Pandora by Holly Hollander

How We Mulled

It felt funny for our house to be so empty and quiet. I hadn’t really expected Elaine to come running to see if her little girl was okay, but I’d expected, at least, to hear her and Mrs. Maas stirring around. After a while it got spooky. I played records, and that should have helped; but it didn’t because I could hear the silence behind them, if you know what I mean; and when each record was over there would be nothing except the click, click of the changer and the flop of the next one dropping into place. When my hi-fi had gone through the stack, I let it switch itself off; I read for a little and took the medicine that was supposed to stop my leg from hurting, and went to sleep.

A door shutting woke me up. Not the front door—the back. Then I heard Mrs. Maas walking around in the kitchen; I listened for two or three minutes, I guess, before I was sure it was her, and then, boy, did it ever sound good. I could have yelled or rung my bell for her to come up, but I didn’t even think about it.

I switched on my light instead, grabbed my crutches and got up. My little clock said it was after midnight, but I started downstairs, scared to death I’d fall because I couldn’t use both crutches and hang on to the banister at the same time, but bound and determined to find some human company. I decided right then that if I ever get rich and build a house of my own it’s going to have an elevator.

Mrs. Maas must have heard me, because she came and dithered and more or less helped me down the bottom half of the stairs. I don’t think I’ve said a lot about Mrs. Maas so far, but maybe I ought to here. She was blond, a little bigger than average but not really big, solid-looking and muscular. I never asked how old she was, but her hair was starting to get gray and I’d say about fifty. One time she told me she had grown up on a farm, and both her parents had been born in the Old Country. She was a widow.

Here I’m going to psychoanalyze. If you don’t like it (and in a lot of books I’ve read I don’t) you can skip this bit. I think that while Mrs. Maas had been with us I had been trying, without really knowing what I was doing, to make her my mother. Or my grandmother or aunt—whatever. You know what I mean. And I think Mrs. Maas had been through it before someplace and had lost her job because somebody’s real parents saw she was getting closer to their kid than they were.

Naturally I can’t prove any of that; but that night we were both tired and scared, and we practically fell into each other’s arms. She didn’t say anything special to me, just, “Oh, Holly, my poor Holly!” and I didn’t say anything special to her; but by the time she had helped me into one of the kitchen chairs and put on water to make cocoa, we both felt quite a bit better.

“Where have you been?” I said.

And she said, “Didn’t they tell you? They took me away, down to the police.”

“In Barton?”

“Yes, to Barton. Afterward they said if I would take the lie test they would let me come home. I said yes, and we went to Constance.” She showed me where they’d stuck the sensors on her. “They asked a million questions. Some two or three times, saying it different ways.”

“What kind of questions?”

“About your father. Bill is still there, they were going to do him after.”

“What’d you tell them?”

“That he is such a good man, only away too much. They asked if he had fights with your mother, and I said no.”

“Mrs. Maas, that was a lie. The machine must have jumped the track.”

“No, it was not a lie. Not real fights. In fights someone hits or throws. What your father and mother have are arguments. I don’t think you ever in your life saw your mother with a black eye, Holly.”

“Of course not.”

“Not of course. I have seen my own mother with many black eyes.”

“Were you afraid?” I meant when her father hit her mother, but she didn’t understand.

“I was. Yes. Not for myself, because I knew they would let me go. For your father. And for me, too, because if they don’t let him go there will be no place for me and I will have to pack, pack all my things and find a room to live in until the agency gets me a new position. All the time I will be thinking of you and your family and this house.”

The kettle sang, and she went over to pour water for my cocoa, and then the kitchen door opened and there was Elaine in a negligee. “It’s you two,” she said. “How’s your leg, Holly?” I don’t think she knew I’d been gone.

I said, “Okay. The cops had Mrs. Maas.”

“I know. They took Mrs. Maas and Bill. I think they would have taken me, too, if I hadn’t been much too upset to tell them anything. After a while I swallowed four of my pills and went to sleep. I just woke up.”

Mrs. Maas asked, “Would you like cocoa, Mrs. Hollander?”

“Yes,” Elaine said. “I would. I’d like some cocoa.” She got another chair and pulled it up to the table and sat, and I remember thinking it was probably the first time in her entire life that she’d ever sat down in that kitchen. Usually she only went in there if she had to give last-minute orders to Mrs. Maas or the caterers, and got out as fast as she could.

“When do you think we’ll see Dad again?”

“Tomorrow, I suppose. Don’t they let them out on bail?”

“I think so.”

“Then they’ll have to let him go on bail. I’ll call Harvey Webber,” (that was my father’s lawyer) “and Harvey will get him out. But …”

“But what?” I asked.

“But, Holly, it won’t be for terribly long—perhaps not for more than a few weeks. You have to realize that. Then there’ll be the trial, and then he’ll be gone.”

“You think he did it?”

Elaine didn’t answer. Mrs. Maas had brought her cocoa in a pedestal mug exactly like mine; but when she raised it to her lips ever so delicately and sipped like she was afraid it was too hot to drink, which it was, it seemed like hers might be the chalice from the palace holding the brew that was true. There are a lot of pretty women. I’m a pretty woman myself, and maybe Mrs. Maas was once, too, because she was tallish and a blonde, and she must have had a good complexion when she was younger. But Elaine was beautiful the way a sunrise is beautiful, or wild geese flying over you. When you saw her profile like that, not expecting it, it could make you catch your breath.

“What are we going to do?” I asked her finally.

“I don’t know, Holly. I don’t know how much money there will be.”

“If there isn’t much.”

“We’re not going to starve, I don’t mean that. There’ll be enough to keep us. But when I try to think about what I’ll do, I find I’m only thinking about what I won’t. You’ll finish high school and go on to college, and after that, we’ll see. I won’t marry again, or live with some man. Harry wouldn’t like it, and I wouldn’t either.”

I couldn’t help thinking that if she’d felt more like that before, we wouldn’t be in the mess we were in now; I suppose she saw it in my face.

“When you’re older you’ll understand, Holly—or you won’t.” She still wasn’t looking at me, just out of the kitchen window. The ground there sloped down toward the stable, and it seemed to me Elaine was looking at the stars above the treetops. “Whether there’s a great deal of money or just a little, we’ll be able to do what we like, with nobody to say no. I’ll have an apartment in New York or London. I’ll go to plays, and …”

“You’ll have to come back, if you want to visit Dad.”

“I will, of course; I’ll fly. And of course the business—I’ll have a business manager here.” Suddenly she turned to look at me and those big beautiful violet eyes just seemed to swallow me up. “You’ll come to visit me, won’t you, Holly? You’ll have vacations and holidays. We can go shopping together, and if I’m in New York I’ll take you to Sardi’s or the Plaza for luncheon. We’ll have such a good time.”

“I won’t come if you don’t want me to.”

“Oh, but I do! I’ll want to see you, Holly, and we won’t fight anymore. I know you don’t believe me, but you’ll see. We won’t. All this awful pressure will be gone, no more living together when we don’t like it and no more groveling for crumbs. What are you going do with your life when you’re finished with college? Don’t say get married. That isn’t a life.”

I had to think fast, because I really hadn’t done a whole lot of planning. “Get a job on Time, maybe, or The New Yorker.” Elaine smiled and gave my hand a squeeze.

Bill still hadn’t come back when I went up to bed, so I had to do it pretty much on my own. My leg hurt some—there wasn’t any question but that it liked being up on the bed or something better than swinging in the air—but it wasn’t more than I could take, and I was proud of myself for having done what I did.

The trouble was that I couldn’t get back to sleep. I kept thinking about everything that had happened, about what Sandoz had said in my father’s study before he took him away, and about going to Blue’s, and then about Blue and me and my father, then about how Sandoz had come in and everything he’d said, and so on and so forth, around and around. Eventually I got clear back to the day the bomb went off, and even the day that I met Blue when I went out to visit Uncle Herbert. That was when I decided that sooner or later I’d write this book; and I began to write it in my head there in bed that night. Believe me, I was a lot more anxious to see how it came out than you are.

Sometimes when I find a really good mystery, I stop reading a little before the end and go over the whole first part two or three times, underlining the stuff I think might be significant. Then, if the author’s played fair, pretty often I can guess how it’s going to end. So I did it that night, and the underlined parts of my memory are the parts I’ve written down here. That night I tried to solve it, just like I try to solve the books; but I came up against a couple things that bothered me. I think it’s only fair to tell you about them now.

In the first place, in a lot of books I’ve read there are only a certain number of people who could have done it, usually fewer than ten. They’re all in a big house in the country, or maybe on a ship—something like that. But what had happened to Larry and Mr. Munroe and Uncle Herbert and Mrs. Whoosis wasn’t like that at all. The killer could be anybody in the whole wide world, and there was no guarantee whatsoever that the killer (I was sure then that it wasn’t my father) who had set the bomb at Barton High had also killed Uncle Herbert. I think it would be awfully nice for the cops if they had more cases like the ones in books, where the murderer’s got to be one of seven or eight people; but until somebody can arrange it, maybe we should have a law that says the murders in books have to be more like real ones.

Another thing was servants. In a book you can bet your booty it isn’t old Portwine the butler, no matter how guilty he looks on page ninety-four; and I think the real reason for that is snobbishness. The murderer has to be somebody important, and somebody important can’t be working class, a fact that would be big news to lots of union presidents. In real life, everybody knows it just isn’t so; working-class people have killed plenty of other people, including quite a few very important ones. So it could be Bill or even Mrs. Maas; I didn’t believe it, but I couldn’t rule them out.

Okay, let’s get down to cases.

The first big question was, where was the bomb? It seemed pretty likely that it had been in Pandora’s Box, since the shell hadn’t been fired (according to Sandoz) and a thing like that—an artillery shell—would have been pretty big and hard to hide. But if I allowed it was in the box, somebody must’ve gotten the box open and put it there, and the only people I could think of that I thought could have done it were my father and Larry. If it had been Larry, he wouldn’t have done it and blown himself up unless he’d wanted to commit suicide.

Only come to think of it, it was possible he had, what with those mysterious calls and all. In a book, naturally, you could rule out suicide, but I couldn’t. Maybe Larry had fixed up the bomb—getting the shell one of the times he came to see Elaine, and picking the lock and so on—just to kill himself. But if he had, we’d never prove it; and anyway, I couldn’t really believe it.

That left Dad. I don’t have to give the case against him, because Sandoz already did; but what about the case for him? He could have picked the lock, sure. The box had been right there in his study for a couple of weeks at least (I couldn’t remember just how long, but it was plenty of time) and so was the shell. Only if it was him it was all over and there was no use thinking about it. And anyway I couldn’t believe that it was. Not just because he was my father and I loved him, but because a bomb at the Fair wouldn’t have been his style. If he’d wanted to mess up Larry and Elaine, he could have done it a dozen ways without doing anything illegal or running any risk. For starters, how about tipping off Molly and filing for divorce, which he could have gotten with no alimony when he showed that Elaine had been unfaithful? He had money and lawyers and a sharp, cool brain. None of that fit with a bomb and risking the chair.

Which left me nothing but dark horses. Maybe, just maybe, Bill would have been able to pick that lock. He’d fixed things around our place and made some minor repairs on the cars. Who could say he might not be good with a lock? He could have been mad at Elaine because of something she said. Or if he knew, he could have wanted her himself and been jealous because Larry’d had her and he’d never get her. And come to think of it, it was damn near certain he had known; servants always know that stuff.

Or what about Aladdin Blue? All along I’d been ruling him out like he was the detective. Outside of a book, you can’t do that. He’d been anxious to find out whether I knew what was in the box, and he’d been nice and far away when the bomb went off. As far as I knew, he’d never been to our house while the box was there; but it wasn’t downright impossible that he’d gotten into it while it was in the window at the First National. I hadn’t heard that anybody’d ever checked into how well they watched it, and one thing for sure is that a bank’s window isn’t the same as a bank vault—maybe you’ve noticed they don’t put money in the window. Or maybe he’d gotten to the box while it was at the Fair; after all, he was there. Nobody had ever proved that the shell that went off at Barton High was the same one that had been on our mantel. Germany must have made a million of those shells. When my father had carried me down the stairs, he’d been pretty careful, and even though Blue was lame he’d gotten ahead of us. My father had said, “To your left,” and Blue had gone into the study before we did. Suppose that instead of finding that dark spot, he’d picked up the shell and hidden it so well that Sandoz hadn’t found it when he searched the room. Then this evening, maybe, when Blue had gone in there, he’d fished it out and taken it away. Two things for sure about Blue: he was an ex-con, and he was slick enough to slide up a flagpole.