Pandora by Holly Hollander

How I Lost Every Cent and Had to Hitch

It was like a spa, if you can imagine what a spa would be like if every guest stayed a long, long time—a big old threestory house, part limestone and part wood, with pillars in front and a lobby with chairs and books and a big TV. The main difference between the staff and the patients seemed to me to be that the patients had better clothes but looked—most of them—a little sloppy.

A nurse took Blue right up to see his friend the judge like they’d been expecting him; but he’d made a phone call from the station in Chicago, and I’ve always figured that was why and he hadn’t been going there until I’d said I was. I had to go in to talk to Uncle Bert’s doctor, which I had expected, and he tried to phone our house, which I hadn’t. But when Mrs. Maas told him my mother and father were both gone, he decided to let me go up. I was cussing myself for not having worn a nice dress and more lipstick; if I had I could have passed for twenty-one and there wouldn’t have been any trouble. But everything worked out okay. Be yourself, as TV guys who spent two hours in makeup are always telling us.

Uncle Bert had a big room with three windows on the second floor, but as soon as I saw him he stopped being Uncle Bert for me and turned into Herbert Hollander III to stay, or at least no chummier than Uncle Herbert. He looked a little like my father, but not much. My father’s what people call a tall man, around six foot one or two, I guess. Uncle Herbert was six five or six easy, but stooped. He was quite a bit thinner, too. His hair was starting to go, and what was left was white; but he moved around almost like the guys on the hardball team, and if I’d had to pick the winner in a fistfight between him and my father, I’m not so sure I wouldn’t have picked him. He was wearing one of those really wild black-and-red sportcoats you see now and then, with a bright blue knit shirt and white slacks. There was wire over the windows, but for all you could tell it might have been there to keep the pigeons out.

“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 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.