, but I couldn’t come up with a way to tie it in, so I let it go, with some reluctance.
“What I’ve decided to do,” I said, pointing to my head, “is take this roll of film home and spend the weekend developing it to see which snapshots are the best.” There were a lot of puzzled looks at this. “In other words,” I said, speaking rapidly and starting for the stairs at the side of the stage, “I’ll go through the notes I took on your auditions and think about them very carefully and then announce my choices next week.” I began moving down the aisle as quickly as I could without actually running. I waved my clipboard at the crowd and said “Thanks for coming, everybody.” I let myself out the door, and then I did start running.
Mrs. Graham burst through the doors and called out to me. “Peter! Peter!” she called, in that voice full of pleasure and excitement that was beginning to send chills down my spine. “Oh, don’t run off, Peter, don’t run off. Come here to me.”
I stopped running and turned toward her.
“Oh, Peter, Peter,” she said. “Isn’t this exciting?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said.
“I noticed that you were taking lots of notes,” said Mrs. Graham. “Why don’t we look through those together?”
“Uh—well,” I said, squirming.
“Oh, you’re right,” she said. “We don’t have much time. Here: I made a list of everyone who auditioned. I’ll just read through my notes with you quickly.”
The bell rang, so Mrs. Graham had no time to read through her notes with me. She gathered her things quickly and followed me outside. She fumbled in her briefcase, spilling homework papers onto the driveway, and found the notes she had taken. She gave the notes to me, and I started off for home as quickly as I could. When I looked back over my shoulder to see if anyone was following me, I saw Mrs. Graham and several boys and girls running around gathering up the homework papers.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” and “Call Me Larry,” the first eight novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
21
MRS. GRAHAM and I walked down the hall together. The line of boys and girls waiting for the auditions stretched from the auditorium doors down the hall nearly all the way to the cafeteria. As we walked past, I tried not to look anyone in the eye.
We passed Veronica. She was wearing the sort of thing that she usually wore, one of those clingy knit dresses, but she had added a wide black patent leather belt, she had a sheer red scarf knotted around her neck, and she had drawn a beauty spot on her cheek with a pen. She stood with her back against the wall and her head tilted to the left. Her right shoulder was raised, her left shoulder dropped. Her eyes were half shut, and her mouth was half open. “Hello, Peter,” was all she said, but it was enough to make my face turn red and my knees grow weak.
Spike was right at the front of the line, waiting at the auditorium doors. She was passing the time playing jacks. She was down on the floor, scooping up jacks with remarkable dexterity, apparently immune to the tension that filled the hall. Behind her were Biff, Studs, Chuck, and Knuckles. When I reached her, Spike snatched up the jacks, stood up, and called out, “Okay! Here’s Peter! Now we’ll find out ‘who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out—’” She stood there grinning at me, waiting for me to acknowledge that I recognized the line. I smiled weakly and nodded my head. She flung the door open for me, and I saw Clarissa standing just inside the auditorium, holding a clipboard.
“Peter!” she said. “Where have you been? We’ve got to get started! We’re running about ten minutes behind schedule.”
My legs were wobbly, and I felt a little sick. Mrs. Graham must have noticed that I was shaky: she grabbed me under the left armpit and lifted me so that my left foot was hardly touching the floor. Clarissa reached out for me, and together, one holding me up on either side, she and Mrs. Graham dragged me into the auditorium, letting the door swing shut behind us.
They led me to a seat in the front row. I sat there, staring at the empty stage. It took a while before I realized that Clarissa was talking to me.
“—and—before the rest of the boys and girls come in—I—well—” she said.
Clarissa stood silently for a moment, her hands moving nervously inside her fur muff, her head down. When she raised her head and looked me in the face, her eyes were as wide and startled as they had been when we first met. She parted her lips ever so slightly, as if she were going to speak, but then she closed them, swallowed, and looked downward. When she spoke at last, she spoke to the floor.
“Do you think it would be all right if I tried out for Cordelia?” she asked. “I know I won’t be good enough, but I’d like to try. I’m usually shy in front of people, and it might help me to try out for a part in the play.”
“Gee, Clarissa,” I said, “I—”
“Of course, I haven’t had a lot of time to practice, you know,” she said quickly. “I’ve had other things to do.”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “I’m sure—”
“I’m just going to try for the fun of it,” she said. “I don’t even want you to pay any attention to me. Promise?”
“All right,” I said.
“I could never really play Cordelia,” she said. “I shiver just thinking about it, so you don’t have to worry about me.” She took a deep breath and giggled, and then she dashed over to the doors and swung them open. At once, she was back in the role of director’s assistant, keeping a tight hold on her clipboard and her muff and meekly asking the boys and girls to file in silently and fill alternate rows and alternate seats.
“Look at them,” Matthew said, taking a seat beside me. “Some of these kids would do anything for a part—anything.”
I sat, stunned, while the auditions began. Clarissa asked for silence in a small voice that I wouldn’t have thought anyone could hear. The auditorium hushed at once. She looked at her clipboard and said, softly, “Bobby Swanson, please.”
Bobby Swanson walked onto the stage, struck a histrionic pose in front of me, making his eyes bulge out and pulling at his hair, and cried, “‘Doesn’t anybody here know me?’” He looked quite mad. He beat his chest and bellowed, “‘This is not Lear!’”
“You’re telling me,” muttered Matthew.
“Okay, Bobby,” said Clarissa. “That was very interesting—especially the way you made your eyes bulge out.”
“Don’t you want me to do some more?” asked Bobby.
“Oh, no,” said Clarissa. “That’s enough, I think. It was—uh—very interesting the way you made your eyes bulge out. Thank you, Bobby. Let’s see Biff Parker next.”
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” and “Call Me Larry,” the first eight novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
20
BY LUNCH TIME I was a nervous wreck. The entire fourth grade was abuzz about the auditions. It seemed to me that everybody wanted one part or another. Even one of the boys who had already taken a job as a stagehand buttonholed me to explain that he was sure he could play Edmund the B*d and still work the curtain if I could just rewrite the script so that Edmund didn’t have to be onstage at the opening of acts I, II, or V. I told him I’d have to think about it and dashed off to the boys’ room.
When I got back to the cafeteria, the place was empty. I dropped my uneaten lunch into the trash can and started for the door, thinking that if I could just get to the nurse’s office unseen I might be able to get her to send me home right away. Mrs. Graham was standing at the door.
“Oh, there you are Peter,” she said. “It’s just about time for the auditions. Isn’t this exciting? I’ve never seen such excitement over one of these productions. You’re a born leader, do you know that?” She stopped and looked at me for a moment. “Are you all right?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“Are you going to faint?” she asked.
“Maybe,” I said. “I’m not sure. I’ve never fainted before.”
She made me sit down and put my head between my legs. She held her hand on my forehead for a while, and then she got a paper napkin and wet it with cold water and held it to my forehead. “How do you feel now?” she asked.
“I feel better,” I said, “except for my stomach.”
“Did you eat lunch?” she asked.
“I didn’t feel like eating,” I said.
She made me drink a container of milk, and that made my stomach feel better. “Okay, Peter,” she said. “It’s time. Don’t worry. This is going to be great fun.”
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” and “Call Me Larry,” the first eight novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
19
MANY, MANY of my fourth-grade classmates had signed up to try out for parts, and I was going to have to choose among them. When I announced which ones I had chosen, I might make a few friends, but I was likely to make lots of enemies.
The auditions were held on a Friday. I didn’t sleep well the night before, and I didn’t have much appetite at breakfast. My uneasiness had no real focus; it was like the feeling that some people have about ocean bathing: they know that there are nasty creatures under the water somewhere; they don’t know which ones might get them, so they’re afraid of all of them. I got to school by stealing from cover to cover, slinking along behind hedges, ducking behind parked cars, dashing from telephone pole to telephone pole. As soon as I reached the school, I ran up the stairs and along the hall. When I got to the door to Mrs. Graham’s room, I heard my name, so I stopped outside to catch my breath and listen to what was being said about me.
Clarissa was speaking. “I’m sure Peter’s going to have a hard time choosing someone to play Cordelia,” she said. “It’s such an important part. I think Cordelia’s even more important than King Lear. It scares me just to think of playing her, doesn’t it scare you?”
“Oh, no,” said Veronica. “My mother told me that she was sure I would do a wonderful job as Cordelia.”
“Oh, how I wish I had your self-confidence,” said Clarissa. “Every time I think of playing Cordelia I shiver. I’m glad I’m working behind the scenes. I’d be scared to death if I had to play one of the big roles. I just don’t think that I could do a good enough job, do you?”
Veronica spoke again, but she spoke as if she had stopped listening to Clarissa. She said, “My mother played Cordelia once, and she said she was just wonderful. She told me, ‘Veronica, you go after the part of Cordelia and if you don’t get Cordelia, you just forget the whole thing. The other two daughters are real snots and everybody will hate you if you play one of them.’”
Clarissa said, “I think Cordelia is just wonderful, don’t you? She’s kind and shy and quiet. Whenever I think of playing the part I get goose bumps all over my arms. I’m sure I could never do it. It’s just such an important role. It would be too much for me.”
Spike spoke, but she too seemed not to be listening to Clarissa; she was responding to Veronica. “My mother said pretty much the same thing, but not in words that I can repeat, so I figure that I better get that part. I wish Peter would get here. I want to—um—talk it over with him.” She snickered and cracked her knuckles.
“Oh,” said Clarissa, “I’m sure that Peter wouldn’t be influenced by—”
Veronica spoke right over her. “That’s not going to work, Spike,” she said. “My mother has always told me that the boys buzz around the honey, if you know what I mean.”
“Gosh,” breathed Clarissa. In a small, hesitant, distracted voice, she asked, “Do you think that Peter would be influenced by—”
I’d heard enough. In a cold sweat, I turned and started to tiptoe down the hall. I felt a powerful hand on my shoulder, and Spike shouted, “Hey Peter! There you are! How come you’re tiptoeing down the hall like that?” She turned me around to face her and looked at me with something like concern. She slowed her gum-chewing and stared into my eyes. “You’re not sick or anything are you?”
“Uh, no,” I said.
“Hey, that’s great!” said Spike. She turned to one of her pals: Studs or Chuck or Knuckles or whatever his name was. “Isn’t that great?” Spike asked him.
“Yeah,” said, let’s say, Studs.
“I wouldn’t want you to be too sick to pick the kid who’s gonna play Cordelia,” she said, chewing her gum with a big wide-open smile that allowed me to see not only the wad of gum but all her teeth, her tongue, and her uvula. “You get me?” she asked, and she nodded upward, pointing her chin at me.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” and “Call Me Larry,” the first eight novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
18
IN THE MORNING, Veronica called. “Peter,” she said, giggling, “I think you have something of mine.”
“Yes,” I said. “I do. They’re in my sock drawer. Do you have mine?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’m wearing them.”
“What!” I exclaimed. In a hoarse and trembling whisper, I went on: “Veronica, are you crazy? What if somebody sees them?”
“Who’s going to see them?” she asked. Then there passed a period of silence. It was a significant pause, and its significance was not lost on me. Veronica said, very softly, “—unless I show them to somebody.”
“Look,” I said, quickly, “we can switch them in school on Monday.”
“You know, Peter,” said Veronica, “I really want to play Cordelia.”
“You do?” I asked.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I really do.”
“Well—”
“I wonder what your mother would do if she knew that I was wearing your underwear?” Veronica whispered.
“Me too,” I said.
“I’ll see you in school, Peter,” said Veronica. In her huskiest voice, she added, “I can’t wait to find out who gets to play Cordelia.”
“Me too,” I said.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” and “Call Me Larry,” the first eight novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
17
WHEN MY MOTHER came to pick me up, she was excited and talkative. She had been shopping for Christmas, and among other things she had bought me a new outfit to wear during the holidays: new pants, shirt, socks, and sweater. She insisted that I try everything on as soon as we got home. She followed me upstairs to my bedroom in the attic, talking happily about how cute I was going to look and how much fun Christmas would be. I hung my coat up and took my sweater and shirt off while she spread the new things out on the bed. I unbuckled my belt and started to unzip my fly. The zipper stuck, and I glanced down at it. I could see, jammed in it, a bit of cloth, a bit of pink cloth. My hands grew cold at the fingertips. Goose bumps spread across my back. I pulled the waistband of my pants out enough so that I could see inside. I was wearing Veronica’s underpants.
“What’s the matter, Peter?” asked my mother.
“Uhhhhh,” I said. My mind was entirely occupied by terror; there was no room for thought. “Uhhhhh,” was all I could say.
“Do you feel all right?” she asked. “You look pale.” I’m quite sure I did. “Maybe you should go to bed early tonight. You don’t want to get a cold now, with Christmas coming.”
“Uhhhhh,” I said.
“What on earth is wrong?” she asked, wrinkling her brow. Then she started, as if surprised by something. Her mouth fell open a little, and she smiled a smile that was equal parts girlish and motherly. “Oh, I know what’s wrong,” she said.
“You do?” I asked, smiling, scared to death.
She chucked me under the chin. “I knew it would happen someday,” she said.
“You did?”
“Of course,” she said, slowly and tenderly. “The day had to come when you’d be embarrassed to get undressed in front of me. That’s it, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said, “that’s it.” I was surprised to find that in fact that was exactly it.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” and “Call Me Larry,” the first eight novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
16
THE SKY WAS QUITE DARK on the day that Veronica invited me to her house to play. It was a Saturday. Veronica called at noon. My mother drove me to her house and said that she would be back to pick me up before dinner. After I had taken my hat and coat and gloves off and said hello to Mrs. McCall, Veronica led me to the playroom in the basement.
“This is the playroom,” she said.
“It’s nice,” I said.
The floor was covered with red and white squares of linoleum tile. A bar made of blond wood was at one end of the room, and a number of stools stood in front of it. A small pool table was in the center of the room, and to one side was a card table with four folding chairs set around it. We played Monopoly for a while, and then we worked on a picture puzzle. Veronica’s mother brought us some milk and cookies and said that she had to go out to do some shopping. Veronica followed her upstairs. I drank my milk and ate a couple of the cookies. They were the kind with a small amount of peanut butter encased in a crunchy beige cookie, the two halves of which could be pried apart so that the peanut butter could be removed with the tip of the tongue. I heard the front door close, and I heard the car start and drive off. Veronica came back down the stairs. She closed the playroom door behind her and stood with her back against it and her hands behind her back. She tilted her head to one side.
“What shall we play now?” she asked, and she tossed her head just enough to make her hair swing.
“How about pool?” I suggested.
“How about Clothes Closet?” she suggested.
“Clothes Closet?” I said. “How do you play that?”
She walked across the room to a door and opened it. “First we go into this closet,” she said.
I went into the closet. It was used to store toys and games and sports equipment and brooms and mops. There wasn’t a lot of room. When Veronica came in and closed the door behind her, the two of us were squeezed pretty close together. It was very dark.
“Now what?” I asked.
“Now we take off our clothes,” she said.
“Wow,” I said. I started unbuttoning my shirt. A thought struck me. “What if your mother comes back?” I asked.
“Oh, don’t worry—she won’t,” Veronica said. “You can’t just take off your clothes all at once, you know. You have to follow the rules—”
“But what if your mother forgot something?” I asked.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “You have to take off what I say. Are you ready?”
“Well—”
“Take off your—shoes!” ordered Veronica.
“Veronica—”
“Are you taking off your shoes?”
“Well, yes, but—”
“Now you take off your sweater, and I’ll take off my dress. Go!”
“I haven’t got my shoes—”
“Hurry up, Peter. You have to keep up with me. Now I’ll take off my undershirt, and you take off your shirt. Go!”
“Was that a car?”
“Hurry!”
“Yeah. I’m hurrying.”
“Now you take off your pants, and I’ll take off my socks. Go!”
“Maybe we should start putting our things back on, Veronica. I—”
“Oh, don’t worry so much, Peter. Have you got your pants off?”
“Yes, but—”
“Good. Now what have you got left on?”
“Socks and underpants,” I said. “Maybe we should start putting—”
“I only have underpants on, so you should take your socks off.”
“Why don’t we save this game for—”
“Peter, a lot of boys have asked me to play Clothes Closet with them, you know.”
“Yeah, I guess—”
“Take your socks off.”
“I am.”
“Good. Now we’ll take our underpants off,” she whispered. “Ready?”
“Well—” I said.
“I’m taking mine off,” she said. “Are you taking yours off?”
From the way she was wiggling around, I could tell that she really was taking her underpants off, and it seemed to me that it wouldn’t be fair not to do as she was doing, so I said yes and pulled mine off, too.
“Do you have everything off?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Here,” she said. “Give me your hand.”
When she groped for my hand, she touched my belly. I swallowed and reached toward her.
“Honey!” called a voice from upstairs. “I’m home!”
“It’s my father!” said Veronica.
“Oh, no,” I said. I began grabbing wildly for my clothes.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “He won’t come down right away. He never does.”
“Oh, what are we going to do?” I whined. “What are we going to do? What’s this? Is this my shirt? This is your dress. Oh, if your father catches us like this—”
“Don’t get all upset,” Veronica said. There was an edge to her voice, but many years passed before I realized that the tense and breathless quality was caused not by alarm but by excitement, that part of the thrill of Clothes Closet for Veronica—perhaps all of the thrill, come to think of it—came from flirting with the danger of being caught by her father, of having him fling open the closet door, gasp, grab the nasty little boy with one hand and Veronica with the other, throw the boy out the front door, drag Veronica to her bedroom, throw her over his knees and spank her bare bottom.
“Oh, these aren’t my socks,” I wailed. “Here! They’re yours. They don’t fit me.”
“Peter, the best thing to do is to stop for a minute and take a deep breath, calm down, and then just get dressed the way you do in the morning.”
“In the morning, I’m not in a closet with you!” I said.
“Hello-wo!” called Mr. McCall again. “Where’s my little honeybunch?”
“He’s going to come down in a minute,” said Veronica. “Are you ready?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m ready.”
When Mr. McCall opened the door to the playroom an instant later, he found Veronica taking aim at the four ball while I stood holding a cue and praying silently that he wouldn’t notice that my shirttail was out and my sweater was on backwards.
“There you are!” said Mr. McCall. “Didn’t you hear me calling?”
“Oh, sorry, Daddy,” said Veronica. “I was teaching Peter how to play—pool. I guess we didn’t hear you.”
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” and “Take the Long Way Home,” the first seven novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
“The story’s pretty much the same,” she said. “Except it hasn’t got such a happy ending.” She pulled a battered blue-covered paperback book from her back pocket and looked around to see if she might get caught with it. “That part at the end where they all get together for dinner and everybody’s happy again isn’t in here at all.” She gave me a big wink, tapped the book with her index finger, and said, “But there’s a lot of other stuff in here that isn’t in the other one.”
“Oh, yeah?” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “Just listen to some of this.” She flipped to a page with a folded-down corner. “Oswald says, ‘What dost thou know me for?’ And Kent answers, ‘A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats—’”
“What’s an eater of broken meats?” I asked.
Spike glared at me.
“Ohhhh!” I said. “Sure. Sure. I know.” I gave her a knowing wink, although all I’d gathered from the look she gave me was that it must be another thing that a fourth-grader should know, like the times tables, and that it was probably something I shouldn’t say in front of my parents.
“It gets better,” she said. “‘—lily-livered, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable, cynical rogue—’”
“Wow,” I said. I wanted to ask about a couple of items in that list, but instead I raised an eyebrow in the way I’d observed adults doing when they wanted to acknowledge something but didn’t want to explain it to me.
Spike went on. “‘—beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel b***h—’”
“Hey—hey—uh—Spike,” I said. “We’re kind of close to my father’s gas station. Maybe you should keep your voice down.”
“Oh, sure,” said Spike. She looked around. “Come here, come here,” she said, backing into some bushes alongside the railroad tracks that ran beside my father’s Esso station. “You’ve got to hear this one.” She flipped to another page.
“The Fool says,
“‘She that’s a maid now, and laughs at my departure,
“‘Shall not be a maid long, unless things be cut shorter.’”
At this Spike burst into a deep, rumbling laugh and gave me another knock on the shoulder. “You get it?” she asked.
“Oh, sure,” I said. I started laughing uproariously. I screamed, “‘Unless things be cut shorter!’” I had no notion in the world what might make it funny, but I exploded in another paroxysm of laughter, and tears began to run down my cheeks. I had to lean on Spike for support. “‘Unless things be cut shorter!’” I howled again.
“Yeah, well, it is pretty funny,” said Spike. She pushed me away from her and shoved the book into her back pocket again. She pushed her way out of the bushes and began walking off. I followed, repeating, “‘Unless things be cut shorter,’” and chuckling.
“Hey, is this your father’s gas station, right here?” Spike asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“You think your father would give us a Coke?” she asked.
“Sure!” I said.
We drank our Cokes and watched my father look for a leak in a tire. I sneaked a sidelong look at Spike and marveled at how badly I had misjudged her. I had expected, almost from my first day in Mrs. Graham’s class, that Spike or one of the boys in her gang would want to beat me up sooner or later. Instead, here we were drinking Cokes and telling jokes, and she seemed to want to be pals.
By the time we got to my house, we had our arms thrown over each other’s shoulders and were singing “The rain it raineth every day,” like a couple of miniature drunks.
“You want to come in and have a cruller?” I asked her.
“Nah, I’ve got to get home.” she said.
“Oh, okay,” I said. I looked at her and hesitated, then finally decided to speak my mind. “You know, Spike,” I said, “before I got to know you, I was afraid that you were going to beat me up or something.” We both laughed. Spike looked at her shoes and scraped them back and forth on the sidewalk. “A lot of kids think you’re some kind of monster,” I added.
“She cannot be such a monster,” muttered Spike.
“But you’re not,” I said. “You’re nice. You’ve just got a bad reputation.”
Spike looked up at me and shrugged. “I’m a kid more sinned against than sinning,” she said.
“Well, I’ll see you in school tomorrow,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Spike. She started down the walk. I started up the front steps. “Oh, hey,” she called. “I almost forgot.”
She walked back toward me, and I walked down the steps toward her. When we reached each other, she grabbed the front of my jacket in her fist and twisted it so that her knuckles dug into my chest. She put her face close to mine, so that she was looking right into my eyes, and when she spoke, her spit sprayed onto me.
“I really want to play Cordelia,” she said. “And if I don’t get the part, I’ll break your foot with a brick.”
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” and “Take the Long Way Home,” the first seven novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
15
ALTHOUGH work on the play seemed to go along pretty well, I couldn’t shake the conviction that King Lear was going to get me into some kind of trouble. I had the kind of indistinct foreboding that, on a sunny day, warns a clamdigger on Bolotomy Bay that a storm is approaching.
It was a gloriously sunny day, an unseasonably warm day for December, almost a balmy day, when Spike walked home from school with me.
“Hey, Peter! Peter!” she called. “Wait up!” When she reached me, she was a little out of breath. “It’s such a nice day,” she declared, flinging her arms toward the sky. “What do you say I walk you home?”
“I don’t know,” I said. Spike had never had much to say to me before, and I had had hopes that it might be possible for me to get through the entire fourth grade without coming within arm’s reach of her.
“Come on,” she said. “You and I can have a nice talk.” It sounded like a command to me, so I followed her. She walked off, singing “The rain it raineth every day.” When I caught up to her, she raised her arm and I thought she was going to knock me on the ear, but instead she flung her arm across my shoulder and gave me a friendly squeeze.
While we walked along, scraping our shoes on the sidewalk and chatting about this and that, I thought to myself, “Gee, this Spike is pretty nice. It just goes to show that you shouldn’t judge people by reputation or appearance.” I almost thought of sharing this observation with Spike, but when I tried putting it into words, it came out as, “You know, Spike, you’re not the rat that everybody thinks you are,” and so I decided to keep it to myself.
“Hey, Pete,” said Spike, knocking me on the shoulder, “a penny for your thoughts.”
“Huh?” I said.
“What’re you thinking about so hard? I bet you haven’t heard a word I said.”
“Oh, uh, nothing,” I said. “Just, uh, nothing.”
“‘Speak,’” she said, chewing her gum enthusiastically and giving me that big grin again.
“Nothing,” I said.
“‘Nothing?’” she said, widening the grin so that I could see the gum again and giving me a knock on the shoulder.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Hey! That’s great!” she said. “That was perfect. Maybe you ought to play Cordelia!”
“Huh?” I said. Then I realized what she was getting at. “Oh, I get it,” I said. “Act I, Scene I. Yeah. Very good.”
“Sure,” she said. “I’ve been practicing. I think I’d be a pretty good Cordelia myself. What do you say?”
“Cordelia?” was what I said.
“Yeah,” said Spike. She poked me in the stomach with her forefinger. “I’m going to try out for the part—and I sure hope I get it.”
“I don’t know—” I began, without knowing how I was going to finish.
“Hey, listen,” she said suddenly. “I bet you haven’t seen the real King Lear, have you?”
“Uh, no,” I confessed. “Is it different?”
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” and “Take the Long Way Home,” the first seven novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
14
CLARISSA took to her work with wholehearted determination, though she seemed to have no confidence in her abilities at all. Whenever I gave her a job to do, she would begin stroking her muff and looking at the floor. She’d tell me that it sounded much too hard for her, but that she knew how much I was counting on her, and so she’d try, so long as I’d agree not to be angry with her if she couldn’t do the job the way it should be done. Then she would go off and do the job and come back for another, just as uncertain as ever. I was pleased to see that she had such pluck despite her fears, and I felt that working on the play was really doing something for Clarissa—she was getting to know lots of the kids in the fourth grade, for one thing. In no time at all, Clarissa had recruited a technical director, a property manager, a publicist, stagehands, a prompter, and so on.
She actually made an asset of her timidity, especially when she was recruiting someone for a job. One afternoon I watched her, clipboard in hand, walk up to a group of kids in the hall and say, her eyes wide, her voice quavering, “I need six stagehands, but you don’t want to be stagehands, do you? Probably not. I don’t blame you. I do need six stagehands, though, and I need them right away. I don’t know why anybody would want to do it, really. There’s no glory to the job. You’ll have to work long hours, and you’ll get dirty and sweaty. While the other kids are taking bows, you’ll be backstage, out of sight. You’ll stand there with the applause ringing in your ears and a lump in your throat, thumping one another on the back, and the only satisfaction you’ll get is knowing that you’ve done something fine, really fine.” She brought her muff up to her face and rubbed her eyes with it. Then she swallowed hard, stood up straight and said, “It’s just not worth the trouble, I guess.” She started to walk away, but the boys and girls quickly surrounded her, climbing over one another trying to sign up.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” and “Take the Long Way Home,” the first seven novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
13
I ALSO ENGAGED the help of Matthew Barber. Matthew wasn’t enthusiastic at first. In fact, he was convinced that the production was going to be a farce.
“Peter,” he said, “all of you are going to look like a bunch of idiots when this hits the boards.”
“‘Hits the boards’?” I asked.
“That’s theater talk,” he said. “You’re not very familiar with the theater, are you?” he asked.
I thought of reminding him about my success as an elf, but from the way Matthew’s mouth was twisted I could tell that it wouldn’t go very far toward making him think that I was “familiar with the theater.”
“No,” I confessed.
He shook his head and let out a long sigh. “I’ll never understand school,” he muttered. “Look, Peter,” he said, looking me in the face and putting his hands on my shoulders, “it’s not going to be easy, you know. You can’t just have a bunch of kids running around the stage like madmen and fools. This is a very complicated play.”
“Oh,” I said, “we’re using a simple version, just for kids.”
“I should have known,” he said. “But that doesn’t make any difference. It’s complicated no matter how simple they make it.
This didn’t make any sense to me, but I nodded my head gravely, as if I recognized that it would be impossible not to agree.
“You’ve got to create an atmosphere of gloom,” said Matthew. “At the end, we’ve got to see that Lear has lost everything. You see? Did you read the play?”
“Oh, yeah!” I said. I was hurt that Matthew would think I hadn’t.
“Well, don’t you see what I’m talking about?”
“Well—”
“Worst of all,” said Matthew, “he loses the illusion that his daughters loved him. Only when he’s blind does he finally see the truth. Then he understands that Goneril and Regan think he’s just a crazy old fool.”
I nodded my head in the way that adults did when they meant to indicate by the nodding, “Too true, too true.”
“There’s no fool like an old fool,” I offered. I had heard my parents say this from time to time, and considered it an example of the kind of painfully acquired wisdom that adults laid claim to.
Matthew looked at me incredulously. “‘No fool like an old fool,’” he repeated. “Oh, God, this is going to be just horrible,” he said. “All right, Peter. You really need my help. I’ll do it.”
“Great!” I said. “I knew you’d help me out, Matthew. We’re going to have great fun with this, you’ll see. Here.”
I gave him a copy of The Story of King Lear and His Daughters. Matthew sneered at the book, but he did help me. In his heart of hearts, he must have been convinced that the play was doomed to failure, but part of him had decided to challenge fate on my behalf, to try with everything he had in him to make it a success for my sake. He had an apparently endless supply of ideas for staging the play, and yet he had no real enthusiasm for what he was doing. He would suggest things to me, or explain things to me, or listen tirelessly to my questions, all the time wearing a look that said, “We haven’t got a chance in the world of pulling this off.”
“The way I see the play is this,” Matthew announced one day. “Lear is in the clam-processing business. He owns a big plant. He’s worth a lot of money.”
“Matthew—” I said.
“He knows he’s going to die soon, so he wants his daughters to take over the family business.”
“Matthew,” I said, “we have to use these scripts.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Matthew, “we’ll use those scripts, but we’ll put the kids in costumes that make them look like people in the clam-processing business, and the scenery—”
His eyes lit up, and something almost like a smile formed on his lips.
“—the scenery will look like Babbington!”
“Matthew,” I asked, “couldn’t we just do it the regular way? Couldn’t we just do it the way people usually do it, the way the book says to do it?”
Matthew gave me a look of profound disappointment. “Peter,” he said, as if he were explaining something to a child, speaking as slowly and simply as he could, “you asked for my help, remember? This is our only chance to make something out of this. And it’s my big chance. This is going to make me famous in the fourth grade.” He paused and went right for my weak spot. “It might even make me happy.”
“Matthew,” I said, “I think this is going to get me into a lot of trouble.”
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” and “Take the Long Way Home,” the first seven novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
12
MRS. GRAHAM’S FIRST SUGGESTION was that I read King Lear. I did. The school used a simplified, abbreviated, optimistic adaptation called The Story of King Lear and His Daughters, published as part of a series called Classics Made Suitable for Boys and Girls. I read and reread the play, and I tortured my parents with recitations from it at the dinner table, at bedtime, first thing in the morning, and on any occasion that seemed to invite me to quote a line or two.
Mrs. Graham next suggested that I choose an assistant director. I think that what she had in mind was that I would choose a boy from the class, and that by working closely together we would become friends. But she could see from the speed and eagerness with which I said, “Clarissa Bud,” how much I wanted to have her working with me, for during the time that we had spent together repeating the times tables we had grown quite close, and I was certain that Clarissa was not merely someone who made my heart ache but somebody I understood, someone I could trust.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” and “Take the Long Way Home,” the first seven novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
11
I BEGAN MY WORK as director the very next day, full of enthusiasm but with no idea at all of what I was supposed to do. Mrs. Graham called me to her desk while the other students were working on some very tricky multiplication problems that she had written on the blackboard. I began to think that being a director was quite nice. Patiently and with a great deal of pleasure, she explained what my duties would be.
This became the pattern for the next couple of weeks. I would spend part of each day standing beside her desk, listening while she coached me in low, murmuring, conspiratorial tones, tones so low, so murmuring, and so conspiratorial that there were times when I couldn’t figure out what she was saying. I didn’t want to tell her that I couldn’t hear her at those times, so I would just nod my head and hope that I wasn’t missing anything really important.
She never told me directly what I should do. She suggested. I pretended to think the suggestion over and then agreed that it was exactly what should be done. I was as nervous throughout all of this as I have ever been about anything, but I was most nervous—most frightened—in the early days, and what I feared most was that when I actually began directing the fourth-graders I would do something so outrageously foolish, so third-grade, that it would ruin my chances of being accepted by them forever.
In those hours I spent standing beside her desk, Mrs. Graham and I developed a mutual understanding that was quite uncanny. I was soon able to anticipate her gestures so well that I could snatch a chair from in front of her before she barked her shin on it and move her vase out of harm’s way whenever she swept her arm out to make a point. She took a protective attitude toward me, an attitude that she might have taken toward a timid and skittish kitten. I began bringing a chrysanthemum or two each day to add to the bunch of flowers in Mrs. Graham’s vase. This turned out to be a continually changing bunch. Each day she added some fresh flowers and threw away a few of the oldest.
“Do you know why I keep these here on my desk?” she asked me on the day that I first brought her the chrysanthemums.
“Because they look pretty?” I suggested.
“Because they smell pretty,” she said. She leaned toward me and spoke in her conspiratorial mumble. “This classroom stinks,” she said.
I can recall the odor of the room, the odor of chalk dust, ordinary dust, the smell of wet wool that came from the coats and sweaters spread out to dry on the big steam radiators below the windows, the waxy smell of crayons left to melt on the radiators, and, quite prominently, the smell of those wonderful hard-salami sandwiches that Spike used to bring every day in a brown paper bag: thin slices of aromatic salami on spongy white bread with lots of butter. About midmorning, when the smell of Spike’s sandwiches reached my desk, my stomach would begin to growl and my mouth would start to water. The memory alone is enough to make me want to break for lunch.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” and “Take the Long Way Home,” the first seven novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
10
THE TIMES-TABLES BUSINESS left me skittish, afraid each day that something else was going to come up in Mrs. Graham’s class that I wouldn’t know, and that I’d have to put myself through another crash program. Whenever Mrs. Graham began a new lesson with the words “Now, class,” I would reach for my camera and start chewing on my lower lip and praying that she wouldn’t want us to learn anything I didn’t already know. Mrs. Graham could see that I was anxious about something, and she became convinced that I was having trouble making friends among the fourth-graders.
She called me to her desk one day while the rest of the class was at work on a page of multiplication problems. I had finished early, but the work had required so much mental finger-counting that my head hurt.
“Peter,” she said. “How would you like to have some fun and really get to know the boys and girls in the fourth grade at the same time?”
Her cheeks glowed. She was so excited by whatever she was leading up to that I immediately became excited and eager myself.
“You bet,” I said.
“Well, each year the fourth grade puts on a production of King Lear, and this year I’m in charge. I thought that you might like to be the director,” she began.
From the frozen smile on my face Mrs. Graham reasoned that I didn’t know what on earth she was talking about.
“It’s a play,” she said. She examined my face for some sign that I was keeping up with her. She didn’t find any, so she elaborated. “The boys and girls put on costumes and act it out on the stage in the auditorium.” She examined my face again. “Have you ever seen a play?” she asked finally.
“No,” I said, “but I know what you mean.” I did have an idea of what she meant. After all, the annual production of King Lear was an event of long standing, and I had heard people talk about it. I had been an elf in a Christmas pageant, and I knew that a play was something along the same lines but longer and more elaborate. It wasn’t ignorance that had frozen the smile on my face, it was a tiny thought that had taken root in my mind while she spoke. It was the thought that King Lear was going to turn out to be a lot like the times tables.
“I think that you should be the director!” she said. “It will be just wonderful. You’ll get to know nearly all the other fourth-grade boys and girls that way.”
“Gee,” I said, “that would be great!” I meant it. It would be nice to get to know the other fourth-graders. “What should I do?” I asked.
“It won’t be hard, Peter,” said Mrs. Graham. She reached out to pat me on the shoulder, and her elbow struck the vase of flowers on her desk. I lunged toward it and caught the vase with one hand, just as it left the desk top on its way toward the floor. It was quite a feat, I thought. I hardly even spilled any water. When I set the vase back on the desk, I felt that I had in some measure repaid Mrs. Graham for the kindness she was doing me by putting me in a position to get to know the other fourth-graders. “Thank you, Peter,” she said, so off-handedly that the vase might never have fallen. “I’ll help you with all the work you’ll have to do.” She smiled at me, and a warm spot spread around my heart. She reached toward me again, and I reached for the vase at the same time, so that when her elbow struck it I already had a firm grip on it, and it barely moved. She patted me on the shoulder and said, “Everything is going to work out just fine.”
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” and “Take the Long Way Home,” the first seven novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
9
IN ONE MISERABLE WEEK, I did learn to answer questions about the times tables more quickly than Mr. Beaker could snap his fingers. I also learned to snap my fingers, and I learned that the pattern on the wallpaper in my room repeated every eleven inches and that the meals my mother made lost all their restorative power when they were handed through my door on a tray, the puddle of gravy around my potatoes already dark and rubbery at the edges. However, I didn’t really learn the times tables very well at all. I memorized them as I might have memorized lines for a performance, and it worked pretty well. I was able to satisfy Mr. Beaker, impress Clarissa during our “practice” sessions, and please Mrs. Graham. But as soon as I had put on my performance, the lines began to slip away from me. Later, when I needed to know one of the products that had, while my mind was occupied with something else, crept into the dark unknown, never to return, I would reconstruct it from one of the ones that remained or count it out on my fingers, at least in my mind.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” and “Take the Long Way Home,” the first seven novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
8
I HAD FIGURED that if anyone could teach me the times tables quickly, it was Mr. Beaker. I was right. Mr. Beaker instituted a crash program in the times tables that very evening. He and Eliza drove up in a gleaming new Starliner, which Mr. Beaker had bought for Eliza’s birthday. Eliza took all of us for a ride, and then we walked around and around the car until there was no longer enough light for us to see well.
“It’s getting pretty dark,” said my father, “we might as well go in. How about a beer, Dudley?”
Mr. Beaker and Eliza and my father and I went inside, but my mother stayed outside, sitting at the wheel of the car, humming a tune. Finally, my father opened the back door and called out to her, “Ella, come on inside now. Come on in and have a beer.”
She didn’t answer him, and he stood in the doorway for a while without saying anything else. Then we heard the car door close, and my mother’s footsteps on the driveway, and then my father moved to one side and my mother came into the kitchen. She was smiling, almost laughing, acting bubbly and girlish. She seemed to me to have gone nuts out there, sitting in the car in the driveway. She hugged my father and rumpled my hair.
“Well,” said Mr. Beaker with a let’s get-down-to-business air, “I’ve come to the conclusion that Peter can learn all he needs to know of the times tables in six days.” He spread a chart out on the kitchen table. We all stood around the table, looking down at the chart. “You see, it is really only necessary for a student at the start of the fourth grade to know the times tables for the numbers one through ten.” He chuckled with pleasure at the clever and efficient way he had tackled the problem. “Of course, the one-times table is trivial, so we can count that as finished right off the bat!” He was having a wonderful time with this. He made a large check mark beside the number 1. My father reached into the refrigerator and took out a couple of beers. He opened them and handed one to Mr. Beaker. “Would you like a beer, Eliza?” he asked.
“Yes, thanks, Bert,” said Eliza.
“How about you, Ella?” my father asked.
“Oh, not a beer,” said my mother. She turned to Eliza and said, “Let’s have something more fun than a beer.” She turned back to my father. “Make us an Old Fashioned, Bert,” she said. My father sighed and began working on a couple of Old Fashioneds.
“Well,” said Mr. Beaker, “The two- and ten-times tables are very easy, so we’ll start with those. Peter should be able to master those tonight—”
He paused and looked at me.
“—if he can keep his mind on the task at hand. I’ll have more to say about that later. Now the four- and five-times tables are really just versions of two and ten, so we’ll take care of those tomorrow night. On Wednesday evening we’ll do three and six. On Thursday we’ll do seven, which is a real rogue.”
He stopped to chuckle and to take a sip of his beer. My father set the Old Fashioneds in front of my mother and Eliza.
“On Friday, we’ll do eight, which will be almost like a vacation. And then on Saturday we’ll do nine, which is probably the toughest of them. On Sunday, we’ll review them all.”
Mr. Beaker stretched, as if the work were over. For him, it nearly was.
“Voila!” he said. “Next week, Peter will go in there knowing the times tables as well as any of them.”
We were all pleased. I felt a new confidence. I was grateful for Mr. Beaker’s help. Then he said, “Now, Peter, let’s go to your room.”
Puzzled, I followed him to my room, where I sat on the edge of the bed and he stood in front of me. He handed me a piece of paper on which he had printed the two- and ten-times tables. “Peter,” he said, resting a hand on my shoulder, “if you’re going to learn these by next week, you’re going to have to focus your attention on the times tables and nothing else. Do you understand what I mean?”
“Yes,” I said.
“We have to be sure that you’re going to focus your attention on the times tables and nothing else, do you understand?”
“No,” I said.
“Peter, you’re going to have to stay in your room until you have memorized these times tables and can answer any questions about them like that.” He snapped his fingers.
“What about supper?” I asked.
“Your mother will give you a plate in here,” he said.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” and “Take the Long Way Home,” the first seven novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
7
WHEN I GOT HOME I spent an hour sitting at the kitchen table talking to my mother about everything that had happened. My glass of milk and the cruller my mother had given me—a kind of which I was passionately fond, a thin fried cruller made of a yeasty dough twisted into the shape of a large pretzel and glazed, thickly, with sugar paste—lay untouched on the table while I went on and on. I hadn’t intended to mention the times tables at all, but when I got to the end of the day and remembered Mrs. Graham’s idea that Clarissa and I “practice” together, it suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t want Clarissa to see me fumbling through the times tables. I had to learn them before we began practicing them, so that I could pretend to learn them quickly with Clarissa’s help.
“I have to learn the times tables right away.” I said. “All the other kids know them already, and I don’t. I don’t even know what they are, except that they’re arithmetic.”
“Well, I guess your father and I could teach them to you,” said my mother, with little enthusiasm.
“You know,” I said, picking up my cruller and using it to emphasize the good sense of what I was going to say, “Mr. Beaker could probably help me out.”
“Oh, yes!” said my mother, brightening. “That’s just the right idea! I’ll give him a call right now.” On her way to the phone, she gave me a hug and said, “You’re a good boy, Peter.”
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” and “Take the Long Way Home,” the first seven novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
6
AT THE END OF THE DAY, I made my way out the front door of the school, in a crowd of boys and girls. Mrs. Graham was standing beside the door. “Peter,” she called. “I’d like to speak to you for just a minute.”
She took a step toward me, advancing into the stream of boys and girls. A boy in a wrinkled white shirt and brown corduroys stumbled over her foot. Without taking her eyes off me, Mrs. Graham caught the boy with her right arm and stood him upright, gathering his books in against his chest. The boy continued on.
“You know, Peter,” she said, “I’ve been thinking that it might be a good idea for you to practice your times tables.”
“Oh?” I asked. I had had the hope that I had heard the last of the times tables, that all of us in Mrs. Graham’s classroom had discharged our obligation to the times tables that day and would be going on to something else—drawing maps, perhaps, or carving swans from soap.
“Yes, I think you were just nervous today, but it would be a good idea for you to practice the times tables until you can rattle them off like that.” She snapped her fingers. “Don’t you think so?”
I clutched my camera tightly. I understood, if only vaguely, that she was giving me a chance to pretend that I knew the times tables, to avoid having any passing boy or girl realize that I didn’t know something that I should have known. I was going to thank her and say to her simply, “Mrs. Graham, I don’t know the times tables at all.” But just as I was about to speak, Clarissa walked through the doorway. When I saw her, I blushed. When she saw me, she blushed and bent her head so that she was looking down at the white fur muff in which she held her hands. Mrs. Graham saw me blush and turned to find the cause.
“Oh, Clarissa,” she said. “I was just telling Peter that I thought it might be a good idea for him to practice his times tables. Don’t you think that would be a good idea?”
Without looking up, Clarissa said, “Yes, I guess it would.” It seemed to me so beautiful a remark, spoken so liltingly, that it could have been made into a song.
“Maybe it would be a good idea for you and Peter to practice together for a while each day,” said Mrs. Graham. “How would that be?”
I tried not to look at Mrs. Graham, but I couldn’t help it. I was awestruck. How could she understand everything so well? How could she make things turn out so well? The woman was uncanny.
“I think that would be fine,” said Clarissa. She raised her head and looked into my eyes.
“I think it would be great!” I said.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” and “Take the Long Way Home,” the first seven novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
“Hello, Peter,” Clarissa said, so softly that when I responded I spoke in a whisper.
“Hello, Clarissa,” I said. I held my hand out. To be honest, I didn’t just hold my hand out, I reached for her hand. I didn’t intend to shake it; I wanted to hold it. She hesitated for the briefest instant, and then she gave her right hand to me. I held it between both of mine. She kept her left hand on the muff.
“You can call me Clare if you want to,” she said.
Tiny droplets of sweat formed on my upper lip. I stammered when I spoke. “Oh, th—that’s okay,” I said. “I th—think Clarissa is beautiful.”
She blushed. So did I. I heard Spike mutter, “Oh, brother.”
With the introductions over, Mrs. Graham went back to what the class had been doing before I arrived.
“Peter,” Mrs. Graham said, smiling at me, her cheeks glowing, “we’re just practicing our times tables.”
“Oh, great!” I said, smiling right back at her, smiling with all my heart, ready to do anything to show this woman how happy I was to have been allowed into the fourth grade, to be in her classroom, to sit beside Clarissa, to have my heart ache like this. But even as I said it, a chill spread through me. I had no idea what she was talking about. I had never heard of the times tables before in my life. I smiled, but the sweat continued to form on my lip, and when I wiped it off with the back of my hand, it came right back again. When my turn came to do whatever I was supposed to do, I was going to make a fool of myself in front of all the kids that I had just met, and worst of all in front of Clarissa. My happiness would end as quickly as it had begun.
I tried not to do anything that would betray my anxiety, but something—my irregular breathing, the sweat on my lip, or the mad, twitching smile that I was struggling to maintain—must have given me away. When I glanced sidelong at the boys and girls around me, I saw that they were glancing sidelong at me, and from the moue Clarissa wore, the way she was stroking her muff, I thought she must know that something was wrong.
“Peter?” Suddenly I realized that Mrs. Graham was calling on me. I looked up at her.
“Yes?” I said.
“Do you know the answer?”
I didn’t even know the question. I had been so firmly in the grip of my fears that I hadn’t even noticed what was going on. I said, “Uh, well—”
Some tiny movement caught my eye. Maybe Spike hadn’t done anything more than move her hand, but I saw it, and glanced ever so briefly at her desk. I saw, on a piece of paper, where her hand rested, the number 54. Another tiny movement caught my eye. On a piece of paper on Veronica’s desk I saw the number 58. I was on the horns of a dilemma, but not for long. I didn’t want to do anything that was going to offend Spike, so I decided on that basis alone to take the answer that she offered.
“—fifty-four,” I said. I tossed it off as if it had been nothing.
Mrs. Graham looked at me for just long enough before she spoke so that I could tell, though no one else probably could have, that she knew how I had gotten the answer.
“No, Peter,” she said. “That’s not right. Seven times eight is fifty-six.”
I blushed. “Oh! That’s right,” I said. “I guess I just forgot.”
Without turning around, Spike shrugged her shoulders and covered the number she had written. Veronica looked genuinely puzzled.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” and “Take the Long Way Home,” the first seven novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
5
THE CLASS gave me a greeting that they had rehearsed, and Mrs. Graham pointed out a seat for me at the back of the room. I made my way to the seat in a euphoric state, for Mrs. Graham had made me feel secure, even confident. I sat down and stretched myself out nearly straight so that I could keep my feet on the floor and my elbows on the desk top. Mrs. Graham had the boys and girls stand, one at a time, and introduce themselves. Three of them, three girls, were to play particularly memorable roles in my life.
The first was Veronica McCall. She stood slowly when her turn came, placed one foot in the aisle, brought the other out to meet it, turned, tossed her head to clear her straight, dark hair from in front of her left eye, and then pushed it aside with a flip of her hand for good measure. She laughed and shrugged as if to say, “Isn’t it amusing that we all have hair, but only mine falls in this odd and alluring way in front of my eye, only mine is this fine, this straight, this dark?”
She said, “Well, hello there!” and she rippled her fingers through the air. She reversed the set of steps that had brought her to her feet and slid herself into her seat. As she sat, her dress tightened across her bottom and along her legs, and I obtained a photographically precise and durable impression of the outline of her underpants.
The second was Lily O’Grady. She had hair of a color that my mother referred to as “dirty blond,” though her use of dirty in this way may have been only partly a description of color. Lily called herself Spike. She was the class bully. She led a gang of crewcut and muscular boys named Biff, Studs, Chuck, and Knuckles. I never quite figured out which of the boys in the gang was which except for Biff, who had a scar down the side of his left cheek. It was said that Biff got this scar when Spike fought him for the leadership of the gang. (Quite a few years later, at a reunion of my class at Babbington High, I asked Biff whether that was, in fact, how he had gotten the scar. “Heck, no,” he said. “It was a very democratic gang. We elected the leader by secret ballot. I got the scar while Spike and I were counting the votes.”)
Spike stood slowly. She was chewing gum, and the muscles along her jaw and at her temples rippled impressively. She looked me up and down. Her head bobbed as if her neck were a coil spring. Finally, she dropped her jaw, pulled her lower lip in over her teeth, and shook her head once, in a gesture that told me, to my enormous relief, that she considered me beneath consideration. “Hi, Pete!” she shouted, though I was only a couple of feet away from her. She started to sit down, but a thought occurred to her, and she got to her feet again. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s not so hard. I’ve been here a few weeks already, and I understand almost everything. Just keep your mouth shut and you’ll be okay.” She gave me a wink. I resolved to keep my mouth as shut as possible.
The third was Clarissa Bud, who made my heart ache as soon as she raised her eyes toward mine. She was small and fragile, with skin as pale and smooth as moonlight on the Bolotomy. She moved as if she were moving through water instead of air: she rose to her feet as if she were allowing herself to float upward. Her eyes were enormous, wide and surprised. Though the weather was mild, she had on her desk a white fur muff, on which she rested her left hand, rubbing the fur between her thumb and forefinger, drawing from the muff the kind of comfort that I got from clutching my camera. Clarissa seemed so frightened and retiring that she made me feel strong and bold. She was, Mrs. Graham pointed out, also new to the classroom, and in fact new to Babbington, the latest stop in Mr. Bud’s progress from one important position in the food-processing industry to another. Clarissa’s desk was beside mine.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” and “Take the Long Way Home,” the first seven novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
4
THE SCHOOL was an old one. I had begun attending it in kindergarten, and for a long time I had thought that the people who had gone to the school years ago must have been much bigger at my age than I was or than any of my friends were. Everything in the school seemed taller, wider, higher, or heavier than necessary. My friends and I struggled to climb the stairs, stood on our tiptoes to use the water fountains or the urinals, sat on the sinks to look into the mirrors. I had grown accustomed to seeing the building as too big and the boys and girls as too small.
When I opened the door to Mrs. Graham’s room, I was struck at once by the fact that the boys and girls fitted their desks. Their elbows rested on the desktops, and their feet reached the floor. The fourth grade, I could see, was what the school was about. When you reached the fourth grade, you would fit. I wasn’t going to fit, and everyone would know it as soon as I sat down.
Mrs. Graham was standing beside her desk. She had a book in her hand, a book with a navy-blue binding, an arithmetic book that I would soon come to regard with a deep, quiet, enduring hatred.
On Mrs. Graham’s desk was a large vase made of milk glass, and in this vase were flowers, lots of flowers. I don’t remember what kind of flowers, but there were always flowers in the vase, sometimes so many flowers that, if Mrs. Graham sat at her desk, I couldn’t see her at all from my seat at the back of the room.
“Peter!” cried Mrs. Graham. There was so much pleasure in her voice that I felt at once that I must know her, not merely that I must have met her, but that I must have known her for a long time, that somehow circumstances had separated us, and now fate had at last brought us together again, to our surprise and delight. I was immediately as happy to see her as she seemed to be to see me.
“Hi!” I said, gleefully. She closed her book emphatically and tossed it toward her desk. It struck the vase, which tipped and rocked, and looked as if it might fall to the floor, but a boy in the front row leaped from his seat and steadied it. Before he sat down, he shook his head a couple of times and smiled indulgently. Mrs. Graham never noticed any of this, since all her attention was focused on me.
She was an enormous woman. She was not fat; she was just constructed according to a giant set of plans. Good nature and affection seemed to burn within her: her cheeks glowed red, and she approached me with the awful momentum of a locomotive under a full head of steam. She scared me to death, yet she was irresistible. I was drawn to her, and so strong was her attraction that I held my arms out as I walked toward her, as if I would hug her as I hugged my mother.
As Mrs. Graham advanced, boys and girls pulled their feet in safely under their desks. At one point in her advance she stepped on a piece of chalk that was lying on the floor, and it exploded under her shoe, sending chalk dust flying outward to form a starburst pattern that the janitor never succeeded in removing.
We didn’t hug when we reached each other. Mrs. Graham stopped, took a deep breath, extended her hand toward me, and said, “Welcome to the fourth grade.”
I put my hand in hers and she shook it. “Thank you,” I said. I loved her at once, respected her, and feared her. I knew from that moment that I would do anything she asked me to do, told me to do, or even hinted that perhaps I should do. And I knew she’d make sure that I got through the fourth grade all right.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” and “Take the Long Way Home,” the first seven novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
3
I CLOSED THE DOOR BEHIND ME, and in a watery haze I walked down the hall, away from the familiar, toward the unknown. I wasn’t crying, but there was a lump in my throat, my eyes were watering, and everything ahead of me was blurry, indistinct. I had closed the door of Room 218 behind me, but in a larger sense I had closed a larger door, and the echoes of its closing reverberated in the hazy corridor that lay ahead of me. I had closed the door on third grade, on a part of my childhood, forever. I was walking toward an uncertain future, and I couldn’t make out where I was going.
From my right, I heard Matthew Barber’s voice. “Peter,” he called, “watch where you’re going. You’ll fall down the stairs.” I felt his hand on my arm. He stopped me from going farther. “Come on,” he said. “Come into the boys’ room.” I followed where he led me, and after I had dried my eyes and washed my face I felt better.
“I feel better now,” I said. I clutched my camera a little tighter for strength, stood up straight, and added, “Let’s go to the fourth grade, shall we?”
“I don’t know, Peter,” said Matthew. “We’re probably making a big mistake. Do you think they’d let us back into the third grade?”
“Aw, come on, Matthew,” I said. “We would have gone into the fourth grade eventually anyway. We might as well face up to it now. Besides, I don’t think they’ll let us go back—there was something about the way the door closed behind me—and the way it echoed in the hallway.”
Matthew stared at the floor. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “I heard that too.” He sighed. “We should have left well enough alone,” he said, shaking his head. “Things usually turn out wrong.”
I gave him a knock on the shoulder, as if to say, “Chin up!” and said, “Baloney, Matthew! Things are going to be great! We’ve got a great future ahead of us!” I was beginning to believe it. “Fourth grade, here we come,” I said. “Room 231, here we come!”
“Two thirty-four,” he said, still looking at the floor.
“No—231,” I said. From my shirt pocket I took a manila card. Matthew took a similar card from his shirt pocket. On his card was written miss MISS FIORE, ROOM 234. I showed him my card. On it was written MRS. GRAHAM, ROOM 231.
“I should have known,” said Matthew. “I let myself get excited about this, I let myself be happy, and look what happened. I should have known. I should have known.”
He walked out of the boys’ room, and I followed him. He walked down the hall to the door of Room 234 while I stood in the hall watching. He never lifted his eyes from the floor, and he was still looking at the floor, shaking his head and muttering “I should have known,” when he opened the door and walked in. I wondered how on earth he had been able to tell where he was going.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” and “Take the Long Way Home,” the first seven novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
2
ON THE DAY when I left the third grade, my classmates threw a party for me. Everyone had brought cupcakes or cookies, and they had collaborated on a card that said GOOD LUCK, PETER. I was pleased, embarrassed, and moved. When it was time to go, I stood at the door with my hand on the knob. I swallowed hard. I thought that I ought to say something.
At this point I had one of those flashes of inspiration that go off in one’s brain now and then like a flashbulb or a bolt of lightning. I said, “I’d like to take a picture of all of you so I can be sure that I’ll never forget you.”
I had all my classmates gather at one end of the room for a group portrait. I spent some time moving them around to get a good composition, and then I said, “Okay, everybody, that looks just perfect. Now everybody smile.” Everybody smiled, and I held the camera to my eye. The familiar uncertainty gripped me, and my finger trembled over the button. I clamped my teeth together, closed my eyes, and pushed.
“Okay, everybody, you can relax now,” I called out. I wound the knob on the bottom of the camera. “You know,” I said, “snapshots capture your memories forever.”
I wasn’t using film in the camera, of course, so my memories began to fade as soon as I walked out the door.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” and “Take the Long Way Home,” the first seven novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
1
WHEN REPORT CARDS were handed out at the Babbington Grammar School, some of my classmates fell into a whimpering terror, instinctively cowering and covering their vulnerable spots, as skittish and apprehensive as squirrels. Others began whooping and crowing, pounding one another on the back, and totting up their spoils. At the time it didn’t occur to me to pity the first group, but I certainly envied the second, for my parents considered it a Principle of Child Rearing not to reward my accomplishments in school.
When I brought a report card home, I got small praise for even the best of grades, and almost nothing in the way of tangible rewards. My father would say, looking at the best report card in my class, or even in the whole school, “That’s what I expected.” Sometimes Gumma or Guppa would slip me a dollar, or my mother would give me a hug and whisper, “I’m proud of you, Peter,” but these tokens seemed insignificant indeed beside the handsome cash prizes some of my friends collected. Some were paid for meeting certain standards, negotiated with their parents in advance, standards that were often, it seemed to me, quite low for the loot involved. Others were rewarded for showing any improvement at all; quite a few made out pretty well just for getting through six weeks without being sent to the principal’s office; and still others could collect a metal dump truck or a movie pass just for compiling a decent attendance record. It didn’t seem just.
However, on the extraordinary occasion when Matthew Barber and I were, after three weeks in the third grade, moved ahead to the fourth, I did get a reward: a camera, the first I had ever owned. It was small, well suited to the hands of a third-grader, but it was an unusual possession for a child in those times, a sophisticated gadget even for a fourth-grader.
The camera was made of black plastic, the kind called Bakelite. In overall shape, it was a cube, but a cube on which every edge had been smoothly rounded, as if the designer had streamlined it in case the photographer had to use it in a high wind. On each side was a vertical slide of bright metal that traveled in a channel molded into the Bakelite, so that, by moving these slides toward the top, one could separate the front and back halves of the camera to load or unload the film or to examine the interior. At its upper end, each metal slide terminated in a circular lug, through which were threaded the ends of a braided plastic strap. In the center of the back was a round window of translucent red plastic through which one could see the numbers on the paper backing of the film.
At the center of the front half was the lens, smooth and limpid, inside a crater of plastic. A short cream-colored shaft projected from a protuberance on the body. The top of the shaft was flattened to form the button that one pushed to take a picture. On the bottom of the camera was a knurled knob, also made of cream-colored plastic, that one turned to advance the film. Across the top of the camera, mounted in a channel molded into both halves of the body, was the viewfinder. When one held the camera with the viewfinder to one’s eye, the forefinger of one’s right hand fell quite naturally on the shutter button, and the middle finger fell quite naturally over the right half of the lens.
I loved that camera. I carried it with me everywhere for nearly a year, because holding it and looking at it reminded me that I had done something my parents regarded as extraordinarily worthy. But as much as the camera pleased me it intimidated me. A statement in the instruction booklet said, “Snapshots will capture your memories forever,” and I understood at once that the snapshots I was likely to take would capture forever memories of my childish ineptitude as a photographer, the evidence of my awkwardness and uncertainty. Clearly, the wise thing to do would be to avoid using film until I had acquired some poise, if only enough so that I wouldn’t take pictures I would really regret, so I put the film in the back of my sock drawer to save until I felt confident enough to use it.
For practice, I took filmless photographs, hoping that I’d become familiar enough with the camera to be able to handle it with skill and nonchalance. I trembled whenever I brought the viewfinder to my eye and tried to frame a picture. My finger froze on the white plastic button that would capture this memory forever, or would have if there had been film in the camera. I wanted to push the button, but some small consideration would always make me hesitate.
Maybe it would be better to aim a little higher, in case I might be cutting off the top of someone’s head.
If I waited just a moment, maybe Guppa would smile.
Was I too close?
Should I wait until the sun came out from behind that cloud?
Had I remembered to turn the knob after the last picture?
Maybe I should wait for another opportunity altogether.
Maybe I didn’t really want to preserve this memory at all.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
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You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” and “Take the Long Way Home,” the first seven novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Preface
I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader’s mind. No matter how many times we reopen “King Lear,” never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs . . . . Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us.
Humbert Humbert, in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita
BLUSHING plays an important part in the pages that follow. I do some of it myself, perhaps too much, but I should probably do some blushing here as well, because I have described Veronica McCall inaccurately. I have described her as she appears in my mind’s eye: I have let myself be seduced by the image that remains there, and I have presented it as if it were accurate, have even claimed that the image was recorded and preserved with particular precision, although logic tells me that it can’t be accurate at all.
In my mind’s eye, Veronica is wearing—on the occasion of our first meeting—a beige knit dress made of thin, soft wool. It has long sleeves, and the neckline is a wide scoop, so wide that the dress falls off one smooth shoulder. Surely my memory can’t be correct about this dress, about the fullness of Veronica’s hips in it, or about the way the dress clings to her. All that must be part of a much later memory, since I met Veronica in the fourth grade.
Peter Leroy
Small’s Island
December 28, 1983
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” and “Take the Long Way Home,” the first seven novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Peter Leroy recalls his childhood friend Matthew Barber. Peter and Matthew seem unlikely friends. Matthew finds little to like in life, and his outlook is decidedly blue. Peter finds much to like in life, though nearly everything puzzles him, and he is essentially sanguine about his future, no matter how groundless his optimism might be. Eventually the friends find, as most friends do, that each has added to his developing self a little of the other.
“The Fox and the Clam” is a wonderfully wacky ringing of plot changes on the kind of idiotically moralistic fables that used to fill the pages of elementary school readers. John Stark Bellamy II, The Cleveland Plain Dealer
“The Fox and the Clam” tells us how Peter learned to read, with many versions of the “Fable of the Fox and the Clam;” here Peter plays Candide to his cynical classmate Matthew Barber; it is all about happiness and despair, and it is exceedingly wise and exceedingly funny. Lee Pennock Huntington, Vermont Sunday Magazine
Clamming is the chief industry of Babbington; the town’s driveways are paved with crushed clamshells, and shapely shells are recycled as knickknacks by Bivalve Byproducts. . . . The apotheosis of clamdom is reached in “The Fox and the Clam,” in which the clam clearly represents only one thing—being happy-as-a—but does so in a set of thematic variations (ranging from a Saturday-afternoon cartoon about a happy hippo and an unhappy one to a deadly competition having to do with skipping third grade) that raise complicated farce to the level of calculus. Anna Shapiro, The New Yorker
Get the eBook edition of “The Fox and the Clam” for free on Apple Books.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” and “Take the Long Way Home,” the first seven novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
THE NEXT MORNING, my mother drove me to school. Together we went to Mr. Horne’s office. Mrs. Barber and Matthew were already there. Mr. Horne talked at some length about how proud he was of Matthew and me, but after he said that both of us would be moving up to the fourth grade I was so intoxicated by the news that I missed a lot of what followed. I did, however, recover in time to hear what Mr. Horne read from Mr. Grundtvig’s report, which had been the deciding factor.
Of Matthew, Mr. Grundtvig had written: “One is struck at first by his attitude of blank despondency, his apparently chronic melancholia, but one is delightfully surprised to find that this somber little fellow actually has a lively imagination and a well-developed comic sense.”
Of me, he had written: “Although on the surface he appears to be unbelievably naive, with only the most frivolous and trivial thoughts, one discovers upon closer inspection that he has depth, that he harbors a profound understanding of the absurdity, the pain, and the misery of modern life.”
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” and “Take the Long Way Home,” the first seven novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
13
“SO I SAT THERE, looking at Mr. Grundtvig,” said Matthew, between bites of the tuna fish sandwich I had given him, “and I said to myself, ‘This is it. Everything depends on this.’ There I was. I was actually in the predicament that the man in the rowboat was in. Grundtvig began tapping his pencil on his pad and he looked up at me. As soon as he looked at me, I knew what to do. I gave him the kind of story you would give him! You know what I told him happened at the end? The guy was carried off by a mermaid! They lived happily ever after. I couldn’t believe it. I heard myself saying all this, but I couldn’t believe it.”
I couldn’t believe it either. I sat looking at Matthew, who went on with his story, filling in the details, laughing, and pounding the table with his hand. My heart sank. The more he elaborated on the story, the surer I became that we would be going our separate ways. I couldn’t bring myself to tell Matthew what I had done.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” and “Take the Long Way Home,” the first seven novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
12
AFTER MATTHEW AND I had put in a couple of weeks in the third grade, Mrs. Barber got it into her head that Matthew should skip a grade. I told my mother that if Matthew was going to skip a grade, then I wanted to skip a grade too. She consulted Mr. Beaker, who endorsed the idea at once.
Matthew and I were put through a series of intelligence tests. For three mornings, we sat in a tiny room near the administrative office, alone, at two desks set as far apart from each other as the room would allow, with the door of the room open so that the principal’s secretary could keep an eye on us. At lunch time we would compare our answers and speculate about whether we had done well enough to meet the standards required of a student in the fourth grade.
When the intelligence tests were over, we were put through a psychological test. Both of us knew that this was important. We had heard the principal, Mr. Horne, remark to his secretary, Mrs. Torelli, while we were at work on the tests one morning, that he had no doubt that we were smart enough for fourth grade, but that, frankly, he wondered whether we were mature enough to fit in with the other fourth-graders.
We had to be tested individually, since most of the test was administered orally by Mr. Grundtvig, a fat psychologist in a brown suit who had been brought in especially for the purpose. Matthew went into the room first. He was in there for about an hour and a half. I waited in Mr. Horne’s office. When Matthew was finished, he was whisked away by Mrs. Torelli before I was summoned.
I spent a while looking at pictures on cards and describing them for Mr. Grundtvig. I spent a while describing what I imagined fourth grade would be like. I spent a while describing what I imagined fourth graders would be like. I spent quite a while telling Mr. Grundtvig about my relatives and friends, and he took lots of notes.
“Well, Peter,” said Mr. Grundtvig. “We’ve had quite a lot of fun talking, I think. Now we’re going to play a kind of game. Do you like games?”
I was going to say no, which was the truth, but I was sure that would be the wrong answer, so I said, “Oh, yeah!”
“Well, good. This is a storytelling game.” He picked up a booklet and leafed through it. “I’ll read the beginning of a story, and you finish it for me, all right?”
“All right,” I said.
“Here we go,” said Mr. Grundtvig. “One day a man, in the middle of his life, no longer young, decided that it would be nice to row a boat across a bay. He hadn’t rowed a boat in some time. When he got to the very middle of the bay, he was very tired. His hands were sore. His arms were aching. Sweat ran into his eyes. He looked around. The water was murky and gray. The man was as far from where he had started out as he was from where he wanted to go. He didn’t know what to do.”
Mr. Grundtvig closed the booklet and looked at me. “Well, Peter,” he said, “what do you think will happen next?”
I felt very much as the man in the boat must have felt. I was midway between the third grade and the fourth grade. What I said now might be the one thing that sent me either back to the third grade or ahead to the fourth grade. I didn’t care too much which happened, as long as I wound up where Matthew did. If he made it into the fourth grade, then I wanted to be there too. If he had to stay in the third grade, then I wanted to stay there.
Mr. Grundtvig cleared his throat. He had been looking at his notepad, holding his pencil ready. He looked up at me and tapped the pencil point on the pad. “Well, Peter?” he said.
I made the decision in an instant. The way to be sure of winding up where Matthew wound up was to answer as Matthew would. I pulled a long face. “It would be nice if this story had a happy ending,” I said. Mr. Grundtvig began writing at once. “But it will not. I mean, in a way, we’re all like the man in the rowboat—tired, confused, miserable—”
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” and “Take the Long Way Home,” the first seven novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
The very last Happy and Hapless cartoon that was shown at the Babbington Theater is the one that remains sharpest in my memory.
After a number of mishaps and close calls, Hapless, in his chubby-man incarnation, found himself in a rowboat, rowing across a gray bay. A storm was coming up. Already the bay was choppy, and Hapless was struggling to row into the wind. He was having a terrible time of it, and his expression showed the strain that he was under. Over the sound of the wind and the waves, we began to hear Happy’s chuckling, building gradually, coming as if from behind all of us kids, as if Happy were sitting up in the balcony somewhere, where the bigger kids sat to neck and smoke.
Poor Hapless began to hear it too, and he turned toward us, stopped rowing, and looked at us with a sadness that we didn’t recognize from earlier episodes. There was a scattering of nervous laughter, and all of us expected something to happen to change Hapless’s situation, if not for the better, at least to make it different, at least to get this horrible look off his face. But nothing happened. Hapless just sat there, drifting, looking out at us with misery in his eyes while Happy’s chuckle filled the theater.
Finally, Hapless spoke. “I don’t want to do this any more,” he said. The sadness in his voice was bottomless.
Kids began squirming in their seats and looking at one another. I looked at Matthew and laughed a tentative laugh, as if to say, “This is funny, right? You get the joke, don’t you—even though I don’t?”
Matthew gave me the sardonic grin that he had, as our friendship had grown, added to his sneer and his impassive look of disappointment.
On the screen, the wind suddenly died, and the bay was calm, though the sky was still dark. Hapless sat in the rowboat, drifting. “I don’t want to do this any more,” he repeated, and right before the bulging eyes of a hundred kids, he and his rowboat began to melt into the water of the bay.
It took only a few seconds, I suppose, for Hapless to disperse himself. The water lay there, undulating slowly, under a featureless gray sky. We all sat in silence for a while, and I heard some blubbering, but then Gene Autry came onto the screen, smiling and singing, and the boys and girls seemed to forget Hapless at once.
I didn’t. I realized that I had spent part of every Saturday afternoon for an entire summer laughing at Hapless’s misfortunes. The thought made me miserable.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” and “Take the Long Way Home,” the first seven novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
11
DURING THE SUMMER that followed second grade, I saw Matthew nearly every Saturday. My mother would drive me to Mrs. Barber’s shop in the morning and leave me there for the day. At noon, Matthew and I would eat lunch upstairs, where he and his mother lived, and after lunch we would walk to the Babbington Theater, which was only a block and a half down Main Street, for the Saturday matinee.
Throughout that summer, the theater ran a series of animated cartoons before the feature. These cartoons starred two remarkable hippos. One was a kind and pleasant-looking sort, grandfatherly and a little stodgy, who drew animated cartoons for a living. This hippo was never named, but I used to think of him as Happy, because he seemed quite content and generally unruffled. Each episode began with Happy Hippo at his drawing board, puffing on his pipe and working on a fresh ink drawing of his lead character, a younger, comical, bumbling, and mischievous hippo who was also unnamed, but should have been called Hapless. As soon as Happy had drawn him, Hapless began to romp around the drawing paper, and the adventure got under way. Whatever his adventure might be in any one episode, it shared with all the others some features worth noting.
- All the difficulties that Hapless fell into were concocted by Happy. It was he who drew the cliffs that Hapless fell over, he who made doorways too small for Hapless to get through, he who made Hapless’s roof leak.
- We were continually reminded that Hapless was a cartoon character made of ink. Sometimes, when Hapless was in a tight spot, his face drooped sadly, and then his body began to droop, and he slowly ran down into a puddle. Then from this puddle he emerged in a new form. In fact, although he began each episode as a hippopotamus, he spent most of the time in other forms, and he returned to being a hippopotamus only at the end. Often he was a chubby man in a derby hat who drove a ridiculous little car. When Hapless, as the chubby man in the derby hat, was stuck in a traffic jam, for example, he and his ridiculous little car melted into an inky puddle, and then a balloon rose from the puddle and suspended below it was a basket, in which Hapless drifted above the traffic. Of course, an enormous hawk was soon pecking at the balloon and in a minute or two Hapless was falling toward earth at his wit’s end.
- When Hapless really got into trouble, he appealed to Happy for help. In the basket dangling below the deflated balloon, for instance, when he was so beside himself with fear that he couldn’t think of a metamorphosis that would save him, he got down on his knees and clasped his hands together and looked out toward us with a beseeching look. As if a camera were drawing back, the image of Hapless receded on the screen, and we saw the edges of the drawing paper, then the drawing table, Happy’s workroom, and finally Happy himself, chuckling, amused by the predicament that Hapless had gotten into.
- Sometimes, Happy simply picked up his pen and drew some help for Hapless. When Hapless was falling in the basket of the deflated balloon, Happy drew a kindly herring gull who swooped out of the corner of the page and plucked Hapless from the basket. (Later, however, the herring gull set Hapless down in another pickle. As I recall, the gull deposited him on a tiny desert island.)
- At other times, Happy helped Hapless by drawing a likeness of himself on the paper, joining Hapless in his adventure or misadventure. Whenever he did so, he at once became as inept as Hapless, and both of them were soon up to their necks in trouble. Happy, however, always had an out. He would draw a sheet of drawing paper around the source of their trouble—a charging lion, say—and then draw a drawing table and so on, until he had reproduced his workroom on the paper, with the predicament trapped within the edges of the new piece of drawing paper, while he and Hapless were safely outside it. Then he and Hapless would shake hands, and Happy would wink at the viewer, and the cartoon would be over.
- And at still other times, Happy helped Hapless by drawing for him a bottle of ink and a pen. Hapless would grab the pen, dip it in the ink, and quickly draw something to help himself. Invariably, the devices that Hapless created to help himself turned out to be two-edged swords. In one episode, Hapless, a bumbling cowhand at the time, was being pursued by a charging herd of cattle. Happy drew him a bottle of ink and a pen, and Hapless drew a door in the middle of the Western vista. He opened the door, stepped through it, slammed it, and left the herd of cattle behind. He wiped his hand across his forehead, wiping away the sweat of fear, and breathed a sigh of relief. Then he looked around and saw that he was standing on a tiny platform over a bayou full of snapping alligators.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” and “Take the Long Way Home,” the first seven novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
10
THE COPY OF The Amazing Randy the Unbreakable Record that Matthew gave me was badly worn. Matthew must have played it often. I had to strain to hear Randy through the hissing and popping on the first side. The second side was marked with deep gouges that looked to me as if they had been deliberately made, perhaps with the point of a compass. I couldn’t play that side at all.
When I had recovered from the chicken pox and was allowed to go outside, I smashed Randy with a brick and buried him in the back yard. It seemed the decent thing to do.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” and “Take the Long Way Home,” the first seven novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
I GOT THE CHICKEN POX about halfway through the second grade, and I had to stay in bed wearing flannel pajamas with the ends of the sleeves sewn shut so that I couldn’t scratch my vesicles. One day, Matthew’s mother drove him to my house. My mother came into the room with a package for me, a gift from Matthew. It was wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, but I could see from the shape that it was a record. On the wrapping paper, Matthew had printed a note to me.
The record was called The Amazing Randy the Unbreakable Record. I was feverish and uncomfortable and bored, so miserable that my mother’s hand on my forehead was almost intolerable, and I couldn’t manage even to tell her to thank Matthew for the gift. My mother told me that she would play the record and let me listen to it alone.
“Call me when the first side is over,” she said. She closed the door and left me with the voice of Randy, a voice that I can hear as I write this sentence.
“Ouch! Oh my! That’s always a shock. No matter how carefully a person sets the needle down on me, I always feel a little pinprick. Well, hello there! I’m Randy. What’s your name? (pause) What was that again? (pause) Oh! Now I’ve got it. That’s one of my favorite names! Well, as I said, I’m Randy. I hope you like my name as much as I like yours.
“Da-da da-dum-dum-dum—
I’m Randy the Record,
Now what do you think of that?
I’m Randy the Record;
I’m round and black and flat.
“Ho-ho! Say, that was fun, wasn’t it? I have rather a good voice, I think. Of course, as the years pass, my voice won’t stay sweet and clear. It’s going to get worn and scratchy. Well, that’s life. Listen—you can help me last a little longer, but you’ll have to treat me carefully: never touch my top or bottom with your fingers, only my edges; and don’t go thrusting any pencils, knives, or other weapons into my hole. If you do, I could be badly maimed and slip on the spindle, which woooould maaake meeeaaa saaoound lahhhk theeis.
“Ha, ha, ha! Well, that may sound like fun to you, but I’d be horribly embarrassed if I sounded like that, and you’d get tired of listening to it after a while, and if you weren’t feeling well the sound might make you want to throw up, so don’t play around with my hole, okay? Another thing: watch out for the needle. If you set it down hard or bump it or stomp around the room and make it jump, it will gaareeeahgeeeech! Uh! Jesus Christ! There’s nothing worse! You know how bad chalk screeching on a blackboard sounds—well imagine what it feels like to the blackboard! And then a scratch like that will make me stick in that spot, so that when the needle gets there you’ll find me saying the same thing over and over and (click) over and over and (click) over and over and (click) over and over and (click) over again, which would be a miserable way for me to end my days and could drive you mad. So you see that it isn’t only for my own good that I tell you these things. But if you treat me right I’ll give you years of listening pleasure.
“Oh, you do right by me,
And I’ll do right by you.
Bo-bo ba deedle-de-dee,
Boop-boop ba doodle-de-doo!
“Ha ha! Sure hope you liked that one! Listen, there’s one thing I almost forgot. Every once in a while, give me a little wipe with a damp cloth, will you? Not wet, just damp—and not too cold—oh, and not too hot. And listen, when the time comes that I’m just too old and worn to sound halfway decent, don’t embarrass me by playing me for your friends, okay? I couldn’t stand that. I’ve got my pride. Just smash me on a brick or something and tell your mother that the kid next door did it. Promise? Go on, let me hear you promise. (pause) Thanks. Thanks.
“Now let me do something for you. Get yourself into a comfortable position and tell me about everything that’s bothering you. Tell me your hopes and dreams, your fears and worries, your hideous urges, and I’ll listen. I’ll listen sympathetically. I’ll listen to you without getting tired. Maybe you think that all the other kids are having a lot more fun than you are. Their mothers and fathers never make them do the things that yours make you do. They don’t have any chores to do around the house. Their daddies like taking out the garbage so much that they always want to do it themselves. I know how it is. I’m on your side. The other kids are happy as clams, and you’re miserable. Don’t let it get you down. When you’re feeling really bad, just put old Randy on your record player, and when you hear me saying ‘shhhhh-click, shhhhh-click, shhhhh-click,’ you’ll know that it’s old Randy’s way of letting you know that he hears you, he understands you, he agrees with you. When you’ve had your say, just turn me over. Now go right ahead and tell me aaaall about it. Shhhhh-click, shhhhh-click, shhhhh-click—”
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
8
MATTHEW AND I WERE THE BEST READERS in Mrs. Castile’s class, and she let us gallop through all the anthologies that the school had on hand. When reading time came around, Matthew and I would go down to the boiler room, where we had a couple of chairs and desks set up, and read together. At that time, it must have been the fashion to think of reading—or at least of learning to read—as a journey, judging from the great number of anthologies with titles derived from roads, features of roads, and roadside attractions. Matthew and I read our way through Bridges and Tunnels, Highways and Byways, Detours and Roadblocks, Culverts and Sewers, Sidewalks and Gutters, Crosswalks and Stoplights, and Motels and Diners.
At first, the atmosphere at these boiler-room sessions was tense. Matthew and I faced each other across our desks and read at each other. We spat out the answers to the questions, and we disagreed on the answers to all but the most trivial of them. But as the year wore on, I developed a grudging admiration for him, admiration that was mixed with pity and a strong desire to make him laugh, or at least smile. For his part, Matthew actually seemed to like me, though he continued to shake his head at some of my ideas. Matthew and I, I realized sometime in the spring, had become friends, after a fashion.
At the end of the school year, on the last day, when Matthew and I were carrying our chairs up from the boiler room, he said to me, “Peter, I want to ask you something, and I don’t want you to laugh.”
“All right,” I said.
“Are we friends?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I think so.”
“Then tell me something.”
“Yeah?”
“Why are you happy all the time?” he asked.
“I’m not happy all the time,” I said.
“Well then, why are you happy most of the time?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. It was an honest answer.
“Do you think I’ll be happy someday?” he asked.
I looked at him. He wasn’t looking at me. I thought of lying, but I didn’t.
“No,” I said.
We didn’t say anything more to each other that day, and I didn’t see Matthew again until September. I discovered, however, that he had infected me with a sympathetic melancholy that lasted well into the summer.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
“THE FOX WAS SAD at the beginning,” said Matthew, “because there was no reason for him to be happy. The clam was happy because he was a jerk. The fox was angry with the clam because he couldn’t stand to be around jerks. The fox wasn’t sad at the end because he was dead. And the clam will stay happy as long as he’s a jerk.” He looked hard at me. “But if he ever wises up, he’ll be as miserable as the fox.”
Sitting next to Matthew was Mary Elizabeth Patterson. Mary Elizabeth could make a cloudy day sunny. She was a small girl with slender arms and short brown hair. Whenever I saw her in the morning, outside, before school started, she was smiling and full of things to say. When she smiled, she showed a lot of teeth. She had long, pointed canines that I thought were awfully cute. Before the day began, Mary Elizabeth and I would spend a few minutes chatting happily about the amusing things our parents had done the night before. I was quite contentedly in love with her, and I basked in the certainty that my love was reciprocated. On this day she was wearing a yellow dress with a full skirt, white anklets, and patent-leather shoes. She had been squirming on her chair throughout Matthew’s reading. While he was answering the questions, she squirmed on her chair with more impatience and waved her hand in the air. When Matthew finished, I said, “Mary Elizabeth, do you want to say something?” I expected her to tell Matthew to stop being a Gloomy Gus, or words to that effect.
“I just wanted to say that I agree with Matthew,” she said.
On the tip of my tongue were the words “I think you’re right, Mary Elizabeth.” I was even leaning forward a bit in my chair to encourage her. I caught myself before I spoke, and then I had to catch myself again before I fell off the chair. Mary Elizabeth went right on.
“I think this story shows that you just can’t win,” she said. She was looking at Matthew while she spoke, and the look in her eyes was admiration. I had to say something.
“Well,” I said, “I guess you can’t win them all. That’s what my father says.”
“Oh, that’s just silly, Peter,” said Mary Elizabeth.
Darkness seemed to descend in the cloakroom. Mary Elizabeth and Matthew were staring into each other’s eyes. They looked perfectly miserable and perfectly compatible.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
7
MATTHEW AND I KEPT OUR DISTANCE throughout kindergarten, but we wound up together in Mrs. Castile’s class in the first grade. We were in competition from the first day. Mrs. Castile asked me to distribute copies of Along Sunny Paths, the primer that we would be reading. Matthew looked through his copy and marched right up to Mrs. Castile’s desk with it.
“Mrs. Castile,” he said, “I don’t want to cause any trouble, but I’d rather not waste my time reading this book.”
“Oh?” said Mrs. Castile.
“Yeah,” said Matthew. “You see, I can already read.”
“Isn’t that nice!” said Mrs. Castile. “Maybe you’ll help some of the other boys and girls learn to read.”
“Maybe,” said Matthew, “but I don’t want to have to read this junk.” He tried to hand the book to her.
“Matthew,” said Mrs. Castile. “This book is not ‘junk.’ All of these books are brand new, and there are lots of nice stories in them.”
“Mrs. Castile,” said Matthew, “the stories in here are too simple. They don’t give you anything to think about. You know what I mean. Here, look at this one—‘Quack, Duck, Quack.’ That might be interesting for—”
He turned toward the classroom, looking for someone to use as an example of the “Quack, Duck, Quack” level of mental development. I was on my way back to Mrs. Castile’s desk with the extra books. Matthew pointed at me and sneered.
“—for Peter. In fact, he’ll probably love it, but it’s just too simple for me.”
“We’ll see, Matthew,” said Mrs. Castile. “For now, I’m afraid that you will have to read the stories in Along Sunny Paths with the rest of the boys and girls.”
“I knew it was no use,” said Matthew, when he passed me on his way back to his seat. “I’m supposed to read about the duckies with the rest of you nitwits.”
For a moment, I was going to hit him with my copy of Along Sunny Paths, but I thought better of it. I didn’t want to have to go through another of those apologies.
Matthew could, in fact, read very well. So could I, and four other children in Mrs. Castile’s class could read well, too. Mrs. Castile gave the six of us another book to read, Down Dark Alleys, and had us gather in the cloakroom during reading time to read and discuss the stories on our own. Each day she would appoint one of us as leader. I was the leader on the day that we read a story called “The Happy Clam.”
“Today we’re going to read a story called ‘The Happy Clam,’” I said, by way of introduction. Then, emulating Mrs. Castile, I said, “Now let’s see who will read the story for us.” I looked around, pretending to choose someone, but in fact I had already decided to choose Matthew. “Matthew,” I said, “why don’t you read for us?”
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
6
FOR A WHOLE WEEK, I had to stay in my room from the time I got home from school until it was time to get ready to go to school the next morning. I also had to apologize to Matthew.
My mother drove me to Mrs. Barber’s shop. We walked inside, and my mother said, “Hello, Mrs. Barber. Peter would like to say something to you.”
Mrs. Barber looked down at me and smiled. She was wearing a white dress with puffy sleeves. Printed on the dress were yellow pansies that looked at me with expressions of stern accusation. But Mrs. Barber didn’t seem to be upset with me at all. She seemed sympathetic.
“I’m sorry I punched Matthew,” I said.
“That’s all right, Peter,” said Mrs. Barber. “I understand.”
“Peter would like to apologize to Matthew too, wouldn’t you, Peter,” my mother said.
“Yes,” I said, to the floor.
“Matthew is in the yard, Peter,” said Mrs. Barber. “Why don’t you go out and talk to him there?”
“Okay,” I said, and I went off in the direction she showed me, through the back room and out a varnished door. I heard my mother and Mrs. Barber talking behind me, and when I paused a moment at the door and looked back into the shop, I saw that my mother was watching me. I opened the door and went out into the yard.
Matthew was sitting in a tire swing, swinging slowly back and forth, letting his feet scrape in the taupe dust under the swing. I had the feeling that he had been waiting for me. I walked up to him at once. I wanted to get this over with.
“My mother says that I have to apologize,” I said.
He just kept swinging.
“So—” I said.
He just kept swinging.
“So, I’m doing what she told me I have to do. This is it. I’m doing it now,” I said.
“What?” he asked.
“You know,” I said. “What my mother told me to do.”
I turned and walked away.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
“It all happened in the fall,” I began, “a little before supper. It was starting to get dark, and a little fox was on his way home from school. He was rowing his boat along—”
“A fox was rowing a boat?” asked Mort. It was a friendly question, not a challenge. He wasn’t suggesting that he thought it impossible for a fox to row a boat; he just wanted to make sure that this fox was rowing a boat.
“Sure,” I said. “Look.” I looked around and found my drawing on the floor of the bus. When, earlier in the day, we had been required to draw a picture of an animal, I had drawn my favorite animal subject of that time—the fox in the rowboat. “Here, see?”
“Oh, yeah,” said Mort. He had slipped his thumb into his mouth and he was half reclining now. Matthew glanced down at him and rolled his eyes.
“So,” I continued, “the little fox was rowing along in his rowboat and he was excited about getting home to see his mother and father. His father was a very nice fox, who was always bringing presents home for his children.”
“Cookies?” asked Mort, pulling his thumb from his mouth just long enough to ask the question.
“No, not cookies,” I said. “Fox children don’t eat cookies. They eat lambs.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Mort.
“So the fox was thinking about the nice roast lambs they’d be having for dinner, and he wasn’t paying attention to where he was going. In came the fog, and before that fox knew it he was lost.”
“Oh, no,” said Mort. He covered his face with his hands. Matthew looked, for a fleeting moment, as if he might giggle.
“Wait,” I said. “Wait. It gets better. So the little fox sat there in the fog calling and calling for his mother, but she didn’t come.”
“No, no, no, no,” said Mort under his breath.
“And the little fox began to cry and cry, and he didn’t know what to do. Since his mother didn’t come, he figured that she probably didn’t even notice that he wasn’t at home. He thought about how she and his father and his pesty little sister were probably sitting around the table now, eating lamb and telling jokes. Calling wasn’t going to do any good. Rowing wasn’t going to do any good. Nothing was going to do any good. He just sat there with his head in his hands, crying and crying.”
“Paws,” said Matthew. I shot him an angry glance, and he pushed his face toward me defiantly.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because that’s what foxes have. Paws, not hands.”
“Oh,” I said. “‘Paws.’ I thought you meant—never mind. Okay, paws.” I shrugged. Matthew was right, after all. “He sat there with his head in his paws, crying and crying, and all of a sudden he started to think about the clams.”
“The lambs,” said Matthew.
“No,” I said, with a good deal of satisfaction. “Not the lambs. The clams. You’re not listening closely enough. He started to think about the clams under the water, because the little fox was cold and lost, and fog kept blowing into his face, and the darned boat was starting to leak, so the fox was having a heck of a time. He thought about the clams, and how they were all home already, in their nice little sandy beds with nothing to worry about.”
Mort’s lower lip began to tremble a bit.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I said quickly. “It’s just like the other kids—they’re all home now, and we’re not. They get to see their mothers and eat cookies and go to the bathroom, and we don’t. Well, just wait and see how this comes out.”
Mort swallowed hard and nodded.
“‘Jeez,’ said the little fox, ‘I bet the clams are happy. I wish my mother had been a clam.’”
“Me too,” said Mort.
“And because the little fox was so angry and sad about all the good times that he missed because his mother wasn’t a clam, he began to let out a cry that was as loud as the siren on a fire engine. At first it wasn’t too loud, but the more he wailed the more angry and sad he got and the louder and screechier his wail got, and what do you think happened?”
“He died?” asked Matthew.
“No,” I said. I took a breath and tried to keep the feeling of compassion alive within me. “His mother and father and sister heard him. They were looking for him all the time, and when they heard him, they rowed right to him and took him home to have dinner, and they all lived happily ever after.”
Mort looked at me for a little while with his mouth hanging open.
“So do you know what the moral of the story is?” I asked. I was about to say, “The moral is: ‘Never give up hope, even when you’re lost,’” but I didn’t get the chance, because Mort said at once, “Yeah, I get it,” took a deep breath, stuck his head out the window, and let out a yell that made the bus driver slam on the brakes. The sound coming out of Mort was really remarkably like the siren on a fire engine. It rose and fell, and he could keep it up for an astounding length of time. He would pause only long enough to take another breath, and then he would launch right back into it, a little louder and a little longer each time.
“Hey, stop it, stop it,” called the bus driver. “Can’t you make him stop?” he asked me.
I shrugged my shoulders. “I’m just a kid,” I said.
Suddenly there was a loud and frantic banging on the door of the bus. The driver and I looked toward it and saw my mother and the widow Barber and another woman, Mort’s mother, banging on the door, hopping up and down to try to see into the bus, and calling our names.
I looked at Mort. An insane joy swelled within us. When our mothers got to us, we were standing on a seat, with our arms around each other, jumping up and down, and laughing hysterically. Matthew was just sitting there. When his mother reached him, he got down on the floor and retrieved his drawings. He handed them to her just as they were, crumpled into a ball, without saying a word. He started down the aisle, and when he squeezed past me, he looked at me with that sneer again, and I could tell that he was going to stick his tongue out at me. Before he had a chance, I punched him in the mouth.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
The bus came to a halt, and a fat, sweaty man wearing a brown suit and a derby hat lurched down the aisle toward Matthew, Mort, and me. Mort and I gave each other looks of terror. I think it was the first time that either of us had realized that somebody had been driving the bus. We had just been riding along as passengers on a bus beyond our control, a bus that could have been traveling on its own. Now it dawned on us that this big and frightening character with a little mustache right under his nose was in control of the bus, in control of our destinies. I imagine that Mort had the same thought I did at that moment: that our not having gotten home was proof that this guy’s intentions were not good. Matthew simply sat, unmoved, wearing the same impassive look that he had worn most of the time in nursery school.
“Don’t cry, kids,” the driver said. “Stop crying. I’ll get you home. Don’t worry.” I was ready to take heart at this, ready to trust this wheezing stranger as soon as he said the word home. I looked at Matthew to see what he thought about this, and my hopes vanished. He was giving me another of those twisted grins, and I took it to mean that everything the fat man was telling us was a lie, that we were doomed.
The man went back to the front of the bus and sat in his seat. He turned around and called out to us, “Stop crying!” I took this as an order and did my best to stop. I was past crying anyway. I was sniffling and gasping for breath, shaking with the desperate sobbing that comes after the tears are gone, choking, hardly able to breathe, but through my fears the idea came to me that we should try to escape this demon and find our way home.
I dashed across the aisle and sat beside Mort. I beckoned to Matthew, and he stood up and stuck his chin over the back of the seat.
“We—we—we should try to get out of here,” I said. “If we can get the man to stop, then we can run away and find our way home. Let’s tell him that we have to go tinkle.”
Matthew looked at me with undisguised contempt. “‘Go tinkle’?” he asked.
“You know what I mean.” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “‘Go tinkle,’” he repeated, and he laughed a hollow laugh. “Anyway,” he said, “it’s no use.”
“We could try,” I said.
“I’m telling you, it’s no use,” Matthew said.
“He’s right,” said Mort. Mort had stopped crying. He wiped his eyes, leaving behind feathery streaks of dirt that swept out along his cheeks. They made him look like a tired old man. “It’s too late,” he said. There was no emotion at all in his voice now. He sounded like Matthew. “My mother has probably got another kid by now. Even if I could get off this bus and find my way home, when I got there I’d see some other little boy on her lap eating cookies, and she wouldn’t even remember who I was.”
A thrill ran through me, the electrifying thrill that comes from recognizing a theme in a setting where one doesn’t expect to find it. “This—this—this is like ‘The Fox and the Clam,’” I said. All I really meant was that our situation was as miserable as the fox’s.
Matthew looked at me and opened his mouth. He had that look of disdain again. “Shut up, Matthew,” I said.
Mort looked at me without saying anything. His face still looked drawn and tired, but in his eyes was a wild look of hope.
“Did they get home?” he asked.
“Yeah, Peter,” said Matthew. “Tell us. Did they get home, the fox and the clam?” There was, I thought, a tremor in Matthew’s voice that he hadn’t been able to hide. I started to tell Mort that getting home wasn’t what the story was about, but before I spoke, while I was looking at Matthew, feeling nothing but anger toward him, I remembered the way he had stuck his tongue out at me, and the lard sandwiches that he brought to nursery school, and I saw in his eyes the briefest suggestion of the hope that I had seen in Mort’s, and an unfamiliar feeling ran through me, a feeling that I can now recognize as compassion. If I had been grown-up, I would have said to myself, “Why, he’s not as mired in the slough of despond as he pretends to be. He’s just a scared little boy.”
I moved back across the aisle so that I could see both of them at once. I sat on the edge of the seat, with my legs in the aisle. “Well,” I said to Mort, with a smile, “I’ll tell you the whole story.” With those words, I felt a tiny glow of pleasure inside me, which came from the memory of the day when Mr. Beaker had first read the fable to me and the day when Miss Louisa had concocted her astounding variation on it. If she could do it, why couldn’t I?
Mort wiped his eyes again and ran the back of his hand under his nose. Matthew pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes. His expression seemed to me to say, “All right, Peter. Let’s see what you can do.” I took a deep breath.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
5
I DIDN’T SEE MATTHEW BARBER again until the first day of kindergarten, and then only at the very end of the day, on the school bus.
It had been an exciting day, and each of us on the bus had a handful of drawings to show mom and dad and a headful of strange events to tell about. Each of us was in his or her own sort of daze: puzzled, overwhelmed.
I rode along, sitting beside a window, on one of the seats toward the back of the bus. I was looking out the window, but I wasn’t really noticing anything. I was letting the things I’d seen and heard and done during the day drift through my mind, re-experiencing them and rehearsing the way I would tell about them when I got home. Time passed. From time to time the bus stopped. Each time it did, there was a group of mothers waiting for it. Some children would recognize their mothers and get off at once. Others would remain sitting much as I was, mouths open, eyes blank. Some, I suppose, were rehearsing their stories as I was. Others, I suppose, were just baffled.
A scene often repeated went something like this: a girl sitting staring at nothing suddenly started when a woman who had come onto the bus touched her on the shoulder. She looked up, blinked, and said “Mommy!” Mother and daughter laughed, and the girl began talking as fast as she could, spilling out snippets of the day at random, and pushing papers at her mother, who, beaming, was guiding the child down the aisle toward the door of the bus.
More time passed. The bus emptied. I looked around. There were only two children left, two boys. One was a boy I recognized from the classroom. His name was Mort Grumbacher. He was sitting directly across the aisle from me. The other was Matthew Barber. He was sitting in the seat behind Mort, his head down, staring at the floor.
Mort was looking around wildly, and he had crumpled his papers into a tight ball in his hands.
“They’re all gone,” he said to me.
“Yeah,” I said.
“They all went home,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
His eyes were wide, but he wasn’t really looking at me, he was looking far beyond me, at his future.
“We’re going to die on this bus,” he said, “I’m never going to see my mother again.”
“What?” I said. “What?” I looked around the bus again. There really were no other kids left. I looked under the seat, along the floor. There were plenty of drawings left behind, but I didn’t see any little feet dangling down from the seats.
“You’re probably right,” said Matthew. “The rest of them are all at home right now,” he said. “They’re sitting on their mothers’ laps.”
“Uh, yeah,” I said, “probably.”
“But we’re not going to get home,” said Matthew. Mort’s eyes were bulging. His mouth hung open in stupefied horror.
“Sure we are,” I said. “We’re going to get home. It’s just a longer ride for us.”
Matthew gave me his twisted grin, pursed his lips and rolled his eyes, dismissing me as a ridiculous naïf.
“Nah,” he said. “We’re lost.”
“Lost?” I said. “Lost?” I turned back toward the window. We were passing houses that I didn’t recognize. We were lost.
“I knew this was going to happen,” Matthew said. “As soon as we drove up to the school, I had a feeling. I felt sick.”
So did I, I remembered. “So did I,” I said.
“Me too,” said Mort. He swallowed hard. It looked to me as if there was a good chance he would be sick right then.
“I knew that if my mother left me there I’d never see her again,” said Matthew. “I screamed, I cried, I kicked. But she left anyway.” He sighed and stared out the window, wistfully, remembering his mother. As I remember him now, he seems so drooped, so sagging and world-weary that I’m surprised he didn’t pull a half pint of Jack Daniel’s out of his pocket and light up a Lucky.
“Yeah,” I said, but I didn’t admit having done anything similar. Mort just kept looking wildly back and forth at Matthew and me, swallowing hard and nodding his head.
“And now,” Matthew said, “the other kids are showing their mothers the drawings they made—”
Mort looked down at the tight, sweaty ball of drawings in his hand. Matthew gave another of those twisted grins, shook his head slowly, and sighed. He crumpled his own drawings into a ball and tossed the ball over his shoulder. Mort looked at him and moaned. He looked at his ball of papers again and then let it fall to the floor. It was the most hopeless gesture I’d ever seen.
“—and they’re eating cookies too,” Matthew added.
Then he laughed a mad, desperate laugh. My heart nearly broke. My mother had told me that she’d make chocolate chip cookies for me to have when I got home. When I got home! When I got home!
Mort and I burst into tears at the same time. A voice boomed from the front of the bus, “Hey kids! What are you doing here? Did you miss your stop?”
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
4
THE FOX-AND-CLAM EPISODE cost the Leightons several pupils. I was one of them. My mother spent much of that afternoon on the telephone. Most of the time, she just listened to the mothers of children who had been upset by the story—children who were lying on their beds, wringing their little hands, staring at the walls—but by the time she had listened to the fourth anxious mother, she had herself become anxious.
Over dinner, she told my father what she had learned. “I think it isn’t the right atmosphere for Peter,” she said when she had finished. “I think we should take him out of the school.”
“But I thought you said that the story didn’t seem to bother him,” said my father. He hadn’t finished eating. He had been listening to my mother throughout her account of the day, taking bites in between nodding and saying “Mm-hmm” and “Hmmm.” Now he put his fork down and ran his hand through his hair.
“Yes,” said my mother, “but if they’re going to be reading that sort of story, I think it’s just not the right sort of atmosphere for a child.” Several of the mothers were using the same phrase that evening. It had originated with Mrs. Hosmer, who, entirely by coincidence, had been reading a magazine article on the importance of the right atmosphere in child-rearing on the very morning of the fox-and-clam incident at the Misses Leighton’s School.
“I think childhood is important to a child,” said my mother. My father sneaked in a quick bite of meatloaf. “There’s time enough later for them to see the misery and unhappiness of life. They should be allowed to spend some time on that mountaintop, in the sun—”
“Yeah, I know,” said my father. “Before they descend into the valley of death.” He frowned.
“The vale of tears,” said my mother.
“Right, right,” said my father. “I don’t have any objection to taking him out of the school. I think those two old gals are kind of funny anyway.”
“Then it’s settled?” asked my mother.
“As far as I’m concerned,” said my father.
My mother went straight to the telephone, and my father had to pour his own coffee. He and I sat at the table, not looking at each other. I stirred the last of my peas into my mashed potatoes. I could hear my mother talking on the telephone to one of the other mothers. She was saying, “We decided that it just wasn’t the right atmosphere—”
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Miss Louisa closed her book with a bang and looked around at us with a big smile, as she always did when she finished reading. I looked back at her, beaming. I was tremendously proud of her. She had turned in a magnificent performance. She had brought it off so smoothly, apparently effortlessly, without hesitation. I clapped my little hands together and said “Yay! Yay!” as if she’d just set a new record for the high jump.
I was the only one clapping. I looked around at my fellow pupils and I discovered that they, for some reason, were beginning to blubber. Matthew, however, was not. He sat there in Miss Emily’s lap nodding his head, his mouth twisted into that sneering grin.
Miss Louisa’s face fell. Miss Emily looked terrified. She began gathering children to her bosom. “It’s all right,” she repeated as she ran around the circle trying to give a hug to each of them. “It’s only a story.”
“It’s not just a story.” said Matthew. “It’s the truth.” His voice surprised everyone. We all looked at him, and the other children stopped crying. “I heard another story about the fox and the clam,” he said, “and it was just as bad.”
“I know a different story about the fox and the clam, too!” I said, smiling again, thinking that I might get a chance to tell my version.
Matthew looked straight at me. “How come you’re always smiling, Peter?” he asked.
I stopped smiling. I thought about the question, but I couldn’t think of an answer. I looked at Matthew, and then I looked around at the other boys and girls, at Miss Louisa and Miss Emily. They were all looking at me, waiting for an answer. None of them was smiling. I began to feel empty, stupid, and sad.
“I’m not always smiling,” I said, and I wasn’t.
The mothers and fathers began arriving. One by one their children ran to them, weeping, inconsolable. When my mother arrived, I ran to her at once and took her hand and started tugging her toward the car. When we were nearly there, I turned back to look at Matthew. He was staring at me, and after a moment he stuck his tongue out at me. He looked so silly with his red tongue sticking out of his white face that I couldn’t help myself. I laughed.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
One afternoon, at reading time, we settled onto the lawn, and Miss Louisa opened a book and said, “Today I’m going to read you a story called ‘The Fox and the Clam.’”
“I know that story,” I blurted out, surprised and thrilled. A new feeling arose within me, a warm and pleasant feeling. It was pride. I had already read the story of the fox and the clam, but the other children, to judge from their blank faces, hadn’t; that meant that I was in an elevated position, closer to Miss Emily and Miss Louisa than any of the others.
“I know it, too,” said Matthew. The sound of his voice stunned everyone. It attenuated my warm and pleasant feeling. Miss Emily recovered first; she bounded to Matthew and scooped him up.
“Oh, good, Matthew,” said Miss Emily. She enveloped him in one of her pillowy hugs. “And you, too, Peter, good for you.” She had Matthew squashed in her arms, with his head bent to one side, but nonetheless I could see when he looked at me that he wore the same malevolent smile he had worn when he’d palmed that lard sandwich off on me.
“Now, Matthew and Peter,” said Miss Emily, “since you and I already know the story, we’ll have to be very quiet while Miss Louisa reads, so that we won’t spoil it for the others, won’t we?”
“Yeah,” I said, crushed. Not until she had told me that I was going to have to be quiet did I realize that I had been hoping to parade my familiarity with the story, that I had intended to keep interrupting with “Here comes a good part,” or “Wait’ll you hear what happens to the clam!”
Miss Louisa began.
“Once upon a time, a fox was on her way home to her family. She had spent all day scrubbing floors in the palace of the lion, who was the king of all the beasts.”
I had been wearing a big smile and the condescending look of the cognoscenti, but now my heart began to pound and I broke out in a sweat because the story Miss Louisa was beginning was clearly going to be wildly different from the fox-and-clam story I knew. I felt, at the same time, three kinds of anxiety. The first was the anxiety one feels when one is watching an actor in a difficult role, a musician playing a difficult piece, an athlete attempting a difficult feat: it seemed to me that Miss Louisa was undertaking a stupendous effort of improvisation, and I was afraid for her, afraid that she couldn’t bring off the spontaneous construction of so vastly different a version of the story, afraid that she was going to make a fool of herself. The second was the anxiety one feels when one has pretended, in conversation, to have read a book that one has not and sees in the expression on the face of one’s interlocutor genuine interest, interest that is already forming into a question that one will not be able to answer: it seemed to me that, since I had claimed to know the story, Miss Louisa might at some point ask me what was going to happen next, and I would be the one to make a fool of himself. The third was entirely new to me: it was anxiety born of rivalry. I looked at Matthew. His expression had reverted to his habitual look of disappointment, and from it I couldn’t get any idea of what he was thinking. Since he stayed with the Leightons after the rest of us left, I wondered whether he had perhaps already heard Miss Louisa’s story, whether perhaps he already knew what Miss Louisa was going to say. Since he and I were the only ones who knew anything about the story, we were competitors, but it might well be that he had an advantage, inside information on Miss Louisa’s version of the story of the fox and the clam.
Miss Louisa went on. “Her knees were sore, and her hands were rough and chafed. Her body ached from the hard work she had to do. Her heart ached too, because she knew that she would have to go on doing this work until she died. ‘Oh,’ she wailed, ‘A fox’s life is a sorry life. I wish I could be some other animal.’
“Just then a fairy popped out from under a toadstool. ‘Your wish is granted,’ said the fairy, who had the power to grant wishes. ‘You may be any animal you choose to be.’
“The fox’s heart leaped up, and she skipped along, thinking about what animal she might become. While she skipped along, a small bird flew past her, and the fox said, ‘Oh, I think I might be happy if I were a bird like you. It must be wonderful to fly through the air instead of scrubbing floors.
“‘Does my life look good to you?’ asked the bird. ‘All day long I have been flying back and forth with worms in my mouth to feed my babies, who scream all the time. If that sounds good to you, then why don’t you take my place?’
“The bird’s life didn’t sound very good to the fox, so she went on. After a while, she saw a rabbit hop across the path in front of her, and the fox said, ‘Oh, I think I might be happy if I were a rabbit like you. It must be wonderful to spend all day hopping through the woods, so blithe and nonchalant.’
“‘Does my life look good to you?’ asked the rabbit. ‘Right now I’m running from a farmer who saw me eating cabbage in his cabbage patch. If he catches me, he’s going to impale me on the pitchfork he’s carrying. If that sounds good to you, then why don’t you take my place?’
“The rabbit’s life didn’t sound very good to the fox, so she went on. After a while, she came to a bay, and the fox said, ‘I’ll bet there are clams in this bay.’ And she called out to the clams, ‘Oh, I think I might be happy if I were a clam like you. It must be wonderful to spend all day resting in the sand.’
“‘Oh, yes,’ called a clam. ‘It is wonderful. We don’t have to hunt for food—we just stick our necks out and eat whatever comes along. We never have to bring food to our children, as the birds do—in fact, we never give any thought to our children at all. We never get chased by farmers, as the rabbits do. We don’t have any work to do for the King, as you do, and we don’t ever get sore knees, since we don’t have any knees. However—’
“The clam’s life sounded so very, very good to the fox that she didn’t wait for the clam to finish. She cried, ‘I wish to be a clam,’ and jumped into the bay. By the time she reached the bottom, she had become a clam, and she was happy.
“But just then, along came one of the Royal Clamdiggers, and he dug up the clam who had once been a fox. He took her to the Royal Cook, and that night she ended up in the Royal Stomach.”
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
My mother and Mr. Beaker decided that I had memorized parts of the stories, and that I was making additions and changes to cover up for my not being able to remember other parts. In short, they decided that I couldn’t really read at all.
My mother worried about me. In consultation with the other mothers in our neighborhood, she decided that I had serious intellectual deficiencies that should be corrected before I began kindergarten. She wanted to enroll me in the Misses Leighton’s Nursery School. She enlisted Eliza Foote as an ally, and together they persuaded Mr. Beaker to endorse the idea. The Misses Leighton’s Nursery School was much less practical than what Mr. Beaker would have liked, but it was the only school that that I could possibly attend, since there was no other nursery school in Babbington, and it would at least be a beginning. I would be, at least formally, a student. When my father seemed hesitant, Mr. Beaker offered to pay half the cost, and the matter was settled.
The school was conducted within the Misses Leighton’s house, a large and comfortable frame house where the two women—Emily and Louisa—had for some twenty years attended their ailing mother. When she had died at last, the daughters, released from their responsibility well into middle age, had spent their small inheritance on a trip to Greece, where they acquired an enormous number of fascinating miniature plaster replicas of classical statuary, and where Emily learned to play the bouzouki, though not well.
When they returned, they opened the little school, which emphasized the visual arts (mostly coloring, finger painting, and modeling in clay), dance (which consisted of having the children put on shifts made of cheesecloth and romp around the lawn behind Louisa while Emily played the bouzouki), and literature (which consisted of our sitting in a circle and listening to one or the other of the Misses Leighton read aloud).
Most of our instruction took place on their porch. The porch had been enclosed with windows and knotty pine. In my memory of the time I spent there, the sun is always shining. Miss Emily, large and soft, is wearing a white cotton dress with a billowy skirt. She is constantly moving, bustling from one pupil to another, giving out squashy hugs, and from time to time she bursts into operatic passages that make Louisa, a wiry, wan woman with fine, dark hair, wince.
Miss Emily paid particular attention to one of the other boys, who was so plump and soft and pale that the rest of us thought of him as a marshmallow. He was a sad little boy who wore a look of disappointment nearly all the time. He didn’t laugh, but neither did he cry. He was so uncommunicative that the rest of us gave up trying to talk to him after a while, though Miss Emily continually urged us to talk to him, to play with him. This was Matthew Barber. All of the rest of us knew that Matthew sometimes stayed at the Leightons’ after we left. His mother would come to get him later, when she closed her shop. I had heard my parents talk about how big-hearted the Leighton sisters were, how fortunate Mrs. Barber was that the Leightons allowed Matthew to attend the school for nothing, how fortunate the poor boy was that he had this opportunity.
Outside the porch, behind the house, was a wide lawn, surrounded by lilacs. Surely these lilacs cannot always have been in bloom while I was at the Leightons’ school, but in my memory they are. Perhaps I am remembering the lilac cologne that Miss Emily wore.
During the morning we would draw, paint, or model in clay. Then we would eat lunch. All of us brought lunches from home. When it was time to eat, we would gather together in groups of friends. Periodically, Miss Louisa took us aside, one at a time, and reminded us that Matthew was not a happy boy, that he had no father, and that we should share our lunches with him because he didn’t have any money. Once, I traded sandwiches with him. The sandwich I gave him was tuna fish, and I was fond of tuna fish sandwiches. The sandwich he gave me was lard, just lard. With the first bite I decided that I’d been duped. I looked at him. He was wolfing down the tuna fish sandwich, but he paused to smile at me. It was not a pure smile. It was more like a sneer.
During the afternoon, we would dance, hurl the discus and javelin, play follow-the-leader, or act in skits. Then at the end of the day, our little group would sit in a ring around Emily or Louisa, who would read to us. On cool days we would sit on the porch, but on warm days we would sit outside on the lawn. After the day’s reading, our parents would arrive, and we would go home.
Most of the time, my mother drove me to the school and picked me up at the end of the day. She was always deferential toward the Misses Leighton, who quite bowled her over. Sometimes, though, my father picked me up, and he was always nervous around the Leighton sisters. He would stand with his hands in his pockets for most of the time. He looked at the ground or the floor, or he looked quickly at the drawings and finger paintings I had made, but he almost never raised his eyes to look directly at Emily or Louisa, and since he spoke, when he spoke, in the direction of the floor, neither of them had any idea what he was saying. When we rode home together in the car, he would sometimes ask me questions about what went on at the school, but he seemed more interested in knowing whether the boys and girls changed into their cheesecloth shifts in the same room at the same time than in what I had made out of my ration of clay that day.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
3
SO DELICIOUS was the pleasure of listening to adults read to me that I resisted learning to read for a long time. Mr. Beaker came to my parents’ house a few times a week to read to me and to try to teach me to read. He would run his finger along the lines of type as he read to demonstrate that it was from them that he was taking his words, and I soon began to understand that he was just repeating what was already in the book, that he wasn’t improvising the stories from the pictures, and I began to think that Mr. Beaker wasn’t as smart—as clever—as I had thought. He would point out words to me and have me repeat them, and if a word appeared several times on a page he would have me point to each occurrence of it. But when he asked me to try to read, I would return to the pictures, to my memory of the story as he had read it, and to whatever popped into my head, and I would improvise. I’d try to concentrate on the type, but my eyes and my mind would wander. I used the written words that I could read only as I used the pictures—as prompts for memory, spurs for imagination.
Finally, one day Mr. Beaker asked me to read the fable of the fox and the clam, which he knew was my favorite. “One sunny day the silly fox hopped into his rowboat and set off to see his friend the farmer,” I began.
“I give up,” said Mr. Beaker, and he did. But by that time my mother had grown fond of the stories in the Big Book, and she read to me from it every night when I went to bed. Inevitably, I began to be able to decipher the blocks of print, but when I read, whenever I came to a spot that I didn’t like or a place where something seemed to be missing or where something seemed to be wrong, I would make an improvement, an addition, or a correction. I did this when I read to myself, and I did it when I read aloud for my mother. She became concerned, and she asked Mr. Beaker to listen to me read once more and decide what should be done. He did. When I read the words on the page, my mother and Mr. Beaker smiled. When I added or changed anything, they frowned.
I loved my mother dearly, and I wanted Mr. Beaker’s approval. I wanted to please them, and I was trying to please them. I had gotten the idea, and it had become an unshakable conviction, that the writing in the book was only part of the story, and the thinnest part of it at that. It seemed to me that it was an outline, that it was just supposed to get you going, that the best parts of any of the stories were waiting in the spaces where your mind was free to wander, to decide what the fox’s children were doing and what his house looked like, to make up the stories that were told about the clam.
“Peter,” asked Mr. Beaker, “why did you say that about the fox’s children fighting over the toy lamb?”
“He says that every time,” said my mother.
“Why do you say that, Peter?” Mr. Beaker asked again.
“Because that’s what the children do,” I said.
“Do you think that’s part of the story?” he asked.
I wasn’t quite sure how to interpret this question. Either Mr. Beaker was insulting me or he had begun to lose his marbles. Hadn’t I just read the story to him with the fighting over the toy lamb in it? Didn’t that make it part of the story? If I put it into the story, it was in the story, wasn’t it?
“Yes,” I said, warily.
Mr. Beaker gave me a pat on the head, and he began talking to my mother in whispers.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
2
“WELL, PETER,” said Mr. Beaker, “what did you think of that?”
“It was funny,” I said. I was studying the picture of the fox in the rowboat. I wondered how Mr. Beaker had gotten so long a story out of that one picture, and especially how he had been able to imagine so clearly the hilarious figure of the fox grabbing for the falling leg of lamb and losing his balance. When my father cleared his throat, I was aware that all three of them were looking at me, waiting for me to say something more. When I looked at them, I saw that they wore long faces. There were tears in the corners of my mother’s eyes, and Mr. Beaker and my father looked gravely concerned. I was smiling.
“The fox fell down,” I said, and pointed to the picture to show them what I meant, because it seemed to me that the whole story was somehow contained in the picture, and that my mother and father must be able to see the fox falling just as Mr. Beaker had. “He was a silly fox,” I said. I looked at them again. I could see that they didn’t agree.
“What about the clam, Peter?” asked Mr. Beaker.
“He was a smart clam,” I said. I began to feel embarrassed. I could tell, from the quiet, patient tone Mr. Beaker used, that I was not answering correctly, that Mr. Beaker thought I didn’t have all my marbles.
“Don’t you think he’s a little young for a story like this?” asked my father.
“Oh, yes,” said my mother. She hugged me from behind and ran her hands over my chest. “He’s much too young, Dudley. Don’t you remember telling me that childhood is like a moment on a mountaintop in the sunshine before we descend into the vale of tears?”
“I don’t remember that,” said my father. “When did he say that?”
“Oh, one time,” said my mother. “I forget when.”
“I suppose you’re right,” said Mr. Beaker. He chucked me under the chin and looked straight at me and frowned. “Smile while you can, Peter. Enjoy that moment on the mountaintop in the sunshine.”
“Why don’t I remember that?” asked my father.
I looked at the picture of the fox again. I still didn’t get it. The fox still seemed like a laughable jerk to me.
“Let’s read it again,” I said.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Mr. Beaker brought the package from behind his back and put it on the table in front of me. It was wrapped in brown paper and tied with cord. Slowly, he began to unwrap it. My mother tied the belt on her robe and came over to watch.
Before Mr. Beaker had folded the paper back enough for my mother and me to see what was inside it, my father peeked around the corner and said, “Oh, it’s you, Dudley, I thought I heard your voice.” He came into the kitchen in his shorts, with shaving cream on his face and a razor in his hand.
“Berrrrt,” said my mother, dragging the name out into a complaint, “you’re not dressed.”
“Oh,” said my father, looking at his shorts. Then he frowned and shrugged and said, “Oh, so what? I’m sure Dudley isn’t shocked by a guy in his shorts. Look at you—you’re not dressed either.”
My mother blushed again and pulled her bathrobe tighter around her. “I’ll go throw something on,” she said. “Don’t open the package without me.”
My father looked at the half-unwrapped package. “What’ve we got here?” he asked. He walked toward the table, raising an eyebrow and pointing at the package with his razor.
“Some—thing—for—me,” I said, in much the way that Mr. Beaker had. I finished with a little flourish of my spoon that sent a piece of limp graham cracker flying over the package onto the table.
“Peter!” said Mr. Beaker and my father precisely in unison. They snapped their heads toward each other, and my father knit his brows. Mr. Beaker cleared his throat and turned away. He got a napkin and wiped up the bit of graham cracker.
“Don’t play with your food,” said my father. Mr. Beaker opened his mouth, and I thought that he might say something. My father must have thought that he was going to say something too, since he turned abruptly toward him, but Mr. Beaker just smiled at my father and said nothing.
“Okay,” called my mother. “Here I come.” She ran into the kitchen, wearing the red robe that my father had given her for Christmas. She had put on bright red lipstick too.
“Go ahead, Peter,” said Mr. Beaker. “You finish opening it.” He tugged at the paper a little to show me what he wanted me to do.
I looked at my bowl and at the package. I looked at my father. Very carefully, I picked up the bowl and held it out to him. He took it. The lather on his face had dried and cracked like peeling paint.
I pulled the wrapping paper off the book and lifted the cover. The book was placed on the table with the binding away from me, so that I opened it as I would have opened a box, lifting the cover up and away as if I were lifting its lid.
When I opened the book, it released into the kitchen a rich, earthy, damp odor that I have ever since associated with reading, an odor that I’ve come to expect to smell when I’m about to begin reading a book, an odor that produces an anticipatory thrill and an appetite for graham crackers and milk. Of course, the odor is missing from new books, which smell only of paper and ink, and even from most used books, those that have been treated with care, but from time to time I find a used book with that evocative odor, and when I come across one of these, I buy it at once, regardless of its subject or author. As a result, I have a number of books—The Piezoelectric Properties of Woodcomes to mind—that I’ve bought for their odor alone.
I looked at the endpapers, where swirls of brown, purple, blue, and gold swam—swam, it occurs to me now, like the colors made by gasoline and oil on the surface of the estuarial stretch of the Bolotomy. The swirling colors and the odor of the book made a heady, intoxicating mix, and for a moment I thought I was going to be sick, but I knew that I was getting a gift, and I knew that I should be grateful for a gift, so I looked up at Mr. Beaker and smiled.
“Here, Peter,” he said. “Open it this way.” He turned the book and flipped the first few pages. The paper was thick and deckle-edged. Mr. Beaker stopped at a place with a color plate. The left-hand page was handsome and intriguing but indecipherable. It had on it only blocks of print, squared off along the sides, indented in paragraphs, with irregular lines of type that looked like rows of dark houses silhouetted against a light sky, and intriguing rivers of white that ran along surprising courses, cutting across the lines at angles and changing direction unexpectedly. The right-hand page had a smoother, whiter piece of paper glued to it, and on this paper was a picture, a color picture of a fox in a rowboat, the first picture I had ever seen of a fox in a rowboat.
My father looked over my shoulder at the book. He rubbed his chin, and flecks of dried soap fluttered onto the picture. I swept them off with my hand. My father walked over to the stove and poured himself a cup of coffee.
Mr. Beaker drew a chair up beside me and sat down. “Now, Peter,” he said. “I’m going to read to you.”
My mother stood behind me with her hands on my shoulders, leaning over me so that she could see the page. My father sat at the far end of the table with his coffee.
“This ought to be as good a place to start as any,” Mr. Beaker said. I looked at the open book, and Mr. Beaker began the story.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
1
ONE QUIET MORNING, a Saturday, in the spring, when I was three, while Dudley Beaker was sitting on his porch drinking a cup of coffee and reading the morning paper, the thought struck him that it was time I learned to read.
Mr. Beaker was wearing a tan satin robe that my mother had made for him, though she had presented it first to my father, who never wore such things, as a birthday present. After a month or two had passed and my father had not worn the robe, my mother asked why he didn’t wear it on Saturday mornings when he sat in the kitchen drinking a cup of coffee and reading the paper. My father told her, sheepishly and gently, that he was really sorry he hadn’t worn it, but that a tan satin robe wasn’t his style, that he didn’t wear that sort of thing. My mother admitted that he was right and said it seemed a terrible shame to have a perfectly good robe go to waste and that it was too bad she couldn’t think of somebody else to give it to. My father struck himself on the head with the heel of his right hand and said that he had a perfect idea. They could give the robe to Dudley Beaker, whose birthday was coming up in just a week or two. At first my mother didn’t seem to think much of this idea. She said that Dudley’s birthday wouldn’t come up for months, but my father consulted the small book in which my mother listed birthdays and anniversaries and showed her that Mr. Beaker’s birthday was, in fact, just around the corner. My mother declared that she must be losing her marbles like poor Mrs. Barber, the widow downtown, and scampered off to rewrap the robe, using the original box, paper, and bow, which she had saved on the topmost shelf of her closet, in the back, behind a hat box. When she gave the robe to Mr. Beaker, he said that it was just his style, just the sort of thing he would enjoy wearing on a spring morning, when he drank his coffee and read the morning paper on his porch.
The idea that it was time for me to learn to read struck Mr. Beaker so powerfully that he put the paper aside at once, scrawled a note for Eliza, who was sleeping late, left his coffee, and went off to buy me a book.
There was no bookstore in Babbington at that time, but Lydia Barber, who ran a used furniture store on Main Street, liked to arrange the furniture in her shop as it might be arranged in a house, so she kept a good supply of props to lend verisimilitude to the arrangements, including antimacassars and doilies, knickknacks and books, and these were also for sale. Among the books at Mrs. Barber’s shop was a used, foxed copy of The Little Folks’ Big Book, an anthology of fables, maxims, poems, cautionary tales, and lighthearted stories for children. Mrs. Barber was the widow to whom my mother referred when she said that she must be losing her marbles. Whenever my mother thought of Mrs. Barber, she—like many other young Babbington matrons at that time—took a deep breath and thanked her lucky stars that she was not in Mrs. Barber’s shoes, and she made a mental note to call her on the telephone or drop into the shop for a chat.
Mrs. Barber had one child, a son named Matthew, who was about my age. It was Mrs. Barber’s custom, while she tended the shop, to keep Matthew in the back room, which was full of dusty furniture, antimacassars and doilies, knickknacks and books, or, in good weather, to let him play in the tiny yard behind the shop. When Matthew grew tired and cranky, Mrs. Barber would read to him from one of the books that she had for sale, and this habit gave her a reputation for having lost her marbles, since Matthew, although he could hear her perfectly well from the back room or the yard behind the shop, was invisible to the passersby who glanced through the store window and saw the slight woman reading aloud, apparently to no one.
Among the books that Mrs. Barber read from was The Little Folks’ Big Book. However, Matthew didn’t seem fond of the Big Book. If anything, listening to his mother read from it seemed to make him more tired and cranky. Mrs. Barber was not, therefore, unwilling to sell the book to Mr. Beaker, who decided that it was just the thing for teaching me to read.
Mr. Beaker had Mrs. Barber wrap the book. Then he drove directly to my parents’ house.
When he arrived, my mother was in the kitchen, making breakfast. My father was in the bathroom, shaving. I was sitting at the kitchen table, eating a bowl of graham crackers and milk. My mother was wearing a terrycloth bathrobe and fuzzy slippers. My father was wearing blue boxer shorts. I was wearing a fresh pair of flannel pajamas with pictures of romping, drooling dogs all over them. Mr. Beaker suddenly appeared at the back door, rapping on the window, smiling.
My mother was quite startled. “Dudley!” she cried, and began patting her hair into place. She opened the door and let him in. “Dudley!” she said again. She blushed and smiled and turned her cheek toward Mr. Beaker for a kiss.
“Good morning, Ella!” said Mr. Beaker, full of hearty good humor. He was holding both his hands behind him and smiling. He leaned forward and kissed my mother and rubbed his cheek against hers.
My mother giggled. “Why, Dudley,” she said, “you look like the cat that swallowed the canary.” She took a step back and studied Mr. Beaker’s smile. “What have you got there, Dudley?” she asked. She stepped toward him again and tried to look behind him. He turned so that she couldn’t see. She turned the other way. “What are you holding behind your back?” she asked. She grabbed his arm and tried to turn him around. He twisted away. Her bathrobe fell open. Mr. Beaker drew a sharp breath. My mother blushed and pulled her robe closed. Mr. Beaker turned toward me.
“I—have—something—for—Peter,” he said, advancing toward me and releasing one word with each step.
“Oh,” said my mother. She let her arms fall to her sides. “Isn’t that nice. Isn’t that nice, Peter?” she said.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
THE NEXT MORNING, I began writing the story down. I think that I might have been able to complete it very quickly if I hadn’t tried to verify some of the facts. When I did, I found to my surprise that I had made up two essential ingredients.
As part of the story as I told it to Porky White, I had included the version of the fable of the fox and the clam that I remembered from the first real book that I owned, The Little Folks’ Big Book. Before I began writing, I went downstairs to the library to see how accurately I had remembered the fable. When I opened the Big Book I was surprised to find that the fable of the fox and the clam was not in it. I had been certain that I had first encountered it there. I had read and reread the Big Book so often as a child that I could recite most of the stories in it, and the memory of the fable of the fox and the clam returned to me with such clarity and force that I was sure it had been one of the stories I had memorized from the Big Book.
A little shaken, I searched through my class photographs from grade school to find a picture of Matthew Barber, a boy who figured prominently in the story as I had told it to Porky. He was not there.
I was rattled. These discoveries were terribly disturbing, because they demonstrated to me that the memories, fabrications, and unrealized desires from my past were in even more of a muddle than I had thought. If I couldn’t separate them from one another, then I really didn’t know any longer who I was. Fabrications from my Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations were invading the territory that had once been held pretty securely by memories from my life. Dazed and confused, I wandered absently to my workroom and stood at the window, staring.
After weeks of introspection, during which I spent much of each workday standing at the window of my workroom watching the Jolly Tinkers build a foundation for the cottage and move it into place, I came to understand why I had fabricated my memories of Matthew Barber and the fable of the fox and the clam.
So that the reader may be spared the time and effort required to come to a similar understanding, I include here a summary of my conclusions.
TO UNDERSTAND the relationship between experience and imagination, one must be familiar with the paint-by-number canvases that were popular when I was a boy. These were canvases or canvas-textured boards on which were printed, in pale blue, the outlines of portions of a picture, each portion to be filled in with paint of a color indicated by a numeral within the outline. It was often not immediately obvious, from looking at the pale blue outlines alone, what some parts of the picture were supposed to depict, but when all the oddly-shaped pieces had been filled with paint, one could see the whole picture—if the painting had been done with care and the viewer stood a considerable distance from it.
It seems to me that my earliest experience with something creates, in my mind, a sketch like the pale blue sketches on those paint-by-number canvases. This sketch then becomes a framework for all my subsequent experiences with similar things. In most of my later life, I’ve been putting paint into the oddly-shaped segments of a picture that I sketched very early. However, as time has gone on, I’ve run out of space on the canvas of experience, and in order to accommodate new experiences I have had to paint over some of the older ones. You can, no doubt, imagine the results. The outline and the earliest experiences are soon obscured. The picture grows more distorted as time passes, at least in the sense that it departs more and more from the original outline. However, since the earlier experiences have been obscured by the later ones, I am forced to rely on memory and on the assumed congruity of the later and earlier experiences to reconstruct the earlier ones, and that reliance has been the source of several illusions.
Take, for example, my understanding of the Big Book.
From the Big Book, right from the start, I got the idea—or the pale blue outline of an idea—that all the characters in the Big Book lived in the same place, a place that was as comfortable a home for talking squirrels as it was for dashing knights. Over the course of the years, this childish idea has persisted, although as a young man I came to regard it with the patronizing indulgence that so many of us, as soon as we become young men and women, feel for ourselves as children and our childish misconceptions, and I felt embarrassed by the idea, as I did by many other ideas that seemed like unbecoming baggage for a young man, the intellectual equivalents of hand-me-down cardboard suitcases plastered with stickers from one’s parents’ travels. But after I had finished being a youth I rediscovered my affection for the idea and began painting away at it.
I have now a fond affection for the idea that all the characters in books live in the same place, the Big-Book place, and I’ve painted in so much of it over the years that I have a picture of a well-populated town, where, with Albertine on my arm, I sometimes walk along a shady street on a summer morning and pause to watch the talking squirrels gather nuts in Emma Bovary’s front yard while Tom Sawyer paints her fence.
At the same time, I seem to have been expanding and distorting the memory of the Big Book itself to include every story that I’ve ever enjoyed, or every story that has had a strong effect on me. Therefore, it isn’t surprising that in the picture I formed of the Big Book I included the fable of the fox and the clam, although in fact it was never there. Nor is it surprising that in the mental pictures I had of my early grade-school years, I painted in the pale and dour face of Matthew Barber, though I didn’t meet Matthew until I entered high school.
Peter Leroy
Small’s Island
July 28, 1983
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
THE NEXT DAY, at noon, Porky and I were standing on the front porch of the cottage. We were about in the middle of Bolotomy Bay, pushing into a headwind, a driving rain, and a nasty chop. Al had suggested that Porky join us in the transbay voyage, because she had thought it would cheer him up. The two clamboats on the port side, the Kitten’s Paw and Means to an End, were taking on water, and the engine in the Alice Blue Gownhad quit. The Three Jolly Tinkers were bustling around the platform, checking the lines that held the cottage in place, clucking and looking gravely concerned. I was eating a tuna fish sandwich and worrying about whether we’d make it to the island.
Al opened the door to the porch. It got away from her, but she caught it again and threw herself inside.
“This is rotten weather,” said Porky.
“Yeah, you said it,” I said.
“It’s not the rain and cold I mind so much as the wind,” Al said. “Listen, Raskol says we’ve all got to start bailing or we’re not going to make it to the island.”
We scrambled down to the Kitten’s Paw to start bailing. On the way, Al stopped Porky for a moment and made him take a good look at one of the clamboats nearby, on which Serge de Nimes stood in the rain and wind, clawing at the bay bottom with his tongs. “Now there’s something that should cheer you up, Porky,” she said. “You ought to be glad that you’re not one of those guys, out here all day in all kinds of weather.”
Porky didn’t say anything, but I could see that he was thinking, deciding whether the fact that he wasn’t Serge or any of the other clammies ought to cheer him up. When the three of us were bent over in the Kitten’s Paw, bailing like mad, he spoke. “You know, I’m not so sure that I wouldn’t be happier as a clammy,” he said. “It’s not an easy life, I grant you, but it has more of an aura of romance about it than being a giant in the fast-food industry has, you know what I mean? I mean, sure they’re out here in some rotten weather, but after their day’s work is done they gather in a bar along the docks somewhere and tell stories about their close calls on the unforgiving bay, embellish the tales of the legendary clammies, and that kind of thing. It’s like living in a beer commercial. It seems exciting to me.”
“Well, that’s true,” admitted Al.
Porky went on. “And I guess they all must have the feeling that someday, after they’re gone, other clammies, their sons and the sons of their friends, and their sons’ sons and their friends’ sons’ sons, will tell stories about them, that they won’t be forgotten, that they might become legends themselves, you know?”
He stopped bailing for a minute and rubbed his hands together.
“I can just see my kid telling stories about me when I’m gone,” he said.
A thrill ran through me, the electrifying thrill that comes from recognizing a theme in a setting where one doesn’t expect to find it. “This is like the fox and the clam,” I said.
“Oh, yeah?” said Porky.
“Yeah,” I said. “Keep bailing and I’ll tell you the story.”
I told Porky the story that appears on the following pages. It kept him bailing, and we got the cottage to the island safely. When I had finished the story, Porky smiled and pounded me on the back. “Thanks, Peter,” he said. “I guess I’m just a sucker for a happy ending.”
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Porky took a swallow of beer and ate another onion ring before he spoke.
“Well,” he said, “it’s like this.” He wiped his mouth with a napkin and cleared his throat. “I suppose it happens to all of us from time to time: we feel utterly miserable for no clear or sufficient reason, you know what I mean? Even those of us who think of ourselves as essentially happy people find that our essential happiness is, at these times, in danger of drowning, as it were, in a sea of misery.”
Al, Raskol, and I looked at one another. Raskol went up to the bar to get us some drinks.
“Most often,” Porky went on, “the misery—almost despair—is brought on not by a tragedy but by an accumulation of small problems. I think it’s the smallness of these problems that makes them so deadly, because if you think about it you’ll realize that our lives are full of small things that could go wrong, and when one of them does go wrong, we’re suddenly threatened with the collapse of the whole Tinkertoy framework of our lives, you get me? When the freezer broke down in one of my Kap’n Klam Family Restaurants today, it made me think there’s a good chance that the freezers in all the rest of them will break down tomorrow. Happiness is a fragile commodity, kids. You get a little crack in it, and the next thing you know it’s in pieces all over the floor.”
Porky went back to work on the onion rings. Al gave me a worried look. Porky wiped his mouth again and went on.
“At such times as that, when a little crack shows up in my essential happiness,” he said, “I respond very badly. I try to resist the despair, and I try hard. I use all the right arguments with myself, and I actually work at fighting the despair, but little by little my strength slips away. It’s like trying to row a boat across the bay into a fierce headwind—can you get that picture in your mind? I’m in this rowboat, and I’m rowing like blazes, but I’m not getting anywhere. The rain is lashing against my back. The wind is stronger than I am. I’m getting more and more tired. The boat is filling with rainwater. In fact, I think it’s starting to leak. I know what I should do—press on, Porky, press on. But I ask myself—why? Why go to any more trouble? I stop rowing. I sit there, exhausted, miserable, leaving myself at the mercy of the wind and the rain.”
I reached for one of Porky’s onion rings, but Al slapped my hand.
“In a perverse way,” Porky continued, “I enjoy these periods of misery. I think I enjoy them because they give depth and texture to my life, to my character, you know? I wouldn’t want to be happy all the time, to have people pass me off as one of the grasshoppers rather than one of the ants. Periods of brooding, it seems to me, show that I’m serious, that I’m sensitive to the pain of modern life, that I’m not unaware of how fragile the fabric of a happy life is.”
Porky sat in silence for a moment. None of the rest of us could think of anything to say. Finally Porky spoke. “Hey, Shirley!” he called out. “How about another beer and some more onion rings?”
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Preface
Nothing is miserable except when you think it so, and, vice versa, all luck is good luck to the man who bears it with equanimity. No one is so happy that he would not want to change his lot if he gives in to impatience. Such is the bittersweetness of human happiness. To him that enjoys it, it may seem full of delight, but he cannot prevent it slipping away when it will. It is evident, therefore, how miserable the happiness of human life is.
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, (translated by V. E. Watts)
I FIRST TOLD THE STORY that you’re about to read to Porky White, the fast-food clam-bar mogul, one stormy spring afternoon while we were bailing a leaky clamboat in the middle of Bolotomy Bay, but one could say that the story was conceived in a conversation with Porky the evening before, when Al and Raskol and I dropped in at Corinne’s Fabulous Fruits of the Sea. A couple of months before that evening, Albertine had decided that she could attract more honeymooners, young lovers, and adulterers to our hotel on Small’s Island if she had a cozy cottage or two to offer them, set apart from the hotel itself, where they could feel quite sure that no one would blunder in on their moonlight trysting. Al found an appropriate cottage for sale on the mainland at a good price, and she and Raskolnikov worked out a plan for moving it to the island on a platform constructed atop four clamboats.
In the weeks that followed, Al was extremely busy. She negotiated for and purchased the cottage. She solicited bids on moving it to the island, and she chose an outfit called Three Jolly Tinkers to do the work. Their advertisement in the Babbington Reporter(“We’ll do anything to the best of our ability”) had caught Al’s eye, and their bid was by far the lowest. They were three former schoolteachers who distinguished themselves from other jolly tinkers and most other former schoolteachers by wearing derby hats on the job. Al took to them at once. They moved the cottage to Raskol’s boat yard and constructed the platform.
On the evening when we ran into Porky White at Corinne’s, the three of us were excited, even bubbly. The cottage was sitting on the platform, and the voyage to the island would begin the next morning.
Porky, however, was down in the dumps. He was sitting alone, wearing a long face. He had a platter of onion rings in front of him and a glass of beer in his hand.
“Porky!” cried Al. She threw her arms around his neck and gave him an extravagant kiss. “Why the long puss?” she asked.
Porky didn’t answer. He just frowned and shook his head and stuffed a couple of onion rings into his mouth.
Al sat down beside him and snuggled up to him. She turned his face toward her. “Tell me about it, Porky,” she said.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
[Coming on Tuesday, September 21: “The Fox and the Clam” begins.]
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” and “The Static of the Spheres,” the first four novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
21
GUPPA DIED when I was twenty-five, of a heart attack. Gumma died when I was twenty-eight, of cancer. I still have the radio. I keep it in the cellar, on an old maple table that was here when Al and I bought Small’s Hotel. Beside the table is a wobbly straightback chair. Sometimes, when I wake up in the middle of the night, I go to the cellar and put the earphones on, turn the set on, and sit and listen to the static. I know that, in a sense, the radio doesn’t work, but I know too that in the night, sitting there alone in the cellar, dark except for the glow of the tubes, I can sometimes pick up, through the static, the flutter of Guppa’s note cards, the whisper of Gumma’s slide rule, the crackle of the living room fire, the scree-scree of Guppa’s hacksaw, the Annie-ate-her-radiator-Annie-ate-her-radiator of the toaster, one of those sighs that Guppa let out while he worked on the coils, or the sound of my own footsteps scraping on the wooden stairs, when I came down to the cellar carrying a tray with two glasses of milk and a plate of onion sandwiches.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast from the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
20
“CLOSE YOUR EYES, GUMMA,” I said. “We’re bringing it upstairs.”
I opened the cellar door and peeked around it to make sure that Gumma had her eyes closed. She was holding her apron up over her eyes with both hands. The kitchen was full of the smell of turkey. I held the door open for Guppa, who was holding the radio in front of him in both hands. He set it on the kitchen table and plugged it in.
“Okay,” I said, “you can look now.” My skin was tingling all over with pride in Guppa, and with affection for the radio itself.
Gumma looked at the shining radio with wide eyes, and she began clucking and exclaiming over it. Guppa beamed, and so did I. At last, Guppa said, “What do you say we put it to the test?”
Gumma and I sat down at the table, silent and eager. Guppa switched the radio on. The tubes began to glow with tiny, intricate lines of orange light. Guppa put the earphones on and began twisting the dials. Gumma and I tried to read his expression. His smile slipped away, and he wrinkled his forehead and pursed his lips. He twisted the dials some more, and he tapped at a couple of the tubes. He wiggled the coil in its socket. Then he pulled the coil out and put in another.
“How is it, Guppa?” I asked. He looked at me, but I could tell from his expression that with the earphones on he hadn’t made out what I had said.
“How is it?” I asked again, in a much louder voice. Guppa flashed a smile and nodded. Gumma put her arm across my shoulder. Guppa began twisting the dials and tapping the tubes again, and he began to frown. He pulled the second coil out and put in a third.
“Can I try?” I asked. I had to go to the bathroom, but I didn’t want to leave the scene of all the excitement, so I was squeezing my legs together and bouncing up and down. Guppa didn’t seem to hear me. Gumma tapped him on the shoulder, and he turned toward her with a start.
“What? What’s the matter?” he asked in a loud voice.
“Peter wants to try listening,” said Gumma, speaking with exaggerated precision.
Guppa looked at me, and he seemed terribly tired. My expression was beyond my control. I was smiling so completely that I couldn’t speak when Guppa handed me the earphones. I slipped them on and fussed with them until they felt right or at least didn’t hurt my ears too much. I cupped my hands over them and held them to my ears. The sound seemed to come at once from within me, from the earphones, and from someplace far away.
From a great distance came a sound like wind through willow trees, the rustle of the hanging branches of a weeping willow, the sweep of the branches along the ground. Winding through this was a deep and indecipherable murmur, like the voices of my parents and Gumma and Guppa when I had heard them talking together at night, years before, when I lay in my crib. And rising and falling through it all was a metallic sound, like the operation of a machine, very much like the scraping sound that Gumma’s toaster made.
I looked at Guppa, who was looking at his shoes, and at Gumma, who was looking at me. Her lips were tight, and she was wringing her apron in her hands.
“It’s just right, Guppa!” I said, and of course, with the earphones on and the static hissing in my ears I shouted it so loudly that Guppa looked up with a start and Gumma burst out laughing.
I twiddled the dials, and the rushing hiss faded and the murmur became a howl, the metallic scraping began to echo, and an irregular ticking began somewhere far away.
Gumma said, “Oh, Herb, I’m so proud of you,” and Guppa shrugged and smiled. Gumma got up and poured Guppa a glass of beer and then went back to making dinner, and Guppa went off to the living room. Neither of them asked to try the radio, and I didn’t offer. When my parents arrived, I showed the radio to them but didn’t let them listen to it, and then we ate dinner, and after dinner I insisted on taking it to bed with me.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast from the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
19
BUT I DIDN’T HAVE TO, thanks to Gumma. When I told her what had happened, she got her slide rule and marched downstairs. She had Guppa and Mr. Beaker and me count and recount the number of windings we could see on the outside of the coil. She looked through the instructions and mumbled to herself. She measured the thickness of the windings on the coil and the thickness of the wire itself. Then she went to work with her slide rule. Guppa, Mr. Beaker, and I held our breath. If my heart hadn’t been thumping so loudly, I would have been able to hear the slide whispering through the stock.
Gumma took a deep breath. She smiled and let the breath out.
“It’s exactly right,” she said.
Mr. Beaker looked puzzled. “How many—” he began.
“Exactly right,” Gumma repeated in a soft voice that reverberated through the cellar as if she had shouted.
“Yahoo!” I cheered.
Gumma gave Guppa a big hug, and so did I. Mr. Beaker gave him a pat on the back and said, “Well, you’ll want to celebrate without me, so I’ll head for home.” No one said anything to him, so he left.
Gumma went back upstairs, and Guppa turned toward the workbench, but he was not close enough to it to read the instructions. I walked over to the workbench and closed the magazine.
“I’ll help you straighten up, Guppa,” I said, “and then we can go upstairs and try it out.”
He didn’t say anything. Hesitantly, I looked at him over my shoulder. He stood with his mouth in a rictus.
“I’ll go put the magazine back,” I said. “Why don’t you clean the radio up with a rag so that it’s nice and shiny when we take it upstairs?”
I walked upstairs with the magazine, and at the head of the stairs turned left, toward the back door, instead of right, toward the dining room, where Guppa had built the concealed bookcases that held his back issues of Impractical Craftsman. I went outside, onto the back porch, down the porch steps, and over to the trash cans. I lifted the lid of one and dropped the magazine in.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast from the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
18
GUPPA HAD SPENT forty-six weekends in the cellar at work on the radio, discounting the time that he had spent pumping the cellar out and drying its contents. He had put eight hundred twenty-eight hours into the project. I had put in four hundred fourteen hours in the cellar and another seventy-eight making onion sandwiches and pouring coffee. I had made one hundred thirty-eight onion sandwiches, not counting the one that a boy from across No Bridge Road, a boy that I never knew by any other name but Frankie, left half-eaten on his plate when he came over one Saturday at noontime to see if I wanted to climb trees with him.
“There!” said Guppa at last. He turned toward me, raising the finished coil, the final coil, in a shaking hand. He had aged a great deal during the time that he had been at work on the radio. His eyes were red and teary, and the skin below them hung in dark, flaccid folds. His lips trembled and twitched with the effort to form a grandfatherly smile.
“That’s great, Guppa!” I cried, with deep, genuine enthusiasm. The coil-winding was at last complete, the receiver was at last complete, a phase of my life had come to a crisp and clear conclusion. There was no ambiguity, no fuzzy line, no indeterminate point like that between breadness and toastness in Gumma’s toaster, no need for interpolation. This moment marked the end of the work on the radio, and anything to follow, whatever it might be, would be a post-radio-construction event.
“This was the hardest one of all, wasn’t it?” I asked. I knew that it had been; I had been able to see that it had been, even though I avoided watching Guppa too carefully and hoped that he did not know that I knew how many times he had unwound the coil and begun winding it again when he lost count of the windings.
“Well, yes, it was,” he acknowledged.
I could see him gaining in strength now that the winding was done, now that everything was done. He was beginning to allow himself to feel proud.
“A job like this has got to be done just right,” he said, raising the coil a little higher in a steadier hand. “If you’re not ready to do what has to be done the way it should be done, then you’re not ready to do it at all. Now, you take this coil. I could probably have been off by a few turns and it wouldn’t have made all that much difference, except to me. I’d know that it wasn’t right. That’s why I had to stick to it until it was right.”
Now he was glowing. His hand was firm, and he drew in deep breaths of the damp cellar air. He could relax now. He and I would be able to straighten things up on the bench, put the few remaining leftover parts into the electrical gadget jar, go upstairs to the kitchen, smiling so that Gumma would say that we looked like the cat that swallowed the canary, tell her about the progress we had made, then surprise her with the finished radio, listen to a few foreign broadcasts, show the radio to my parents when they arrived, eat dinner, sit in the living room and listen for a while longer, and then go to bed, content.
I heard the door at the top of the stairs open, and I heard rapid, brisk footsteps coming down the stairs. Mr. Beaker popped around the corner.
“What industry!” he cried. “You two haven’t seen the light of day since breakfast, I understand.”
He leaned back in an exaggerated pose and scrutinized us with exaggerated care.
“Hmmmm,” he said. “From the fact that you got up so early, Herb, and from the little grins that you two are wearing, I’d say that you’re getting very close to the end of this project. How’s the work going?”
With pride, I announced to him that Guppa had wound all the coils and we would be listening in on the babble of foreign tongues any minute now.
“Take a look at this,” I said. I picked up the coil that Guppa had finished. “This was the toughest one of all. It has the finest wire and the most windings.”
“That is quite a piece of work,” said Mr. Beaker. He took the coil from me and held it in front of him, raising it to eye level as if it were a jewel. “Quite a piece of work,” he repeated. He looked closely at the coil and said, “Mm-mm-mm.” He compressed his lips and nodded his approval. “How many windings does this have?” he asked Guppa.
Guppa had been smiling, standing with his hands in his pockets and rocking on his heels. Mr. Beaker’s question had a visible effect on him, the same effect as a sudden increase in the mass of the earth would have had. All of Guppa seemed to slump.
“How many windings?” Guppa asked.
“Yes,” said Mr. Beaker. “How many windings?”
My throat became dry, my palms moist. I knew that something was terribly wrong. I didn’t want to look at Guppa, but I couldn’t look away from him. He pulled his hands from his pockets and swept them through his hair, pushing it back from his forehead.
“It’s got about—”
He looked at me. I gave him a jaunty smile that I intended to mean “I have every confidence in you, Guppa. You’re my hero.” He squinted his eyes and peered at me as if he had forgotten who I was.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It was in the hundreds—I know that.” He turned toward the plans, open on his workbench, then turned away quickly, as if looking at the plans would have been cheating. “I’m sure I got it right,” he said. He seemed to be pleading.
“Me too!” I said, with great verve and the conviction that came from a heartfelt desire not to have him wind the coil again.
“I’m sure that a few turns more or less won’t make enough difference for anyone to notice anyway,” said Mr. Beaker. He put the coil down on the bench.
Guppa picked the coil up and peered at it, as if by looking closely enough he would have been able to remember exactly how many turns of that fine varnished wire he had made. He sighed. “We’ll try again tomorrow,” he said. “What do you say we quit for the day and get something to eat?”
“Oh, yeah!” I cried. I dashed toward the stairs and pounded up them. I had to get away from Guppa. There was a lump in my throat, and I could feel the tears forming in my eyes. I felt horribly sorry for Guppa, who so wanted to please and impress me, and I felt sorry for myself, too, for I was now going to have to spend God knows how much longer sitting on the cold metal stool beside Guppa watching him rewind that damned coil.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast from the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
17
LET ME EXPLAIN these coils that were giving Guppa so much trouble. The reason one radio can pick up signals that another cannot is that each of them is tuned to a different range of radio frequencies. The radio that Guppa was building for me would detect signals in the range of frequencies that are called “shortwave.” Now within that broad range lie narrower “bands.” The receiver would be able to receive signals in many of these bands, depending on which coil was plugged into its circuit. To change from one band to another, all I would have to do was unplug one coil and plug in another. The coils were to be wound on hollow Bakelite forms with pins projecting from their bases that could be inserted into sockets like those into which vacuum tubes were inserted.
When Guppa and I were looking through his back issues of Impractical Craftsman to decide what sort of radio we would build, we had found other, simpler radios, but Guppa had liked the notion of winding these coils by hand, and the thin, shiny wire had appealed to him as soon as he saw it in the electrical gadget store, but what had really persuaded him that this radio was just the one for us to build was the description of the work that appeared in the article: the hours of baffling precision work.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast from the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Most children do not have a good sense of the amount of work required to build a radio from scratch or of the amount of time required to do it or—for that matter—of the passage of time itself. For most of them, time is like a dotted line, with unequal sections of the line itself (events) and unequal interstices (non-events, the periods of waiting for something to happen that make up much of a person’s childhood). I blame this misconception on the type of toaster used in most households: the pop-up toaster. In operating a pop-up toaster, one inserts a batch of bread (usually a slice or two) and lowers it into the toaster. For the child who watches this operation, the lowering of the bread is apparently the last event that occurs for some time, since the string of small events that add up to the toasting of the bread—the real work of toasting the bread—takes place out of the child’s sight. Therefore, the toasting itself becomes one of those interstices between events, a nonevent, a period of waiting that varies, both in real and in apparent length, according to the hunger of the child, the thickness of the bread, and random fluctuations in the voltage of the electrical service to the toaster. When the toast pops up, the child at last witnesses another event, which terminates the period of waiting for something to happen.
What effect, we might ask ourselves, does the pop-up toaster have on the intellectual development of the child who sits beside it, morning after morning, waiting with his plate and peanut butter? Bread goes in as bread and comes out, after an interval, as toast. Put in bread. Wait. Get out toast. Surely, the child who watches this happen over a period of time comes to think of bread as either bread or toast, to think of time as discrete intervals, and to think of being as being in some one form or in some other, with intervals of waiting, intervals between states when, apparently, nothing happens. Such a child would ask his grandfather to build him a radio (that is, lower the bread into the toaster), wait for some interval, and then expect his grandfather to hand him a radio (that is, expect the toast to pop up). When they grow up, these children are immediately attracted to the quantum theory, digital watches, and electronic calculators.
I was not such a child, because Gumma and Guppa did not have a pop-up toaster. Their toaster was a chrome-plated metal box about as long as three slices of bread lined up side by side. At each end of the box was a slot a little higher than the height of a slice of bread and a little wider than the thickness of a slice of bread. Inside the box was a tunnel through which the toast moved from the left end of the toaster to the right. Along the bottom of the tunnel was a set of toothed rails linked by an armature to a motor. The motor made the rails raise the toast, move it a short distance to the right, and set it down again on the stationary base rail. On either side of the tunnel were resistance wires that provided the heat to toast the bread. Little by little, as the bread marched through the toaster, it browned; that is, it became toast.
Now here comes the best part. The manufacturer of this toaster, clearly nobody’s fool, had provided a small circular window in the side, so that one could watch the rhythmic rightward shuffle of the slices of bread and their progress from bread to toast.
From a very early age, I loved watching—and listening to—the operation of this toaster. As the toaster operated, it produced a repetitive sound from somewhere inside the machine, from the scraping of some parts against others, a sound that I interpreted as words, the words Annie ate her radiator, repeated over and over while the bread toasted. I would sit and watch and listen to the toaster and watch the bread through the little window and try to decide where in its passage from left to right it became toast. And from that toaster I learned to think of time as a belt, to think of being as being in transit, and I laid the groundwork for a persistent nostalgic affection for the wave theory of electromagnetic radiation and round-faced watches and slide rules, and I developed a sense of time’s passing.
During the forty-six weekends that I had so far spent with Guppa in the cellar working on the receiving set (not counting the time that we had spent pumping the cellar out and drying its contents after the flood in November), my sense of the passing of time had developed to a point where, although it may not have been as acute as my sense of sight, it was at least as sharp as my sense of smell.
When Guppa and I had begun work on the receiving set, we had, each in his mind’s eye, pictured a similar tableau: grandfather and grandson bent to the work together, youth and age, experience and enthusiasm, harnessed in tandem. We had glowed for a while with the flush of a mutual overconfidence in what an enthusiastic grandson might be able to accomplish, guided by his grandfather’s hand. That glow had faded pretty early in the course of the work, as soon as we had come to see that there was very little that I could do that Guppa would not have to undo or redo later. My helping had degenerated into my keeping out of Guppa’s way and keeping him company, demonstrating by my presence, and by displays of enthusiasm, that I was grateful for the effort that he was making, that I was impressed as could be by his stick-to-itiveness, and that I was still crazy about the idea of having a shortwave receiving set, although in fact I had begun to think, halfway through our third day in the cellar, that I would have been a lot better off if I had asked Guppa to make me something quick and simple, like a scooter, just as I was sometimes struck by the thought, while watching a slice of white bread move through the toaster, that I would rather have had raisin bread.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast from the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast from the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
15
THEN CAME THE FLOOD. Gumma and Guppa lived near Bolotomy Bay, about half a foot above sea level. Every fall, during the hurricane season, high tides during storms would send a couple of inches of bay water into Gumma and Guppa’s cellar. This year had been without hurricanes during the usual season, but a whopper of a storm struck during the weekend after Thanksgiving.
When I got up that Saturday, the whole world was howling and whining. The house felt cold, the cat wouldn’t come out from under the living room sofa, and the toaster wouldn’t work. I had taken to inspecting the radio alone in the mornings before Guppa woke up. I opened the door to the cellar and started down the stairs. When I got two-thirds of the way down, I was up to my knees in water.
Anything buoyant bobbed lethargically on the surface of the water, including, here and there, the vacuum tubes that were supposed to go into the radio. I knew that I was up to my knees in a disaster. My first thought was that the radio was doomed. It would never be completed now. Disappointment mingled with an odd sense of release. There was a lump in my throat, but my mouth was twisted into a strange smile, not unlike the one that I had seen the Regular Joes use on our visits to their store.
When Guppa saw the damage, he sprang into action at once. He had, years ago, built a powerful pump from parts of a cement mixer and an outboard motor, for just such an occasion. He improvised a ramp and wheeled the pump into the kitchen. By the afternoon he had pumped the cellar dry, flooded No Bridge Road, and filled the kitchen with oily soot.
Gumma and I worked at cleaning the kitchen, while Guppa rigged up the fans that he had built for drying out the waterlogged contents of the cellar. (“Surplus Wind Machine Makes Neat Rig for Drying Waterlogged Cellar Contents,” Impractical Craftsman, Volume XVIII, Number 3, pages 48–52.)
By the following weekend, Guppa was back at work on the radio, and I was sitting on the metal stool watching him. He began winding the coils.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast from the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast from the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast from the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast from the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast from the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast from the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast from the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast from the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast from the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast from the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast from the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast from the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast from the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
This episode is a placeholder. I didn’t post any text episodes of the Personal History from Monday, August 16, through Friday, August 20, while I was preparing the podcast launch. The text episodes that I posted on those days were placeholders, counting down the days until the podcast launch on Monday, August 23. To keep the numbering of podcast episodes consistent with the numbering of text episodes, I’m posting five podcast placeholders, Episodes 68 through 72, from Wednesday, November 17, through Tuesday, November 23. My reading of the Personal History will resume with podcast Episode 73 on Wednesday, November 24. To entertain you during this interval I’m posting a reading of a portion of “The Fox and the Clam” by Bill Cavness on his program “Reading Aloud,” broadcast on WGBH in Boston in 1982 or 1983. Here it is.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast from the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
This episode is a placeholder. I didn’t post any text episodes of the Personal History from Monday, August 16, through Friday, August 20, while I was preparing the podcast launch. The text episodes that I posted on those days were placeholders, counting down the days until the podcast launch on Monday, August 23. To keep the numbering of podcast episodes consistent with the numbering of text episodes, I’m posting five podcast placeholders, Episodes 68 through 72, from Wednesday, November 17, through Tuesday, November 23. My reading of the Personal History will resume with podcast Episode 73 on Wednesday, November 24. To entertain you during this interval I’m posting a reading of a portion of “The Fox and the Clam” by Bill Cavness on his program “Reading Aloud,” broadcast on WGBH in Boston in 1982 or 1983. Here it is.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast from the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
This episode is a placeholder. I didn’t post any text episodes of the Personal History from Monday, August 16, through Friday, August 20, while I was preparing the podcast launch. The text episodes that I posted on those days were placeholders, counting down the days until the podcast launch on Monday, August 23. To keep the numbering of podcast episodes consistent with the numbering of text episodes, I’m posting five podcast placeholders, Episodes 68 through 72, from Wednesday, November 17, through Tuesday, November 23. My reading of the Personal History will resume with podcast Episode 73 on Wednesday, November 24. To entertain you during this interval I’m posting a reading of a portion of “The Fox and the Clam”by Bill Cavness on his program “Reading Aloud,” broadcast on WGBH in Boston in 1982 or 1983. Here it is.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast from the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
This episode is a placeholder. I didn’t post any text episodes of the Personal History from Monday, August 16, through Friday, August 20, while I was preparing the podcast launch. The text episodes that I posted on those days were placeholders, counting down the days until the podcast launch on Monday, August 23. To keep the numbering of podcast episodes consistent with the numbering of text episodes, I’m posting five podcast placeholders, Episodes 68 through 72, from Wednesday, November 17, through Tuesday, November 23. My reading of the Personal History will resume with podcast Episode 73 on Wednesday, November 24. To entertain you during this interval I’m posting a reading of a portion of “The Fox and the Clam”by Bill Cavness on his program “Reading Aloud,” broadcast on WGBH in Boston in 1982 or 1983. Here it is.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast from the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
This episode is a placeholder. I didn’t post any text episodes of the Personal History from Monday, August 16, through Friday, August 20, while I was preparing the podcast launch. The text episodes that I posted on those days were placeholders, counting down the days until the podcast launch on Monday, August 23. To keep the numbering of podcast episodes consistent with the numbering of text episodes, I’m posting five podcast placeholders, Episodes 68 through 72, from Wednesday, November 17, through Tuesday, November 23. My reading of the Personal History will resume with podcast Episode 73 on Wednesday, November 24. To entertain you during this interval I’m posting a reading of a portion of “The Fox and the Clam”by Bill Cavness on his program “Reading Aloud,” broadcast on WGBH in Boston in 1982 or 1983. Here it is.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast from the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast from the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast from the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast from the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast from the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast from the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast from the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
Get full access to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy at peterleroy.substack.com/subscribe
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Welcome to the The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy podcast. I’m glad you’re here. The Personal Historyis one large work of fiction composed of many interconnected parts. Its parts are the memoirs and collected works of a fictional character, Peter Leroy, an earnest screwball who tells an alternative version of his life story.
“A masterpiece of American humor.” The Los Angeles Times
Perhaps among the many there may be some who for a moment will turn aside from tales of haughty Heroes, ruffling it in Court and Camp, to listen to the story of a very ordinary lad who lived with very ordinary folk . . . , and who grew up to be a very ordinary sort of man, loving a little and grieving a little, helping a few and harming a few, struggling and failing and hoping; and if any such there be, let them come round me.
Jerome K. Jerome, Paul Kelver, “Prologue”
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