Pandora by Holly Hollander

How Uncle De Witte Sinclair Played Postman

Maybe this is where I should write a transition. You know, “The big yellow summer sun grew brighter each new day. Me and Leslie and Megan, and Kris and Adam and John lolled around our pool and Les’s pool and the pool in the park. Locusts buzzed in the elms like spaced-out doorbells, and the hamburger smell from the fast-food joints up on the highway came drifting through the shadows like smoke.”

There—I knew I could do it. What I’m really trying to say is that summer dragged along about like it usually does. On TV, reruns of utterly ghastly shows got pushed aside by first runs of the most utterly god-awful summer tryouts the world has ever seen. I went on strike about Elaine wanting me to drop karate. Everybody was sick to death of movies, but it wasn’t nearly time to think about the homecoming dance yet.

What it was time to think of, naturally, was the Fair. And all of us got mixed up in it one way or another. We were all so bored we would have mixed into a sparrow fight.

I guess it was a good thing; Lord knows there was plenty of donkey work to do. There were cards you had to talk the stores and eateries into sticking up in their windows, envelopes by the thousand to address and stuff, and the whole damned high school to get ready. I think I already mentioned that there was always a book sale. It was put on by the Friends of the Barton Public Library, which is not the same as the Women’s Club, though a lot of people belong to both of them. The Friends is supposed to be for men as well as women, and there are actually some men in it—seven or eight the last time I looked. Also there are kids in it, because all the librarians belong and if you hang around the library very much they bring you coffee and cookies from their Common Room and talk a little about the Greatest Writer in the World (meaning whoever you just discovered that you didn’t think anybody else knew about; for me then it was Baroness Blixen, or maybe the Englishman who wrote the Father Brown mysteries) and first thing you know they’re shoving a piece of paper in front of your nose.

Then you say, “Oh, gee. Well, gosh, it’s fifteen bucks a year. Honest, Ms. Sudden, I don’t have fifteen bucks.”

Then Ms. Sudden, who’s gone through this maybe fifty times and probably gets a new chain for her glasses whenever she signs up another kid, says, “Darling, don’t worry about a thing. The Friends will just send a bill to your home, and I’m certain your parents will be delighted that you want to become involved.”

Now right there was where she slipped it past you. Become involved. That means that when the book sale looms over the old horizon the Friends are going to call you up, and next thing you know you’re bouncing along in the back of a truck with four or five other slave-labor kids, heading for a house you never knew existed down at the end of a dirt road to load up a hundred tons of books some lady’s father left behind when he passed on during the Coolidge inauguration.

“Oh, dear,” says the old lady. “I didn’t know you’d bring so many children with you.”

Tom Coffey, who’s doing this because his wife Willa’s big in the Friends and he owns the truck, says, “Ma’am, you said you had several sizable boxes, and we didn’t want to keep you long.”

“Well,” says the old lady, “it’s terribly hot, and I don’t suppose your truck is air conditioned,” (it doesn’t even have a top over the back) “so why don’t you and the children come in and have some ice tea first?”

And that’s the way it goes. At this particular place I’m thinking of, we all trooped in—me feeling the wall to make sure it wasn’t gingerbread, I know my way around—and sweated all over her furniture, and laughed, and got to see a real tea ball made out of copper, which was something I’d read about but never seen before. (Mrs. Maas used Nestle’s Instant mix.) I told the old lady she ought to exhibit it at the Fair, and she said, “Do you really think so? Maybe I’ll come down this year and have a look.” So I’d gotten Elaine’s Fair another customer.

Then we toted the boxes out—fourteen, and some so heavy it took two to lift them. Right on top I saw Dreiser and Hemingway and Java Head, by Joseph Hergesheimer, and a bound volume of The Smart Set. The old lady’s daddy must have been some dude.

But the part I really wanted to tell about came when we got back up on the truck. We stacked her books on top of the stuff we had already picked up at some other places and sat on top of that, which put us up pretty high. From there I could see over the bushes and stuff; the house was on a hill and when I looked down between the nearest trees, the rest sort of fell away in a long wave, like the surf the time we went to Great Abaco Island. It was really beautiful. Away far away I could see this little white dot of building, almost like I was looking out the window of a plane, with this neat little black road running in front of it and bright green lawns all around it. And I thought: that’s the place! That’s where I want to be!

So I stuck my elbow in Les and said, “Lookit that! What do you suppose it is?”

And Les said, “That’s Barton High, you dummy.”

Ah, romance! That was exactly where we were going with our load of books, because they were setting up the Friends’ Book Sale in the chem lab, and Uncle De Witte Sinclair would be there to price them.

Uncle Dee wasn’t really my uncle, like Uncle Bert—that’s just what I called him because my father told me to when I was an itty brat. I ought to tell you about him because he’s sort of important to this story. But it’s going to be hard because about anything you could say about Uncle Dee that was true made him sound like an awful bastard. Except when you actually knew him, you didn’t think he was a bastard, you liked him a lot. At least I did, and I think quite a few people did; if they hadn’t, he’d have been flat broke.

Uncle Dee must have been at least sixty and maybe more, but his face was so smooth he looked, sometimes, like a much younger guy in makeup. He had bright blue eyes and bushy white eyebrows, and white hair so long and thick they’d put him in the Senate if he just walked through the door. His business was rare books, and I honestly didn’t know if he was rich or poor. He had a big house in Barton Hills, with rooms where his customers could look at his stock. Still, you never could tell—some people with big houses in Barton Hills were in bankruptcy court. And I ask you, rare books? Anyhow, I think Uncle Dee had been driving the same rusty Chevy and wearing the same old tweed suit with the leather elbow patches ever since I’d known him, which was around twelve years plus.

My father collected books about—you guessed it—safes and locks, and he used to say he could tell when Uncle Dee had found something really good, because then Uncle Dee would call him up and invite him out to his house. When it was only so-so, he’d come over to ours, usually with two or three things, and he and my father would talk about books and locks and The Great Houdini and so on for a couple of hours and have a couple of drinks, and then Uncle Dee would pull out an old magazine with a story that Houdini was supposed to have written, although both of them knew (but I bet you didn’t) that Houdini’s stories were ghosted by a man in Rhode Island.

Naturally they would yak about that for an hour or so, and maybe my father would pay twenty or thirty for it and maybe he wouldn’t. Then Uncle Dee would come up with something else and ask a hundred and maybe take forty or fifty. So, you say, who needs a friend like that? The fact is that my father did. He was never so relaxed or in such a good mood as when Uncle Dee finally started up his old car, unless maybe it was when he got back from spending an evening at Uncle Dee’s. All right, it cost him a couple of hundred bucks, but I’ve seen people spend a lot more and get a lot less. Sure he loved Elaine—in fact, he was so absolutely silly about her that sometimes I kind of thought he’d have burned the house down with me inside just to see her smile. But that was only because she was so damn beautiful and so much younger than he was; in person, if you know what I mean, she drove him bananas. His collection in the study and his shop in the basement, and Uncle Dee, were what kept him from turning on the gas.

Anyway what Uncle did was go to garage sales and grungy old secondhand shops around Chicago and everywhere else where there might be old books. He’d look through a thousand tons of junk hoping to find a first edition of Tamerlane, which is by Edgar Allan Poe but doesn’t say so. Only what he’d really find would be a certain book written in 1890 by a particular lady who came to Chicago for the summer, and he’d buy it and sooner or later sell it to a customer who collected books about Chicago. That old magazine he sold my father for thirty bucks probably cost him fifty cents, and one way to look at that is that it’s an awfully skuggy way to make a living.

Just the same, there are a couple of other ways to look at it, too.

Like I said, Uncle Dee went through a mountain of garbage to find that magazine for my father, and these days even garbage men pull down ten bucks an hour. What’s more, Uncle Dee was one of the few people I’ve ever met who never tried to get paid when he hadn’t done the job. He never came to our house and said, “I looked all day for something for you, Harry, but there wasn’t a damn thing, so how about fifty bucks for my trouble?” Uncle Dee told everybody he was from Richmond, Virginia, but sometimes I wondered if he was really American at all, because I’ve noticed that most of the other guys who never try to chisel you are wetback Mexican busboys.

Besides, Uncle Dee loved his books, and I think that when he bought one for two bucks and sold it for two hundred he felt like the hero who finds The Lost Prince of Graustark slopping hogs and puts him on the throne. He felt that book was worth a couple of hundred, or maybe more, and he, crafty old Uncle De Witte Sinclair, was restoring it to its God-given position in society. Part of the time he must have been right; and when he priced old books for the Friends, I don’t think he ever marked anything too low so he could buy it cheap, even though maybe sometimes he was tempted.

So when I came in lugging my box and saw him there in the dusty smell of all those books with his wide smile and his soft lead pencil, I put down the box and put my arms around him and gave him a good smooch. Because that was another thing about Uncle Dee—white hair or not, he still liked girls. He wasn’t a pincher or a pawer (if he had been I would have kept a mile out of his reach) but when he turned on that southern-fried charm he was doing it for the same reason he had when he was seventeen, and wasn’t just going though the motions. I’ve seen him look at Elaine like a stray dog at a ham bone plenty of times, and you can bet she never gave him a big kiss and little squeeze to show him life was still worth living.

“Holly, my fairest flower,” he said, “how very good to see you! What a coincidence, and what a lovely surprise. So you’ve enlisted in our little project. You all are doing a wonderful job.”

“I’m a member now and everything, Uncle Dee,” I told him. “Gonna run for president next year. Vote the straight Hollander ticket.”

He shook his finger at me. “You’d better mind your P’s and Q’s, young lady, or we’ll elect you. Think of the pickle you’d be in then.” Uncle Dee had been president of the Friends two or three times already, and always said he wouldn’t do it anymore.

“So how are they going, and how come it’s a coincidence to see me?”

“Quite nicely. One would think that holding this little affair each year as we do the springs would eventually run dry, but someone must be printing old books.” It was a regular joke of his, and he was the only one I ever heard laugh at it. “Look here: A.W. Sprague’s Log of the Cruise of the Schooner Julius Webb. Fifty dollars, and cheap at the price. And here’s one I found hardly a minute before you came in: Jim Gillet’s Six Years with the Texas Rangers. I’ve put it at sixteen fifty, and I’m going to buy it myself the moment the doors open.”

“I might beat you to it—I think I can run faster than you.”

His smile would have defrosted a freezer. “That’s right, you’re getting interested in police and crime books, aren’t you? Now here’s something you might enjoy that I know you can afford: Franke’s The Torture Doctor. It’s the history of the infamous Chicago murderer H.H. Holmes. No dust jacket, so I’ve marked it a dollar and a quarter; but you might look for a long time to find a copy, and in a year or two it should be worth ten dollars at least.”

He leaned across the table to pick up the book for me, and a piece of loose-leaf paper that had been dangling from his shirt pocket fell out.

“Oh, yes,” he said when he got it again, “this is for you, too. A very charming gentleman who said that he was a relation of yours was inquiring after you, not an hour ago. I honestly don’t think he realized at first that the school was closed for the summer—no doubt he saw the cars out front and thought a summer semester was in session. I overheard your name and had a little chat with him.”

I unfolded the note.