He wouldn’t look at me. “So who’s hurting, Holly? Maybe I can send a medic.”
“I am,” I said. “Molly, too, I think.”
It took a while, but he finally nodded. “Yeah. Molly. Molly for sure. How do you think Barney feels?”
“I guess I don’t know Barney.”
“Her first husband. They’d been married eight months when I met her. Let’s talk about you. You love your mother, right?”
I shook my head.
“I love her, Holly. Do you believe that? It’s true. I’ve been looking for three or four years now for a woman who wasn’t too good for me, that I could love, and I found her. I thought Molly was the one once, but I was wrong. Elaine’s as selfish as I am.”
“So naturally—” I wanted a sip of Coke but my hand was shaking so bad I had to put it down.
“Yes,” Larry said. “Yes.”
“Most people don’t think it’s so terribly attractive.” I was having trouble talking now, but I managed, “I don’t myself.”
“I wanted to go to college,” Larry said. “Didn’t Sis ever tell you?”
I shook my head. I guess he saw it out of the corner of his eye.
“Dad had just bought the store. He and Mom had borrowed every dime they could, mortgaged everything they owned to swing it. I was going to work nights, take a few classes. No more than I could handle. We figured it would take eight or nine years.”
“What the hell has this got to do with my mother?”
“It has to do with me,” he said.
I would have gotten up and walked out then, if I could have, but the way we were sitting I’d have had to crawl over him.
“Then there was this politician, who was going to get me into West Point. I fell in love with that—fell in love with the whole deal, and it never happened. He couldn’t swing it, he said, but I think he really gave it to somebody who could do him more good. Someday I’m going to look that somebody up and see what he did with my big chance.”
“So you joined anyhow.”
Larry nodded. “I thought maybe I could get into OCS. You know about the guy who wasted a village? It was in the news.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I remember.”
“Well, I never did that.” He stood up. I wasn’t expecting it, and I wanted to say wait a minute, when just a minute before I’d been ready to leave myself.
“I think I’m sober enough to go home, Holly. Sober enough to drive. Don’t you? Want a lift?”
I shook my head.
Larry bent over the table, whispering. “I never did that, but I would have. I got a lot of guys to fight for me, when I knew damn good and well down where I live that we weren’t going to win because nobody but us wanted us to win. Some were pretty good soldiers, and quite a few of them died.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”
“I did it for me,” Larry told me, “and I’d do it again. So when your mom came across, it was like I was the only sane man on earth, everybody else was crazy as a loon, and then I found one other sane person. Is that wrong?”
I looked around. There were people at a couple of tables, but they weren’t paying attention to us.
Before I could open my mouth, Larry said, “It’s like I was an empty house, Holly, and I’ve finally found somebody to live here.” Then he was gone. I’d been going to say yes, it’s still wrong, only I never got the chance; the way things turned out, I never did.
After that I must have spent about an hour mooching around Barton waiting for Uncle Herbert—or maybe Bugs Bunny—to tap me on the arm, only neither one of them showed. I’d never realized what a downer Carmen could be.
Hell, the only part I knew was the toreador song.
How War Came to Barton
The next day, Saturday, was Fair Day.
I wore my rose to the Fair; and I rode with Elaine, which meant I was there way early when the first exhibitors were just beginning to unload. Everybody said what a big help I was, but half the time I hardly knew what I was doing.
When the gate opened, I took tickets and ran errands till I was ready to drop. I saw Larry and Molly, and half my teachers, and Tom and Willa Coffey, and damn near every kid in Barton; but I didn’t see my father (just in case you’re wondering), because he’d gone to New York a couple of days earlier; and I didn’t see Uncle Herbert. But just when I was sure my legs were going to drop off, Uncle Dee saw me, and I guess he could tell how I felt from the way I looked. Anyway, he got me to relieve one of the cashiers at the Book Sale, which meant I got to sit on a folding chair, with a bridge table to lean on.
I had a great view of the main event through a window, too.
The idea was that at noon they’d hold the big drawing. A couple of the men had nailed up a little platform, and some of the women had decorated it with big red question marks and gold coins cut out of cardboard. With the winner looking on, Larry would magic open the box, and then the winner would get it, and whatever was inside, too.
Naturally, Elaine had to make a speech first about what a lovely day it was, the blue sky and all that, and how glad she was, how glad all the ladies were, that everyone had come. She looked pretty nervous, I thought, and I didn’t blame her a bit—that platform wasn’t a whole lot bigger than the roof of a car, and it didn’t have any railing.
Then she told all about the box, and how it probably hadn’t been opened in over a hundred years, and how people in England had opened an old trunk they’d found in a bank and discovered a poem by Shelley that nobody’d known about.
Just then Aladdin Blue came by with a couple of books; they were cheap ones—I think it was only about three bucks for the two together. “Hi,” I said. “I thought you were curious about Pandora’s Box. You asked if I knew what was in it, remember?”
Blue nodded and looked worried. Through the window I could smell popcorn, and hear Elaine saying over the PA system, “I’m not going to pick it up and shake it for you, because it’s very heavy. There’s something in there, and if you don’t believe me, you can ask the men who carried it.”
I said, “Well, you can’t have found out, so why aren’t you out there watching?”
“I can see from here,” he told me. “So can you.”
“I’m here because I’m supposed to be working. Really, have you found out? Honest, now.”
Blue shook his head.
“Then what’s bugging you?”
“Do you recall the story? I’ve been refreshing my memory.” One of the books he had was a fat, red one, and he was holding a place in it with his finger. He opened it then, I guess to get all the names right. “Pandora was the Greek Eve,” he said, “the first woman, created to punish men for accepting Prometheus’ gift of fire. Aphrodite gave her beauty, Hermes persuasion, and so on and so forth; and when she was complete, they launched her like a missile at the then-wholly-male human race. Humanity had been the doing of the titan Epimetheus, and he’d set aside in a box all the qualities he felt people would be better off without—envy, malice, and so on. They gave her that box, and with it a name that meant all-gifted.”
I told him, “It sounds like a kid’s story to me.”
Blue shook his head. “Why is it that people will rave all afternoon over the philosophy, the art, the literature, and the architecture of the ancient Greeks, then dismiss something like the legend of Pandora as a fairy tale?” I didn’t answer, and he said, “I suppose it’s because fairy tales have their own depths and hidden caverns, and dismissing one is as easy as scoffing at the other.”
He laid a five on the table, but I wouldn’t take it. “Hey, prove it,” I said. “Show me some of those caves.”
(Outside, there was a little girl in a yellow dress up on the platform with Elaine, getting her blindfold on so she could pull a ticket stub out of the big wire drum.)