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

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 f...

     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 lo...

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.    ...

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 co...

     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...

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...

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 hol...

     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 t...

     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, bachel...

Chapter 2In 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...

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 Cl...

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...

     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 me...

     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...

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 cal...

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 t...

     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 loo...

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,...

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 kn...

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....

     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 last opportunity—”     Porky leaned closer to the window. He shaded his eyes with his hand. H...

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 fee...

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 pos...

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 “...

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...