Gene Wolfe: Pandora by Holly Hollander

Right here I want to write that I forgot it almost as soon as it happened; but I guess I didn’t, really. Larry wasn’t just being polite when he said that, and I knew it. Ever since he’d gotten out of the army and come back to Barton to live with his folks, I’d known that Megan and his wife, Molly, thought he had big problems, just from the way they talked about him. But I think that was the first time I’d really realized they weren’t just worrying over nothing. It isn’t too easy for somebody that good-looking to look down, but I was still thinking about Larry and how down he’d looked while I hiked across the parking lot and up the steps to the CW&N station.

There was only one other person waiting for the ten o’clock train, a guy at least ten years older than I was. I noticed him because he turned for just a second to give me the once-over as I came up, and he had a once-over like I didn’t think anybody could have. It didn’t take long at all, but I felt like I could hear the shutters click. Those eyes had me cold, and he’d know me again if he met me in the New Guinea jungle twenty years from now.

After that, naturally, I looked at him. Those two little camera lenses were bright blue and set quite a ways behind the rest of his face, which was bony. There was a high, squarish, almost narrow forehead, and straw-blond hair in a widow’s peak. It was getting pretty thin, and the rest of him was thin already—in fact, he was one of the skinniest people I had ever seen. One leg was stiff; he had one of those plain wooden broom-handle canes that they sell in drugstores, and it looked old. He was wearing khaki work pants and a white office shirt, open at the throat and rolled up past the elbows. He had a little trouble getting onto the train when it came, and that’s when I made my mistake, or anyway what I thought for a while was a mistake.

(Really I don’t make many mistakes, because I’ve found out that if you just yell at a mistake long enough it will usually straighten itself around and turn into some kind of shrewd move—like the time I broke my leg and got out of gym and my father promised to buy me the horse that turned out to be Sidi.)

Anyway there I was, the little Girl Scout, trying to catch hold of the cane so I could help him up. He could have done it okay by himself, but anyway (I guess because he wanted to show he was grateful) he went down to the smoking car with me and sat down next to me. He smells cleaner than anybody else I know—like he’s washed himself all over with lye soap. You don’t ask where anybody’s going on a CW&N commuter, because everybody’s going to Chicago, so I said, “Going shopping?”

“No. Just going to try to collect a few bad debts. You?”

I said I was going to see a sick relative, which I thought was very clever of me at the time, and we got to talking. After a while, because it was on my mind, I guess, I asked whether he knew anything about bus service to Dawn.

He laughed, surprised, and said, “Oh, you’re going to Dawn? That’s quite a coincidence—so am I. How’s your uncle?”

And before I could think about what I was saying, I said, “How’d you know about him?”

“Herbert Hollander is your uncle? I thought so.”

“We always keep this really quiet,” I told him. “Have you been talking to Mrs. Maas?” My mind was going round and round, because it looked like pretty soon this would be worse than if I’d taken her Ford.

He laughed again (he has a good laugh, the kind you’d like in the audience if you were a comedian) and winked and said, “I have spies everywhere!”

“Do you know my father?”

He shook his head. “I wish I did. I’ve seen him on the street, just as I’ve seen you, but we’ve never spoken.”

“You know my mother, then.”

“I have several friends who know your mother. One is the shampoo boy at Felice’s.”

“He told you?”

He shook his head. “I doubt that your mother’s small talk under the drier contains many references to Herbert Hollander.”

“Then how did you know?”

He smiled and turned away like he didn’t want me to see it. We were already past the golf course, and the trees and fields of the greenbelt were giving up the ghost (an Indian ghost, I suppose) to suburban houses. When he looked back at me he said, “You seem an intelligent young woman. Surely you can guess by now?”

“How could I possibly? I don’t have the facts.”

“You mean you lack an exhaustive list of my acquaintances. If you had one it would do you no good, only confuse you. If you can’t guess without that sort of information, you couldn’t possibly guess if you were burdened with it.”

I’m good at a lot of things, but there’s one I’m not worth a damn at, and that’s turning on the feminine charm to get what I want out of a man. I tried it then, leaning over and catching hold of his arm and making my eyes go all misty while I said, “Please? Because I helped you?”

He just about laughed in my face. “Believe me, that’s not the way. You should have said, ‘Because I need your help.’ Or at least you should have if you really required the information. You’ve been watching television. It turns people into idiots about human relations.”

“I don’t watch that kind of TV. Listen, I really do need your help.”

“Much better. Why?”

“Because Elaine—because my mother and father feel very, very strongly about this Uncle Bert thing, and if it gets out they’ll think I was the one who told. I have to know who did tell, so I can point the finger.”

“Me.”

“You’ve already told other people?”

He was smiling again. “Not really. But I might. I doubt, though, that your parents will think of you. They probably don’t even know you know.”

“Yes, they do. My father told me. Now please tell me who told you.”

“You really do feel you have to find out, don’t you? All right, I’ll answer your question. But a professional man has to turn a profit. So in exchange for my information, I want you to give me frank and honest answers to two questions of my own, and grant me a favor.”

“What’s the favor? Who are you, anyway?”

“That’s two more questions, which makes it three to three. The favor is that you let me go to the bus with you, and ride out to Dawn and up to Garden Meadow with you. Until you helped me into this train, I hadn’t realized how much I’ve missed the company of pretty women. As to who I am, here’s my card.”

He took it from his shirt pocket, but it still looked new—not a fancy engraved one like my father’s but not a cheapie either. It read:

ALADDIN BLUE

with a Barton post-office box and a South Barton (I could tell by the exchange) phone number. I stuck it in my shirt pocket. “Is that your real name?”

“No more questions from you. I’ve answered two of yours already, including telling you what the favor I want is. Is it a deal?”

I nodded.

“Then answer one of mine. What do you know about your Uncle Herbert?”

“Everything?”

“Yes. Everything.”

“All right. Uncle Bert—he’s really Herbert Hollander the Third—is Father’s big brother. He’s about six or seven years older, I think. He’s crazy. You know that, too; if he wasn’t he wouldn’t be in Garden Meadow, which is a sort of hospital for crazy people.”

“Rich crazy people,” Aladdin Blue put in.

“Right. It costs a couple of thousand a month just to keep him there. One time I heard my father say it was like sending a kid to college, only worse; and it never stops. He doesn’t talk much about things that happened when he was a kid, and I think the reason is that Uncle Bert would be in all the stories. They must’ve been pretty close, and maybe he joined the army when he was young because Uncle Bert was in it already. Uncle Bert was a captain.”