Gene Wolfe: Pandora by Holly Hollander

So I pulled out my cute little green billfold and dumped it for Uncle Herbert—twenty-two bucks—and said, “Here, if there’s someplace around here where you can buy pipe tobacco and stuff, take what you want.”

And he took it all.

Then he sat down on the bed and started to bawl because I was so good to him; and I wanted to say, hey, I never meant to be that good, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to do it.

And he said he’d make out a will and leave me everything he had, but I knew if he did the will wouldn’t be worth anything as long as he was where he was.

After that he said he wanted to show me the grounds because he had this feeling I’d never come there again. I had to agree his feeling was probably a real good one. Just the same, I said I’d come back, only I couldn’t promise exactly when because this summer I was taking Spanish lessons, fencing lessons, dancing lessons, music lessons, and swimming lessons, besides my karate class—some of which was true. Only I said I’d already learned more right there sitting in his bedroom with him than I ever had in any of the lessons. And that was table grade.

So we went out and had a look at the grounds, and at first I was surprised nobody went with us, because what if he were to start ripping my clothes or try to climb the fence? But pretty soon I caught on that they had people posted all over, and Uncle Herbert and the rest could wander around all they wanted because there would always be somebody there to keep them out of trouble if necessary.

Still, I don’t think it was necessary too often. The whole time that I was there I never saw anybody really do anything, if you know what I mean. None of them tried to hurt me or anybody, even themselves. I saw Uncle Herbert cry, sure, but then I saw my father cry once, and nobody tried to lock him up. At least I knew what Uncle Herbert had been crying about, more or less, and I never did find out what had been the trouble with my father, although now I think maybe I could guess.

There were swell tennis courts and a big swimming pool that seemed to get used only for sitting around. Like Uncle Herbert had said, the golf course was only nine holes, but we walked over all of them with him telling me how to play each—where to use a five iron and like that. Then we saw the formal gardens, which were really lovely because when a patient got well enough to do more than just sit in a chair on the lawn, the staff put him to planting and weeding and so forth, and if everything went okay for a month or so he got to use the tennis courts and the rest of the stuff.

But I have to admit I’m a real sucker for formal gardens. Hell, for any kind but especially for places like they have at Garden Meadow with rose bushes and marble statues and tinkling little fountains. In The Lord of the Rings there’s this bit where Sam, who used to be a gardener, is tempted with a whole valley he can make into any kind of a garden he wants to, and when I read that part I kept whispering, “Take it! Take it!”

So when I saw the garden there I went all sappy and told Uncle Herbert it was Paradise.

“Yes, it is, you know,” he said; and when he told me that, I would have sworn there wasn’t a damn thing wrong with him. “The director is God, and the staff are his angels. And they really are angels, to us, because with the salaries he can pay he gets only the best and most dedicated people. And the rest of us are lotus-eaters. We’re all on medication—I am myself, though mine is light. So we’re mostly happy, or placid at least. One meets such interesting people, too. You might almost say that this is a place for people who are too interesting for any other place. Not the ones who believe they’re Jesus or Moses or Dolly Madison—yes, we’ve a woman here who thinks she’s Dolly Madison sometimes—but the ones who are sincere in trying to understand themselves, and have something real to understand.”

“Like you,” I said, but I don’t think he heard me.

“Most people outside, particularly most successful people outside, don’t really have problems in any serious sense. I myself was a successful person, Holly dear, on the outside. I inherited the company, but I quadrupled our volume during the five—or five and a half, or whatever it was—years that I ran things. I met a great many of the men at the top during those years, and I can testify that the men at the top are rather dull.”

I said I’d always suspected that.

“You’re a very perceptive girl. They are all of one piece. A few are brilliant, but even the brilliant ones are hardly more than thinking machines. They have their lives in order, and no errant impulse ever disturbs their days, which may be frantic in many instances, yet are tranquil nonetheless. They have reached their positions because they have been able to keep a single end in view for well over half their lives, that end being authority within a very narrowly defined structure.”

“I don’t think I could do that,” I told him.

“In all probability you won’t have to, my dear,” he said. “And so you will be spared a great many dull meetings … . I was talking toward something, I’m certain, but I’ve forgotten what it was. Perhaps I intended to say that we failures—and we are all failures here, of one sort or another—are the fascinating ones, each of us more people than you will find in many plays, all done up in a single skin. No, that wasn’t it.”

“You were saying this was a real Paradise, Uncle Herbert. Only I’ve got to get going.”

He took my hand. His own hand was bigger and harder than my father’s, I suppose from all the golf. “I feel the same way myself, Holly. They have it all wrong, you know, the ones who think that they’re divine. They’re always saying that sinners shall be cast into hell when they die, and the just lifted up to heaven. I did a terrible thing, and I was dropped into Paradise while I lived. Nobody should live in Paradise, Holly. It is for the dead.” He put both big hands on my shoulders and kissed my cheek. “I’m pissing blood—did they tell you? You will come back, won’t you?”

Lying through my teeth I said, “I sure will, Uncle Herbert.”

He nodded, and I got the feeling that I hadn’t fooled him for a second; but all he said was, “Until I see you again.”

I had to sign out and everything, and when I did I saw that Blue had left about half an hour ahead of me, taking the little jitney bus that stopped at Garden Meadow on its way to Dawn. I had my train ticket all right, and forty-two cents change, but no way to pay for the jitney, and even if they had trusted me, no way to pay for the Greyhound from Dawn to Chicago. The year before I’d always carried a five in my bra, and that was my mad money. Then everybody at school quit wearing them, so I spent the five on a movie with Les. Now thanks to Gloria You-know-who and Kate You-know-who and so forth, there I was outside Garden Meadow sticking my thumb out and wishing I had a hat to push my bonny brown locks up into. Well, it always works like a charm for those faire maids of Shakespeare’s.

In a way it was kind of interesting and taught me a lot about myself, the sort of stuff Uncle Herbert had been talking about. Because when I first got out on the shoulder with my thumb, I wasn’t going to take a ride with anybody who didn’t look a whole lot like me, and by the time I had been hitching a while I would have climbed into an old pickup with Igor and Dr. Frankenstein. Only what I really got was a salesman, a woman gym teacher, and then another salesman. The first two worked me so hard about how dangerous it was to hitchhike that I turned it around and worked the second salesman, telling him how he could get his throat cut picking up wild kids like me. By the time we got past the Oldsmobile place in Barton I could see him thinking about pulling right up to the police station. But in the end he won it fair and square, letting me out at the corner of Main and Half Street, where the stoplight is. By that time I was trying so hard not to laugh that I had practically forgotten about my crazy uncle and losing all my bread.