Pandora by Holly Hollander

Pandora by Holly Hollander

Foreword

To Aladdin Blue and David G. Hartwell, because this is mostly their fault.

Is this a historical novel?, you ask. Nope. This is just one that took a real long time to sell. (Except in France, so vive la France! It almost makes me wish I’d taken French instead of Latin.)

It’s also the only book of mine to sell, so far. I started writing it the day after I moved in with Blue, but it took over a year to get it finished and it hung around various publishers’ offices for about as long as it would’ve taken me to get through college, assuming I’d gone to college.

Then Ms. Sudden down at the BPL introduced me to this real writer who knows Joe Hensley and everything. We got to talking, and it turned out that I’d had three or four classes with his daughter. So he wrote it all over again putting in a lot more commas, and they say they’re going to run his name on the title page with mine. Only Hartwell wanted more about Larry Lief, so now we’ve put that in, too.

Altogether it’s been one hell of a time, but Barton hasn’t changed a lot. (Here I’m awfully tempted to tell you all about how I met Abbie Hoffman, and the first time I smoked dope, and the last time, and bunches of other stuff. But that’s all after the end, so why should you care?) The Ben Franklin Store’s been squeezed out by more boutiques. Some new people own the Magic Key now, and they don’t call it that. The worst thing by a long shot is that Uncle De Witte Sinclair’s dead. I could tell you quite a bit about that; but you wouldn’t want to read it. And to tell you the truth, I wouldn’t want to write it. So long, Uncle Dee. Kisses.

Holly H. Hollander

Barton, Illinois

1990

How the Box Got to Barton

The German 88 mm. gun was undoubtedly the most famous artillery piece of World War II. It fired a 22 lb. shell and could pick off a tank a mile away. The Germans called it the “Gun Flak”; it weighed 5.5 tons, it had an extreme range of nine miles, and it killed thousands of Russian, British, and American soldiers.

I got all that out of a book.

A shell from a German 88 almost killed my father, twice. I didn’t get that from the book—he told me about the first time.

My father is George Henry Hollander. In his company, which is Hollander Safe & Lock, they call him G. H. Hollander. Anyhow I guess they do, because he took me down to their headquarters one time—they rent four floors of this big building in the Loop—and that was what it said on his door: “G. H. Hollander, Chief Operating Officer.” Only his business cards say: “G. H. ‘Harry’ Hollander.” I used to have one of those cards around here, but I guess I lost it.

Anyway, he lied about how old he was and joined the army in 1943, when he was seventeen. He said he figured he never would get drafted, because his father was Herbert Hollander and had so much money, and he was going to this private school in the east, and he hated it. So one night he hitchhiked into New York, and spent the rest of the night walking around and sitting in bars and what he calls onearm joints. And the next day he told them he was eighteen and hadn’t registered for the draft, but now he wanted to enlist. He trained in America for a couple of months, I guess, and then they sent him overseas, and he was in one of the waves that landed at Anzio. I forget which wave, but not the first. Anyway, he was a supply clerk in an infantry company, and later on he was the supply sergeant. The day that he landed, this 88 shell smacked into the sand right at his feet. He said he heard it coming, only he hadn’t learned to flop down without thinking, the way he did later. If it had gone off, it would’ve killed him for sure, and I wouldn’t be here writing this.

The second time is kind of funny, because he wasn’t even there. But before I tell you about it, I think I ought to tell you a little about me and my father and mother and Barton, and Barton Hills, which is where we were all living then.

My name’s Holly H. Hollander. The H is for Henrietta, so you can see why I don’t use it. My mother—her name’s Elaine Calvat (that’s pronounced Kal-VAH)—wanted a cute name, and I was born on Christmas Eve. My father wanted me named for him, because it must have been awfully obvious even back then that there weren’t going to be any more kids. I’m older now than my father was when he joined the army, which really wipes me out.

If you’ve been adding and subtracting, you will have seen that my father was pretty well up there already when I was born, but my mother was only about twenty-three. She used to be his secretary, and she’s quite a bit younger than he is.

Maybe you want to know what we look like. You’ve seen guys like my father around quite a bit, I guess, if you’re the kind of person who serves on boards of directors. He’s big. He has short gray hair and one of those old noble-Roman faces. He used to be on the stout side, if you know what I mean, but since all this happened he’s lost some weight and looks a little younger. I remember one time a couple of years ago when he had a bunch of men like him out to the house. I always shake hands with guys, because I can tell they like it, and afterward I went over and felt my father’s hands because the ones I had been shaking felt so yucky. His were the only ones that weren’t soft. He used to say that if things had been different he would’ve made somebody a good mechanic, and I think he was right. He had a shop in our basement with a lot of tools, and at night sometimes he worked on some of the stuff the company