by Gene Wolfe
“So you’re Harry’s little girl,” he said, and took hold of my hands. The doctor had phoned a male nurse on this floor and told him I was coming up.
I said, “Call me Holly,” wondering whether he was going to let go of me or try something.
He let go. “That’s fine, Holly. Fine. Sit down, won’t you?” There were a couple of armchairs besides the bed and a dresser, both with tapestry seats and back, and ball-andclaw legs.
I sat. “How’re you feeling, Uncle Herbert?”
“So they’ve told you about me, and that’s why you’ve come. Certainly, certainly. I feel perfectly fit, Holly. Would you believe I played a round of golf this morning? We’ve a nine-hole course, and I think that I might win the National Open, if only it were played here. I know every bush and hummock.”
I said that was good, and we made quite a bit of small talk, me telling him all about Sidi and school and so forth, and him asking me about my father and Elaine. He’d never ridden a jet, he said, and he was surprised when I said I’d gone to Chicago on the train, because TV and magazines had given him the impression that there were only freight trains left.
Then he got off onto prices, and he asked so many questions that I thought, uh-oh, here it comes, pretty soon he’ll get mad or start singing or something.
Except he never did. He was amazed at how much everything cost, and talked a lot about how the government was selling out the country, but everybody does that, and I’ve heard people in our living room get a lot madder than he was. He wanted to know how much his sportcoat had cost at Marshall Field’s, but I could only guess at it because I don’t know much about men’s clothes. Then he wanted to know how much it cost to ride the train (a dollar eightyfive back then, if you’re curious) and how much a cheap meal might be. So I told him how much at McDonald’s for a shake and a Big Mac with fries, and then I had to tell him all about McDonald’s, the golden arches and all that.
When I was about to go he kissed my hand, bowing from the hips the way he had, I guess, been taught to in dancing school about 1929. It made me feel funny. Then he took both my hands like he had when I’d first come and asked me if I could give him some money. I started to say that my father had just been there—which he had, because Uncle Herbert had told me—and he could have given him whatever he needed. Then I thought, well, if he were really on the ball about all this he wouldn’t be in Garden Meadow, now would he? And probably by asking me for money he’s testing me, and the money represents love to him. I’ve got my return train ticket, and even if that Aladdin Blue guy doesn’t have a whole lot of cash, he’d probably help me out and I could pay him back.
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 fr
om 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.
How I Saw the Black Sedan But Not Larry
While I was hiking up our private road I caught sight of a green van parked in front of our house. Yes, the exact same van (what an astounding coincidence!) with Magic Key of Barton on the side that I’d hitched a ride to town in. So naturally, genius that I am, I figured Megan had come over and wanted to Do Something; so I hollered and ran into the house.
Nobody was there. Nobody at all.
I checked the family room, which would have been where Mrs. Maas or Elaine would have dumped Megan, then my room, thinking she might have gone up there to play some tapes and wait for me. Zilch.
Finally I went through the whole damn house looking for anybody—all the bedrooms and the kitchen and the dumb little storeroom Elaine always called the butler’s pantry. Nothing.
I stuck my nose into the study, too, because I figured that was the one room where nobody, not even Bill, would take her, so naturally she’d be there. Naturally she wasn’t.
So then I thought, well, I’ll just take a look at the box, because that guy Blue was so anxious to find out what’s in it, and I felt like a dummy telling him I didn’t know. Maybe I can even figure out how to get the damned thing open.
I poked around for a minute before I remembered that Elaine had said somebody from the bank was coming out today to pick it up and put it in their window as part of the hype for the Fair. My father locked the study door a lot, so sometimes the cleaning lady and Mrs. Maas didn’t get in to vacuum and wipe off all the furniture and stuff like they should have, and I could still see exactly where Pandora’s Box had been sitting on the big library table, a ghost of its shape in the dust.
But the whole room felt funny somehow, like something else was missing. At first I thought it was just the box, but really I’d only been in there twice when it was there, as nearly as I could remember—when Bill lugged it in and that morning when I’d gone in to sneak a peek at the letter. Finally I decided it was just because the house was so quiet.
So you can bet it was just then that I heard a door close someplace, and if you come around asking about a certain teenage hellcat who practically jumped right out of her harness boots, I’ll be able to show her to you straight off.
I suppose you’ve got it all figured out that this being the kind of story it is, why naturally that door was being closed by a syndicate hit man at the very least. Wrong. It was only Mrs. Maas, and when I asked her what the heck was going on, she said “Mrs. Hollander” (my mother Elaine to you and me) had asked her to pick up a few things at the drugstore, and she had taken the opportunity to do a little grocery shopping. I looked through the “things” and told her Elaine practically never went in the water. It sailed right over Mrs. Maas’s head, but it started me thinking about Garden Meadow again. I wished I could have asked her about Uncle Herbert, who I was nearly ready to start calling Uncle Bert again. Only Barton isn’t exactly Pippington-on-the-Squeak, where all those nice English ladies drop arsenic in the tea and stab dubious women with Florentine daggers … .
(Hey, I don’t mean to change the subject all of a sudden, but hasn’t it ever struck you that if the Secretary of Defense was really smart he’d issue those Florentine daggers to all the combat marines? I think I’ve read a dozen books where somebody gets it with a Florentine dagger, and none of them even twitched afterward. Today I read in the News where a sixty-nine-year-old retired machinist got beat over the head with a beer bottle and slashed and stabbed with a big hunting knife, and after the guys had taken his wallet and split, he made it to the emergency ward on foot.)
Anyway as I was saying, in Barton we haven’t got those old family retainers who remember when Sir Rollo was but a wee tyke. Mrs. Maas had only been with us about four years and Bill less than two, so if I wanted to hear old family stories I’d have to make them up or ask the folks.
So I said, “Where’s Dad?” and Mrs. Maas told me she didn’t know, he’d gone out in the morning and hadn’t come back. (That would be to Garden Meadow, but he must have stopped somewhere on the way home.) So then I asked, “Where’s Elaine?” and Mrs. Maas said, “She was here when I left.”
No matter what my old math teacher may have told you, I’m a gritty brat who hangs right in there. I said, “What was Larry Lief doing here?” and she said, “Who’s Larry Lief?”
Strikeout.
Then she said, “Oh, is he that good-looking blond man who wears coveralls? About twenty-five?”
“He’s Megan’s brother,” I told Mrs. Maas, “and I’m pretty sure he’s quite a bit older than that.”
“Well, Mr. Lief’s been here several times to talk with Mrs. Hollander about Pandora’s Box. He’s the one who’s going to open it, you know, at the Fair, when they have the drawing.”
I hadn’t. But it made sense, because Larry was a locksmith and ran the only lock shop in Barton, the only one I knew about anyway, and since his shop hadn’t been open that long, he could probably use the publicity. I figured my father could have done it about as well, but that would have made it look like too much of a Hollander Family deal maybe, and besides you couldn’t ever count on him to be around; if there was trouble at some company and he was on the board he might have to fly to Algiers on about an hour’s notice. He could have loaned the Fair an expert from his plant, sure, but the plant’s way to hell and gone down below Gary.
Anyway I wandered out to the garage, just hanging around, thinking that the Caddy would be gone. But the Caddy was right there shined up like a wet seal, and Bill was in his room above the garage reading a comic. And Larry’s van was gone, having started up without my hearing it while I was looking around the house, probably before
Mrs. Maas came back, because she hadn’t said anything about it. Okay, I’m hip.
So I went over to our little pasture, caught Sidi (not very hard because by that time I had a couple of lumps of sugar in my pocket), saddled up, and Hi-Yo!
Since I wasn’t going to catch a train or anything, I rode him right into town. There are two liquor stores in Barton, a big one and a little one; the big one’s My Case, at the corner of Main and Woly. Woly’s just a grotty little deadend street that folds when it bumps into the CW&N rightof-way, but there’s a string of shops down one side of it behind the liquor store: the Redman Lounge, one of the very few spots in Barton where you (you, not me) can buy a drink, the Whileaway Travel Agency, the Magic Key, and so on. I tied Sidi to a parking meter (no ticket for me, because where would the meter maid put it, right?) and went in.
I guess locks run in the Hollander blood; one of these days I’ll get in the business if I have to open a deli. That was a joke, but it’s really the truth about locks. They’re nice and solid, and they’ve got this shine to them and snap with a good, solid chink. There’s not much plastic even about the cheap ones you have to buy for your locker at school, and the classy ones have more class than any car I’ve ever seen. What I’m trying to say, I guess, is that I always liked the Magic Key. It wasn’t one of those bright places like a chain drugstore, and it wasn’t dim like the Wicker Works. It was dim in places and bright in others, which I think is how a store should be, and it smelled a little bit of sewingmachine oil, which is okay with me. A lot of my friends go for incense, and it’s a great cover-up for pot; but I think incense belongs in church.
“You!” somebody yelled. “Put that down unless you’re going to buy it.”
I turned around—I’d picked up one of those fancy gadgets you snap on to keep your sister-in-law from calling Nome on your touch-tone phone—and naturally it was Megan, sticking out her lip trying to look tough. Molly was there, too, working on the books or something behind the counter.