The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy

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 L...

     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. L...

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...

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 an...

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...

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...

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 t...

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 w...

     “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 he...

     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, Lor...

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 a...

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...

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 e...

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 suppor...

Chapter 5In 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...

     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...

     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...

     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...

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...

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 Por...

     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...

     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 th...

     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...

     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 watch...

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 b...