Pandora by Holly Hollander

How War Came to Barton

The next day, Saturday, was Fair Day.

I wore my rose to the Fair; and I rode with Elaine, which meant I was there way early when the first exhibitors were just beginning to unload. Everybody said what a big help I was, but half the time I hardly knew what I was doing.

When the gate opened, I took tickets and ran errands till I was ready to drop. I saw Larry and Molly, and half my teachers, and Tom and Willa Coffey, and damn near every kid in Barton; but I didn’t see my father (just in case you’re wondering), because he’d gone to New York a couple of days earlier; and I didn’t see Uncle Herbert. But just when I was sure my legs were going to drop off, Uncle Dee saw me, and I guess he could tell how I felt from the way I looked. Anyway, he got me to relieve one of the cashiers at the Book Sale, which meant I got to sit on a folding chair, with a bridge table to lean on.

I had a great view of the main event through a window, too.

The idea was that at noon they’d hold the big drawing. A couple of the men had nailed up a little platform, and some of the women had decorated it with big red question marks and gold coins cut out of cardboard. With the winner looking on, Larry would magic open the box, and then the winner would get it, and whatever was inside, too.

Naturally, Elaine had to make a speech first about what a lovely day it was, the blue sky and all that, and how glad she was, how glad all the ladies were, that everyone had come. She looked pretty nervous, I thought, and I didn’t blame her a bit—that platform wasn’t a whole lot bigger than the roof of a car, and it didn’t have any railing.

Then she told all about the box, and how it probably hadn’t been opened in over a hundred years, and how people in England had opened an old trunk they’d found in a bank and discovered a poem by Shelley that nobody’d known about.

Just then Aladdin Blue came by with a couple of books; they were cheap ones—I think it was only about three bucks for the two together. “Hi,” I said. “I thought you were curious about Pandora’s Box. You asked if I knew what was in it, remember?”

Blue nodded and looked worried. Through the window I could smell popcorn, and hear Elaine saying over the PA system, “I’m not going to pick it up and shake it for you, because it’s very heavy. There’s something in there, and if you don’t believe me, you can ask the men who carried it.”

I said, “Well, you can’t have found out, so why aren’t you out there watching?”

“I can see from here,” he told me. “So can you.”

“I’m here because I’m supposed to be working. Really, have you found out? Honest, now.”

Blue shook his head.

“Then what’s bugging you?”

“Do you recall the story? I’ve been refreshing my memory.” One of the books he had was a fat, red one, and he was holding a place in it with his finger. He opened it then, I guess to get all the names right. “Pandora was the Greek Eve,” he said, “the first woman, created to punish men for accepting Prometheus’ gift of fire. Aphrodite gave her beauty, Hermes persuasion, and so on and so forth; and when she was complete, they launched her like a missile at the then-wholly-male human race. Humanity had been the doing of the titan Epimetheus, and he’d set aside in a box all the qualities he felt people would be better off without—envy, malice, and so on. They gave her that box, and with it a name that meant all-gifted.”

I told him, “It sounds like a kid’s story to me.”

Blue shook his head. “Why is it that people will rave all afternoon over the philosophy, the art, the literature, and the architecture of the ancient Greeks, then dismiss something like the legend of Pandora as a fairy tale?” I didn’t answer, and he said, “I suppose it’s because fairy tales have their own depths and hidden caverns, and dismissing one is as easy as scoffing at the other.”

He laid a five on the table, but I wouldn’t take it. “Hey, prove it,” I said. “Show me some of those caves.”

(Outside, there was a little girl in a yellow dress up on the platform with Elaine, getting her blindfold on so she could pull a ticket stub out of the big wire drum.)

“In the first place,” Blue lectured, “it’s a commentary on Platonism—the idea that each real thing is an imperfect attempt to duplicate an ideal one. Epimetheus had made mankind like the gods, so the gods made Pandora like a goddess. The Greeks were saying that real people are caricatures of ideal people—their gods. In the second place, think of the pure fiendishness that the Greeks attributed to those perfect gods—Pandora was human herself, and thus a part of the target as well as a part of the weapon, like the wonderful guidance mechanism that directs an ICBM, a mechanism that is vaporized when the warhead—”

“Wait a minute. This is all so interesting I’m just damned near spellbound, but what does it have to do with the box Elaine found? Why are you so worried about it? If you think there’s really and truly such a thing as Pandora’s Box, and Elaine’s got it out there on the platform with her, you’re a lot crazier than your friend the judge and my Uncle Herbert put together. To get it to come out even, I’d have to throw in Daffy Duck.”

Blue got mad. “Of course there was a real Pandora’s Box. And of course your mother has it there on the platform with her, just as we’ve got it in here, with us.” Before I could jerk my head away, he tapped my temple with the knuckles of his free hand. “It’s the part of the human brain that’s suppressed in the interests of society. You just mentioned your uncle, and yesterday you telephoned to ask me about him. He killed Alice Nyman Hollander because Pandora’s Box had been opened, if you like. Didn’t I tell you Pandora was also a part of the target?”

“I’m starting to think you really are crazy. You get hold of some old story—”

Blue raised his hand to stop me. “Is that old sunshine out there? That sun’s been beating down on some part of this planet from the beginning. In this school they no doubt teach you that the difference between myth and history is that history concerns past events and myth events that never were—provided that they condescend to mention either. But the real difference is that the events that make up history are over and done with, while myth continues, circling our earth forever, like the chariot of Helios.”

Elaine’s voice crackled from the loudspeakers again: “Five hundred and ninety-six. Is number five hundred and ninety-six here? You have to be present to win.”

Some people in the crowd outside took it up, yelling, “Five ninety-six!” Feeling in some dumb way that I was in a position of responsibility because Uncle Dee had handed me a cash box, I announced, “Five ninety-six,” to the assembled browsers. “Are any of you five hundred and ninety-six? If you are, you’ve won Pandora’s Box.”

A middle-aged guy in a Hawaiian sport shirt looked around. “That’s me!”

He scooted toward the stairs, and I went over to the window and stuck my head out. “He’s coming!” I yelled at Elaine. “The winner’s on his way!”

“How about that,” one of the other browsers said. “He was right in here with us.” He had a whole stack of books, and I pushed the prices into the little calculator that went with the job and gave him a shopping bag for them. “Got to wait on cash customers,” I told Blue. “Sorry, Professor.”

He chuckled. “I hope you realize what a customer you lost. That was mankind. He just heard his cue, and dashed on stage to speak his lines in the five hundredth—or five hundred millionth—performance of a drama that was ancient already when some wise Greek provided it with a name.”

Looking out the window, I could see the man in the Hawaiian shirt pushing through the crowd around the platform, holding his ticket over his head. I asked, “Do you really believe something bad’s about to happen, Mr. Blue?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so. I think that I’ve been carrying on like an old woman. But I’m afraid something may, just the same—so often the old women are right. I don’t suppose you know where your mother acquired that box?”

“She bought it down in Chicago someplace.”

“Was there a price tag on it when you first saw it?”

“Not that I remember. What difference does it make?”

“None, I suppose. But I can tell you why I’m worried. Do you know much about the century before our own, Holly?”

“Sure, how much do you want? Abe Lincoln, the Civil War, the only good Injun’s a dead Injun, Jesse James, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Remember the Maine … .”

Larry was on the platform now holding a black leather case of lock tools. Somebody had taken the wire drum and the little girl down, but even so there was barely room for him and the man in the Hawaiian shirt, and Pandora’s Box on its stand; Elaine was starting down the rickety steps, with Larry holding one hand to help her keep her balance.

“All right,” Blue said, “that’s enough, and I think you’ve made my point for me. It was a rough hundred years. We haven’t—thank God—had a war on American soil in this century, but the Civil War was fought across half the continent. The west was lawless, and the east criminal. Indians killed whites and were killed themselves where you and I are standing now.”

Out on the platform, Larry was on his knees in front of the box, monkeying with the lock.

“It was a rough era,” Blue said again, “and if those people built a solid, clearly expensive chest and wrote Pandora on the lid, I wouldn’t advise anyone to open it—and particularly not at the urging of a woman—unless he was quite confident he knew what was inside.”

I guess the explosion knocked me off my feet, but really I don’t remember it. I was talking with Blue, and I heard a ringing, just for a moment, like a phone or maybe an oldfashioned alarm clock. Then I was underneath a table, with books scattered all around me on the floor and my blood ruining them.