Gene Wolfe: Pandora by Holly Hollander

Is this a historical novel?, you ask. Nope. This is just one that took a real long time to sell. (Except in France, so vive la France! It almost makes me wish I’d taken French instead of Latin.)

It’s also the only book of mine to sell, so far. I started writing it the day after I moved in with Blue, but it took over a year to get it finished and it hung around various publishers’ offices for about as long as it would’ve taken me to get through college, assuming I’d gone to college.

Then Ms. Sudden down at the BPL introduced me to this real writer who knows Joe Hensley and everything. We got to talking, and it turned out that I’d had three or four classes with his daughter. So he wrote it all over again putting in a lot more commas, and they say they’re going to run his name on the title page with mine. Only Hartwell wanted more about Larry Lief, so now we’ve put that in, too.

Altogether it’s been one hell of a time, but Barton hasn’t changed a lot. (Here I’m awfully tempted to tell you all about how I met Abbie Hoffman, and the first time I smoked dope, and the last time, and bunches of other stuff. But that’s all after the end, so why should you care?) The Ben Franklin Store’s been squeezed out by more boutiques. Some new people own the Magic Key now, and they don’t call it that. The worst thing by a long shot is that Uncle De Witte Sinclair’s dead. I could tell you quite a bit about that; but you wouldn’t want to read it. And to tell you the truth, I wouldn’t want to write it. So long, Uncle Dee. Kisses.

The German 88 mm. gun was undoubtedly the most famous artillery piece of World War II. It fired a 22 lb. shell and could pick off a tank a mile away. The Germans called it the “Gun Flak”; it weighed 5.5 tons, it had an extreme range of nine miles, and it killed thousands of Russian, British, and American soldiers.

I got all that out of a book.

A shell from a German 88 almost killed my father, twice. I didn’t get that from the book—he told me about the first time.

My father is George Henry Hollander. In his company, which is Hollander Safe & Lock, they call him G. H. Hollander. Anyhow I guess they do, because he took me down to their headquarters one time—they rent four floors of this big building in the Loop—and that was what it said on his door: “G. H. Hollander, Chief Operating Officer.” Only his business cards say: “G. H. ‘Harry’ Hollander.” I used to have one of those cards around here, but I guess I lost it.

Anyway, he lied about how old he was and joined the army in 1943, when he was seventeen. He said he figured he never would get drafted, because his father was Herbert Hollander and had so much money, and he was going to this private school in the east, and he hated it. So one night he hitchhiked into New York, and spent the rest of the night walking around and sitting in bars and what he calls onearm joints. And the next day he told them he was eighteen and hadn’t registered for the draft, but now he wanted to enlist. He trained in America for a couple of months, I guess, and then they sent him overseas, and he was in one of the waves that landed at Anzio. I forget which wave, but not the first. Anyway, he was a supply clerk in an infantry company, and later on he was the supply sergeant. The day that he landed, this 88 shell smacked into the sand right at his feet. He said he heard it coming, only he hadn’t learned to flop down without thinking, the way he did later. If it had gone off, it would’ve killed him for sure, and I wouldn’t be here writing this.

The second time is kind of funny, because he wasn’t even there. But before I tell you about it, I think I ought to tell you a little about me and my father and mother and Barton, and Barton Hills, which is where we were all living then.

My name’s Holly H. Hollander. The H is for Henrietta, so you can see why I don’t use it. My mother—her name’s Elaine Calvat (that’s pronounced Kal-VAH)—wanted a cute name, and I was born on Christmas Eve. My father wanted me named for him, because it must have been awfully obvious even back then that there weren’t going to be any more kids. I’m older now than my father was when he joined the army, which really wipes me out.

If you’ve been adding and subtracting, you will have seen that my father was pretty well up there already when I was born, but my mother was only about twenty-three. She used to be his secretary, and she’s quite a bit younger than he is.

Maybe you want to know what we look like. You’ve seen guys like my father around quite a bit, I guess, if you’re the kind of person who serves on boards of directors. He’s big. He has short gray hair and one of those old noble-Roman faces. He used to be on the stout side, if you know what I mean, but since all this happened he’s lost some weight and looks a little younger. I remember one time a couple of years ago when he had a bunch of men like him out to the house. I always shake hands with guys, because I can tell they like it, and afterward I went over and felt my father’s hands because the ones I had been shaking felt so yucky. His were the only ones that weren’t soft. He used to say that if things had been different he would’ve made somebody a good mechanic, and I think he was right. He had a shop in our basement with a lot of tools, and at night sometimes he worked on some of the stuff the company made, and lots of other things.

My mother’s a natural blonde, with that straight hair that looks like it’s been ironed. Us Hollanders are supposed to be Dutch if you go back far enough, and the Calvats are supposed to be French; but Elaine’s the one with the blond hair and the kind of skin you think you can see through. Only I’ve always thought of Dutch girls as having these round, apple cheeks, and Elaine’s certainly aren’t like that. She has this perfect almost heart-shaped little face you see sometimes on sexy girls in the comic strips—the kind that goes just super with a hat about the size of a cold-cream jar that cost five hundred dollars. To tell the truth, my mother never used to look like my mother; she looked like she was about thirty, which would make her my big sister, and quite a few times she asked me to pretend she was my aunt. Sometimes I used to think I was adopted. Nobody would ever say it was true, and I know that lots of kids think that—half of my friends at Barton High did—but for me it wasn’t as crazy as it sounds.

I’m kind of tall, but not real tall. My hair’s brown, like my father’s was before it turned gray. It’s curly, and I let it grow long enough to hang a good way down my back. I tan and I’m usually pretty brown, and I have strong arms; all that’s because I really love tennis and horses—especially horses. We used to have a little stable, and I had an Arabian gelding called Sidi ben Sahid. We had a tennis court, too. Sidi’s gone now, but I still hitch up to North Park two or three times a week to play on the courts there. There’s room for a horse here, and someday I’m going to buy Sidi back, or anyway buy another horse, maybe a jumper.

Let’s see, what else?

I swim quite a bit when it’s warmer. I used to blast cans off the fence with my .22, and now I’m pretty good at squirrels. My eyes are brown, my face is squarer than Elaine’s, with high cheekbones, and my nose turns up in a way that I guess makes me look snotty sometimes. I’m not very big up top, but the shape’s good. I have this little waist that I can nearly get my hands around (which is something nobody seems to care about any more, although from Jane Austen and like that it seems to me it used to be terribly important), and good hips and legs. Kris, a guy I used to go with, said I had the greatest ankles in the world. Since I’ve already mentioned Jane Austen, maybe I ought to come right out and admit that I read quite a bit, even though that’s a crime or something now, and you wouldn’t think it to look at me. I wear contacts for reading, and for tennis and squirrel hunting, and sometimes for other stuff.