by Gene Wolfe
The fact is I’d done that sort of thing before, and I knew the letter would be in his wastebasket or on his desk, because his secretary, Joan Robush, came out once a week to take care of the filing for him. You can call it being nosy if you want to, or you can call it caring about your family and what happens to them. Or you can call it being a detective. Those things all depend on how you look at them.
Anyway, it said: Mr. Herbert Hollander III is presently experiencing some discomfort. Dr. Peabody has arranged for an overnight visit to St. Mary of the Lake, which has X-ray facilities; and while we feel there is no immediate cause for alarm, we wish to keep you informed.
There was a lot more, naturally; but that was the part that counted. My parents were having a late breakfast on the patio, so I went out there—they got very quiet when they saw me coming—and sat down with them. After ten minutes or so Elaine left because she had an appointment with her hairdresser, and I asked my father if he was going to see his brother.
“How did you know?” he said, looking at me in that way that wilts vice presidents.
“I didn’t know,” I told him, “that’s why I asked. I’d like to tag along.”
“How did you know that Bert is sick?”
“The mail came, and I heard you talking to Elaine like something had happened.”
“Well, you can’t go,” he said, and that was that. Pretty soon I heard the Mercedes purring down our private road, and I was left alone on the patio with the warm summer air, the cold coffee, and some muffins. (I prefer cupcakes.)
I don’t think I ever even wondered whether I ought to go see my Uncle Herbert or not. Here was my father’s brother only about fifty miles away, and I’d never met him, and now he was, most likely, getting set to die. I knew that Garden Meadow was a couple of miles north of a little country place called Dawn, which isn’t really much farther from Chicago than Barton. And I wasn’t really a kid any more, whether my father understood that or not. Sitting there on the chaise, thinking about everything and cussing, I decided that I was going to go anyhow, timing it so he’d be gone when I got there. They’d have to let me in—I was Herbert Hollander’s niece, practically next of kin. All I’d have to do was tell them I’d had an appointment of some kind and couldn’t come with my father, but I came as soon as I could.
The way I saw it there were three ways I could get there. The easy one would be to drive. I didn’t have my license yet, but I’d taken Driver’s Ed that year and the Ford wagon that Mrs. Maas, our housekeeper, used for shopping was in the garage. The problem with that was that I’d be in trouble even if my father didn’t find out I’d gone to Garden Meadow. Mrs. Maas would be sure to tell him, and besides it would have meant waiting around to get the timing right, and I was in no mood to wait around.
The next easiest would be to call up somebody who’d drive me. Les and a couple more girlfriends had cars, and Kris would have given ten bucks to do it. The trouble with that was that it would get out for sure that I had a relative in the crack-up college. For myself I wouldn’t have minded—I act pretty crazy half the time anyway—but I knew my father didn’t want it talked around town and Elaine would throw a fit. Anyway, my big point was that I was grown up enough now to be trusted; and if I let somebody else in on our private stuff like that, I’d be proving right there that they were right and I was wrong.
That left the hardest way. But it wasn’t really so hard, and I had plenty of time. The Chicago, Wisconsin & Northern runs commuter trains—every hour on the hour, after the morning rush—between Barton and Chicago. And it stood to reason that there’d have to be several Greyhounds a day going from Chicago to Dawn and, as they say, points west. So all I had to do was get to Barton to catch a train.
Riding Sidi would have meant leaving him tied up someplace for most of the day and maybe getting him stolen; I wasn’t about to do that. Riding my bike would’ve made a lot more sense, but it would mean parking it at the railway station, a sure tip-off that I’d gone into Chicago to anybody that knew me. That left walking. It’s a little over four miles; but I’d done it before, and besides I figured I might get lucky and be able to hitch a ride with somebody I knew.
Which I did.
I hadn’t more than reached the county road, when here came Larry Lief in his van, and I knew him pretty well because I knew his sister Megan. I stuck out my thumb, and he stopped, and I hopped in. “Give me a ride into town?”
“Certainly,” he said. “How’s your folks?”
“Okay.” I was looking at his profile and trying to decide whether I’d ever seen anybody better looking. It wasn’t easy, but it sure was fun.
“I was out at your place just the other day,” he told me. “You’ve got a nice mother.”
It was a big lie, but I thought he was just being polite, so I said, “Sure.” Maybe my voice wasn’t quite what it ought to have been.
We stopped for a light, and he looked around at me. “You deserve one,” he said; and then, “We don’t always get what we’ve got coming, Holly. None of us.” Then he switched on the radio.
Right here I want to write that I forgot it almost as soon as it happened; but I guess I didn’t, really. Larry wasn’t just being polite when he said that, and I knew it. Ever since he’d gotten out of the army and come back to Barton to live with his folks, I’d known that Megan and his wife, Molly, thought he had big problems, just from the way they talked about him. But I think that was the first time I’d really realized they weren’t just worrying over nothing. It isn’t too easy for somebody that good-looking to look down, but I was still thinking about Larry and how down he’d looked while I hiked across the parking lot and up the steps to the CW&N station.
There was only one other person waiting for the ten o’clock train, a guy at least ten years older than I was. I noticed him because he turned for just a second to give me the once-over as I came up, and he had a once-over like I didn’t think anybody could have. It didn’t take long at all, but I felt like I could hear the shutters click. Those eyes had me cold, and he’d know me again if he met me in the New Guinea jungle twenty years from now.
After that, naturally, I looked at him. Those two little camera lenses were bright blue and set quite a ways behind the rest of his face, which was bony. There was a high, squarish, almost narrow forehead, and straw-blond hair in a widow’s peak. It was getting pretty thin, and the rest of him was thin already—in fact, he was one of the skinniest people I had ever seen. One leg was stiff; he had one of those plain wooden broom-handle canes that they sell in drugstores, and it looked old. He was wearing khaki work pants and a white office shirt, open at the throat and rolled up past the elbows. He had a little trouble getting onto the train when it came, and that’s when I made my mistake, or anyway what I thought for a while was a mistake.
(Really I don’t make many mistakes, because I’ve found out that if you just yell at a mistake long enough it will usually straighten itself around and turn into some kind of shrewd move—like the time I broke my leg and got out of gym and my father promised to buy me the horse that turned out to be Sidi.)
Anyway there I was, the little Girl Scout, trying to catch hold of the cane so I could help him up. He could have done it okay by himself, but anyway (I guess because he wanted to show he was grateful) he went down to the smoking car with me and sat down next to me. He smells cleaner than anybody else I know—like he’s washed himself all over with lye soap. You don’t ask where anybody’s going on a CW&N commuter, because everybody’s going to Chicago, so I said, “Going shopping?”
“No. Just going to try to collect a few bad debts. You?”
I said I was going to see a sick relative, which I thought was very clever of me at the time, and we got to talking. After a while, because it was on my mind, I guess, I asked whether he knew anything about bus service to Dawn.
He laughed, surprised, and said, “Oh, you’re going to Dawn? That’s quite a coincidence—so am I. How’s your uncle?”
And before I c
ould think about what I was saying, I said, “How’d you know about him?”
“Herbert Hollander is your uncle? I thought so.”
“We always keep this really quiet,” I told him. “Have you been talking to Mrs. Maas?” My mind was going round and round, because it looked like pretty soon this would be worse than if I’d taken her Ford.
He laughed again (he has a good laugh, the kind you’d like in the audience if you were a comedian) and winked and said, “I have spies everywhere!”
“Do you know my father?”
He shook his head. “I wish I did. I’ve seen him on the street, just as I’ve seen you, but we’ve never spoken.”
“You know my mother, then.”
“I have several friends who know your mother. One is the shampoo boy at Felice’s.”
“He told you?”
He shook his head. “I doubt that your mother’s small talk under the drier contains many references to Herbert Hollander.”
“Then how did you know?”
He smiled and turned away like he didn’t want me to see it. We were already past the golf course, and the trees and fields of the greenbelt were giving up the ghost (an Indian ghost, I suppose) to suburban houses. When he looked back at me he said, “You seem an intelligent young woman. Surely you can guess by now?”
“How could I possibly? I don’t have the facts.”
“You mean you lack an exhaustive list of my acquaintances. If you had one it would do you no good, only confuse you. If you can’t guess without that sort of information, you couldn’t possibly guess if you were burdened with it.”
I’m good at a lot of things, but there’s one I’m not worth a damn at, and that’s turning on the feminine charm to get what I want out of a man. I tried it then, leaning over and catching hold of his arm and making my eyes go all misty while I said, “Please? Because I helped you?”
He just about laughed in my face. “Believe me, that’s not the way. You should have said, ‘Because I need your help.’ Or at least you should have if you really required the information. You’ve been watching television. It turns people into idiots about human relations.”
“I don’t watch that kind of TV. Listen, I really do need your help.”
“Much better. Why?”
“Because Elaine—because my mother and father feel very, very strongly about this Uncle Bert thing, and if it gets out they’ll think I was the one who told. I have to know who did tell, so I can point the finger.”
“Me.”
“You’ve already told other people?”
He was smiling again. “Not really. But I might. I doubt, though, that your parents will think of you. They probably don’t even know you know.”
“Yes, they do. My father told me. Now please tell me who told you.”
“You really do feel you have to find out, don’t you? All right, I’ll answer your question. But a professional man has to turn a profit. So in exchange for my information, I want you to give me frank and honest answers to two questions of my own, and grant me a favor.”
“What’s the favor? Who are you, anyway?”
“That’s two more questions, which makes it three to three. The favor is that you let me go to the bus with you, and ride out to Dawn and up to Garden Meadow with you. Until you helped me into this train, I hadn’t realized how much I’ve missed the company of pretty women. As to who I am, here’s my card.”
He took it from his shirt pocket, but it still looked new—not a fancy engraved one like my father’s but not a cheapie either. It read:
ALADDIN BLUE
Criminologist
with a Barton post-office box and a South Barton (I could tell by the exchange) phone number. I stuck it in my shirt pocket. “Is that your real name?”
“No more questions from you. I’ve answered two of yours already, including telling you what the favor I want is. Is it a deal?”
I nodded.
“Then answer one of mine. What do you know about your Uncle Herbert?”
“Everything?”
“Yes. Everything.”
“All right. Uncle Bert—he’s really Herbert Hollander the Third—is Father’s big brother. He’s about six or seven years older, I think. He’s crazy. You know that, too; if he wasn’t he wouldn’t be in Garden Meadow, which is a sort of hospital for crazy people.”
“Rich crazy people,” Aladdin Blue put in.
“Right. It costs a couple of thousand a month just to keep him there. One time I heard my father say it was like sending a kid to college, only worse; and it never stops. He doesn’t talk much about things that happened when he was a kid, and I think the reason is that Uncle Bert would be in all the stories. They must’ve been pretty close, and maybe he joined the army when he was young because Uncle Bert was in it already. Uncle Bert was a captain.”
“But now your father is rich, and your uncle is poor.”
It wasn’t a question, just a statement thrown out for me to let pass if I wanted to, but I could tell from the way he said it that he knew something already—maybe more than I did. “Not exactly,” I said. “My grandfather—he was Herbert Hollander, Junior—was kind of a nut, in one way anyhow.”
“He founded the Hollander Safe and Lock Company and made a fortune.”
“Right, but he was kind of a nut just the same. He had a partner when he started, and there was a lot of trouble between them.”
“I didn’t know that,” Blue said.
“He bought this partner out pretty early, while the company was still small, but I guess he always remembered those fights and felt that they could have done a lot better if he’d been the only boss.”
“And—?”
“And so when he died he left my father some money. But he left all the stock in the company to Uncle Bert, because he was older. My father had been working for the company, too. He was a vice president, and because he’d been doing a good job Uncle Bert kept him on. Then when Uncle Bert had his breakdown, the court made my father his guardian. It seems like when a person goes crazy, they don’t take their property away, it’s just like the person was a kid.”
“But if your uncle recovered, he’d be able to take control of his company again.”
“Yeah, only I don’t think that’s going to happen. Because another thing I know about Uncle Bert—I believe this’s the last one—is that he’s still in Garden Meadow and he’s pretty sick. That’s why I’m going to see him now. Are you going to tell me why you want to know all this?”
“Because I knew some of it already. It’s an odd situation, and I’m insatiably curious by nature. You wanted to know how I knew as much as I did, but as I said, it should’ve been obvious from what you already knew. I didn’t learn it from you, or from your father or mother—who have, I’d say, excellent reasons for keeping it quiet. By the way, you were supposed to give me all the information you had about your uncle. You referred to him as ‘crazy’ but never told me what his insanity consisted of. Do you know?”
I shook my head. “I’ve never heard—or even thought about it.”
“Then we’ll let that pass for now. As I said, the source of my information should have been clear to you almost from the beginning. I’m going to Garden Meadow, too, to visit a friend. My friend—he’s Judge Bain, of whom you may have heard—”
“I thought he was in jail.”
Blue nodded. “The judge was sent up in connection with a racing scandal, but when his grasp of reality failed, and he was transferred to a state hospital for the criminally insane, the governor commuted his sentence. His family sent him to Garden Meadow, where he’s become quite a crony of your Uncle Herbert’s. He’s a charming man, the old judge, and they must be nearly the same age. Understandably, your uncle doesn’t feel obligated to conceal his ownership of Hollander Safe and Lock.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I should’ve guessed.”
“Now for my last question. Answer this, and we’re even. What’s in Pandora’s Box?”
> 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.
