Insight Editions · No. 196
Mary and the Giant
Philip K. Dick
In a small California town in 1953, stenographer Mary Reynolds seeks security and love among an ageing record dealer, a nightclub singer, and her domineering father.
A study guide to Mary and the Giant by Philip K. Dick. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book in Brief
Mary and the Giant is a realist novel Philip K. Dick wrote between 1953 and June 1955. Rickman counts twenty-five rejections; after Edwin Fadiman Jr. called it "a jumbled pawn shop... full of valuables," Dick rewrote it, and Arbor House published it only in April 1987.
The setting is Pacific Park, a town of orchards and retired people fifty miles from San Francisco. Joseph R. Schilling, a big, cultivated man of fifty-eight, arrives with his driver Max and opens a classical record shop, the Music Corner. Mary Anne Reynolds, twenty, a stenographer who questions every rule and lives in fear of her father Ed, answers his advertisement, then refuses the job the moment he takes her arm.
- First giant. She chases Carleton B. Tweany, a grand Black singer at the Lazy Wren, through a false emergency (Ch3-4), a summer affair and a long cooling (Ch8), until he laughs at her asleep in the flat she cleans for him (Ch12).
- The past returns. Beth and Danny Coombs, the woman Schilling slept with in 1948 and her husband, follow him west for money (Ch7); their night at Tweany's ends in a police raid, a gun, an ice pick and Coombs's fatal fall (Ch10-13).
- Second giant. In December she takes Schilling's job on her own terms (Ch13); they become lovers in the stockroom (Ch15), but a landlady takes her for his daughter (Ch17) and Nitz calls him "just too old" (Ch18).
- Release. When he says "I love you" she kicks him and sits alone in a corner chair (Ch20). He decides he can help her "only by not hurting her," misleads her father and sends Paul Nitz, who carries her out of a twenty-dollar room (Ch21).
- Epilogue. About two years later she is married to Nitz, has a son, and is "not frightened" (Ch22).
Dick tells the story mainly through Mary Anne and Schilling in turn, with stretches seen by the car-wash owner Bill (Ch1) and Arnold Gordon (Ch12) and a whole chapter from Danny Coombs (Ch11). He works through objects and places: the newspaper ad, Tweany's leaking heater, a key, a blue clay dish, Schilling's black notebook, a corner chair. The title's giant is plural: the grandfather with "giant strides," Tweany who "could lift a truck," and Schilling, who "towered over everything." Each big man shrinks as she comes close.
Chapter map
| Ch | Title | In one line |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | A Town Called Pacific Park | Schilling arrives, eyes a schoolgirl, leases a shop |
| 2 | Chrome Furniture | Mary Anne's factory, her father, the ad |
| 3 | The Lazy Wren | Nitz reads her; she marches Tweany home |
| 4 | The Third Floor | Leak fixed; lecture, pass, the grandfather |
| 5 | The Interview | Job offered; his touch; she refuses |
| 6 | Concrete | Gordon mocked, Boldens stoned, Tweany's door |
| 7 | The Coombses | The 1948 affair walks into the shop |
| 8 | Strange Fruit and White Christmas | Tweany's set; the affair recalled; Beth |
| 9 | A Good Five-Cent H-Bomb | Lemming sings; Beth paints Joe |
| 10 | Flashbulbs | Naked dance, raid, "Only the two of us" |
| 11 | The Remington .32 | Coombs buys a gun and waits |
| 12 | Poor Miss Mary Anne | Cleaning, laughter, ice pick, the fall |
| 13 | Thank You for Buying the Record | She takes the job on her terms |
| 14 | The Elf at the Audiophile's Party | Hethel's piano; the inquest; a kiss |
| 15 | The Stockroom | Lovers in the basement, by her choice |
| 16 | The Blue Dish | Night walk; Beth half-told; "fifty-eight" |
| 17 | She's Got Your Hair | Redwood flat, "daughter," Ed's assault told |
| 18 | He's Just Too Old | Painting, Glayva, Nitz's verdict, her note |
| 19 | Twenty Dollars a Month | Body check, $20 room, Beth's version |
| 20 | The Corner Chair | His plan, "I love you," the kick |
| 21 | Leave Her Alone | Decoy address; Nitz carries her off |
| 22 | The Light Changed | North Beach: a husband, a son, calm |
1940 Grandfather dies; she is seven (Ch4).
1948 Schilling and Beth Coombs in Washington.
July-Aug 1953 Ad, interview, the shop opens (Ch1-6).
Fall 1953 The Coombses, the party, the raid (Ch7-12).
December The job, the affair, the release (Ch13-21).
Two years on North Beach (Ch22).
20 and 58 her age and his.
$250 a month the wage; $275 "if things work out."
$9.85 the cab after a two-hour walk (Ch16).
$50 his deposit; $20 a month her own room (Ch17, Ch19).
11 months her son's age (Ch22).
A Town Called Pacific Park
About this text. The omnibus prints 22 numbered, untitled chapters; titles here are editorial. Dick wrote the novel 1953 to June 1955; Arbor House published it in April 1987 [pkdickbooks.com]. Rickman reports twenty-five rejections, and in June 1955 Edwin Fadiman Jr. of Julian Messner called it "a jumbled pawn shop... full of valuables" and proposed a rewrite, which Dick made [To the High Castle 304, 308, via philipdick.com]. Dick reportedly called it "a retelling of Mozart's Don Giovanni," with Schilling "seduced and destroyed by a young woman" [Wikipedia, citing Rickman 1984].
At two-forty on a "hot, midsummer California afternoon," Joseph Schilling rides in the back of a big black Dodge crammed with cartons, driven by his grumbling companion Max. They have never been here; the nearest was Los Gatos, on a vacation in '49. As Heraclitus would say, the river is always different." Max: "It all looks alike to me."
He has massive yellowed hands, a rough tweed suit and dusty English shoes. Max reads the map: "Pacific Park. Set in the heart of rich California. Only two days of rain a year. Owns its own ice plant."
Bill's Car Wash
Past a hub of bakery, pottery and notion shop and Spanish-adobe book shop, at Bill's Car Wash the Black owner corrects Schilling's guess that he is the "engineer": "I'm in charge. I own the car wash."
- The town. San Francisco is fifty miles off, but "this a complete town," full of retired people; crops grow all year: apricots, walnuts, pears, rice.
- His road here. A wartime job in a Los Angeles airplane factory; he saved for the car wash and now "can sort of rest."
- The line. There is "a colored section," but "At least nobody ever say I can't come and live."
A pretty girl in a red sweater notices Schilling watching and ducks away. Max: "Hey, hey... I know that look." Schilling, with "a guilty start," calls her "an exceptionally lovely girl." Max: "But none of your business."
"He was so immense that he towered over everything, even as he stood bending and listening, even as he stood smoking his cigar." ... "Bringing the whole outside universe into the little California town of Pacific Park."
Bill, watching Schilling
To Bill the face is so far up it has "no look, no expression," and the stranger smells of a foreign cigar and French cuffs: "He was a man of and from the world."
"We'll locate here"
In a park of pepper and eucalyptus, where children feed a plump duck, Max calls Bill "that coon." Schilling decides: "We'll locate here... Here there's everything I want." Max: "Such as girls with big knockers." Schilling: "I can sit in the park and feed bread to the duck."
At Greb and Potter, agent Jack Greb rises only when the business card appears. Schilling, once "in the publishing end," wants a long-term lease without fixtures for "music for connoisseurs," classical records, against the town's Hank's Music Bar. Greb offers a two-year-old store on Pine Street, once a gift shop, sold when the owner's wife died of stomach cancer.
| Schilling | Max | |
|---|---|---|
| The road | "The river is always different" | "It all looks alike" |
| The girl | "Exceptionally lovely" | "None of your business" |
| Bill | Questions him at length | "That coon" |
| The shop | Feed bread to the duck | "Won't make any money" |
The giant arrives. A tired connoisseur who wants rest, and, seen from below, a towering presence who seems to own the town by looking at it. The stare at the girl in the red sweater is the plot's first seed.
Chrome Furniture
At California Readymade Furniture a shipping clerk bolts chrome tables (sixteen bolts for the top, seven for the legs), dreams of girls at Santa Cruz, and kicks a dropped leg into the litter: "This is shit." Mary Anne Reynolds, the stenographer, holds the leg for him, smells his "thin... acrid" unhappiness and tells him to quit. He would rather be "back in the army."
"What reality is that?"
In the office sit the elderly owner Tom Bolden and his wife Edna at the adding machine. Bolden drives to San Francisco because Dohrmann's has found defects, threatening to bring back "a new shipping clerk." Mary Anne advises El Camino, "slower but a lot safer," and defends the clerk, whose name, Jake, the Boldens do not know: "How can you wrap without litter?"
Mrs. Bolden tells her she is not "in charge" and must respect "those above you." Mary Anne asks the real question: "Don't you want to know things?" The men found a rat in the fabric shed; surely the owners want to be told. Told to "face reality," she asks "What reality is that?" and announces she will leave early to collect her brown gabardine coat. "As far as she was concerned the matter was settled. She had settled it herself."
1950 Graduates from Pacific Park High: "Cooking, civics, and American history."
1951 Receptionist at the Ace Loan Company on Pine Street.
Late 1951 Quits, bored; joins Tom Bolden.
Now (1953) Twenty, a lifelong resident of a town "too frail to survive dislike."
Walking Empory Avenue (she hates buses), she sees the town's "odd little games," whose rules she questions and plays anyway "until boredom came," then "a wondering contempt that left her cut off and alone." At the Rexall she skips the novels and buys Thirty Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary and the Pacific Park Leader for thirty-seven cents.
Outside, Eddie Tate, a scented salesman from Frug's Menswear, says her boyfriend Gordon is looking for her. She once saw Tate with sailors at the Greyhound terminal: "Are you a fairy?" ("My cousin!") "You smell like a woman." The "lift that fairy-baiting gave her" fades as she nears home.
Ed
Her father Ed Reynolds, small, wiry-haired, in black leather jacket and greasy undershirt, lurches after her to her bedroom: "Stop off with some of your nigger friends?" She changes without turning her back to the door. Her mother Rose cooks and worries: Ed works short weeks at the pipe plant. Mary Anne reads aloud a letter calling Malenkov the Antichrist, says she will quit, and refuses to be "a Jake" or marry Gordon, a "little soldier in a uniform" who fixes flat tires.
Then she finds the ad: "Young woman wanted for retail selling... Knowledge of music valuable but not essential. Joseph R. Schilling MA3-6041." She clips it. Ed demands to be called "Dad," catches her hair, "The game, the old, terrible game," and she shuts her eyes on "things distant and peaceful." At table: "she's getting nice little tits on her." Rose says nothing.
Hard reading, and a date. Ed's racism and implied sexual abuse are shown plainly; Mary Anne's own taunting of Tate is homophobic, and Dick lets her enjoy it. The Malenkov letter fits the clock: he became Soviet premier on 6 March 1953 after Stalin's death [Wilson Center archive; History.com].
The rat in the fabric shed. Mary Anne's case is that bad news is information, and the Boldens hear it as insolence. Firms that punish the messenger lose early warnings: bank operational-risk and near-miss reporting, speak-up channels and blameless reviews exist because the person nearest the bench sees the rat first.
The Lazy Wren
She calls at the Gordons', ad in her purse, but her fiancé Dave Gordon is at the Junior Chamber of Commerce. His father Arnold, pipe and slippers, offers ice cream and cake. Mary Anne hears the future in it ("how wonderfully my new egg dicer works") and backs down the steps: "If he wants me I'm at the Wren."
Paul Nitz
At the Lazy Wren the intermission pianist Paul Nitz, "lean, shaggy-blond," a dead cigarette on his lip, weaves "I thought I heard... Buddy Bolden say" into the bop tune "Sleep." He mocks himself ("I'm a faintly audible hole... a musical silence. Between moments of greatness") and passes her the end of an unlit reefer, which she drops.
- His story. Once of the First Baptist Church of Chickalah, Arkansas, he was "moved to get up and denounce Jesus," took four members with him and followed Billy Sunday caravans converting people away from religion: "a Blue-Monday Nitz."
- Her plan. She will be at the new Pine Street record shop "tomorrow morning, before anybody else": "A record store's a nice place... Something's always happening."
- His creed. "I believe in everything. In God, in the United States, in power steering."
Carleton B. Tweany
Then he crosses the room: Carleton B. Tweany, big, "blue-black skin, very shiny," oiled hair, "massive in his dignity," up from a club in El Cerrito; she has watched him since the sixth. "He could lift a truck." When he notices her she shudders "as if she were rising through cold water." He has "matters on my mind": the building's hot-water heater on his third floor is leaking toward the gas jets, and "It'll ruin my furnishings." Nitz: "Golf with the President."
| Paul Nitz | Carleton Tweany | |
|---|---|---|
| Look | Lean, shaggy, dead cigarette | Huge, oiled hair, manicured |
| Self-image | "A faintly audible hole" | "Matters on my mind" |
| To Mary | "What's your father like?" | "How do you do, Miss Reynolds" |
| Faith | "I believe in everything" | Poise and bearing |
| Hidden | Ex-preacher, unbeliever | Buick repossessed |
Nitz reads her: "Another plan." Asked about her father she says "None of your business"; Nitz's father "used to sing me good-night songs," and Mary Anne recalls "a terrifying lullaby": "...If I should die before I wake..."
When Tweany passes again she imagines disaster: geysers, splintered boards, fire, and "Maybe there're children downstairs." Tweany: "Is she always like this?" Nitz: "Mary lives in a universe of leaky pots." She seizes his sleeve. He has no car (his cream and yellow Buick convertible had "recently been repossessed"), so they walk the three or four blocks. "He was a troubled commonwealth. He was an empire plagued at its borders. But she had stirred him into action."
Revisions and dates. Fadiman's 1955 letter asked Dick to make Nitz, "Mary's eventual choice," white rather than a Black man with a disability [Rickman via philipdick.com]; the "shaggy-blond" Nitz printed here fits that rewrite. Billy Sunday died on 6 November 1935 [NYT obituary], so a "young man" who trailed his caravans as an apostle of unbelief is either older than he looks or embroidering. Morton recorded "I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say" in September 1939 [UCSB DAHR].
Two kinds of man. Nitz sees through her; Tweany can be bossed. She chooses the one she can move.
The Third Floor
Past the shut slum shops, "I live in the colored section," Tweany tells her, and out of the bar he expands. He wants "a more refined musical form" than Nitz's jazz ("some conflict between I and Nitz"), studied "At the conservatory," and fingers a suit "tailored for me personally" in Los Angeles: "Clothes are important." Of big cities: "They're all alike." New York has "the finest museums and opera houses."
Whose outsiders? Mary Anne finds Black people restful because "they were like herself... on the outside." Dick marks this as her projection: Tweany wants refinement, not outsiderdom. The narrator says he left the war "a private earning twenty-one dollars a month," but $21 was a recruit's rate for the first four months, and from 1 June 1942 the Pay Readjustment Act paid privates $50 [Public Law 77-607; Yank, 17 June 1942].
The flat
Up an outside staircase, past a rain barrel of rotting newspapers, the flat is "a vast clutter"; Tweany prowls "tomcat-wise" to check his whiskey. The heater is repaired, the floor mopped; "Nothing was the matter after all." From the window she sees yellow lights along the horizon. "A road, maybe."
Seated on a heaped table, "well above her, in a position of authority," Tweany presses his point ("You don't even know if there are any people downstairs"), then asks her age. "Twenty." "You're just a little girl... You got to grow up." She works in "a lousy broken-down chrome furniture factory"; he says she should "do something creative." She says what she wants: "I just want to go somewhere where I can be with people and they won't let me down."
- Eastern beer. It costs more "Because it's finer"; her guess, freight, earns a contemptuous grin.
- Art. "The American society is only interested in money. It's shallow." She asks for "Water Boy," sung in grammar-school assembly.
- The war. She misses its "unanimity." He was a hospital attendant in the Pacific; nursing is "Bathing old, dried-up men."
Grandfather Reynolds. He kept a wall map of the war with pins, explained Munich and the Czechs, and died in 1940, when she was seven. Tall, once a Sacramento Valley rancher who rode a horse as a boy, in a vest and an Indian silver ring, he swung her "a long way off the ground." He was perhaps the only person she ever loved. Her father, then in a San Jose defense plant, is "a danger, not a person" since "one certain night" when he "had really caught her: not in a game."
Tweany pulls the shades and leans over her: "You're a nice-looking girl." "I'm too thin." His voice turns hoarse: "I bet you prefer your men large." His beer smell "reminded her of Ed." She attacks the room instead: "It stinks... I'll bet the wiring is bad." His face "collapsed into itself." "Yes," he says. "The wiring is bad." He checks his jeweled wristwatch and walks her back.
Near the red glow of the Wren she blames her shaking on her sinuses. "Wish me luck," she calls, and has to force herself "not to flee after him."
The first giant shrinks. Tweany's grandeur is a costume over a leaking building and a lost car, and his pass smells of her father. The emergency got her near him; once near, she drives him off.
The Interview
At eight-thirty, from Eickholz's Creamery, she tells Edna Bolden "It's my period" and thinks "The hell with you." In the old Floral Arts Gift Shop, among carpenters and glass for record booths, Schilling directs with a silver-handled stick: "He walked as if the ground came into existence at his feet."
Through his eyes
His first impulse is to send her off, but she is "unusually attractive": small and bony, gold hooped earrings, "a Modigliani neck," an "ascetic quality."
| Topic | Schilling | Mary Anne |
|---|---|---|
| Skills | "That's of no value to me." | Receptionist, dictation, "a trained typist" |
| Manner | "Is this your idea of the way to ask for a job?" | "I'm not asking for a job. I'm looking for a job." |
| Music | Who was Buxtehude? | "No." But Hank is "one of the smartest pop buyers in the business" |
| Town | "go sit in the park" | "It's dead." "I just don't believe in it." |
| Pay | "Two-fifty to start"; "Two-seventy-five. If things work out." | "I have a pretty good job right now." |
She "saw life as a threat"; he likes good food, music and a dirty joke, and thinks she would freshen up the store. With "a sense of adventure" he proposes breakfast at the Blue Lamb and steers her by the arm past the phono lead. On the sidewalk: "The job is yours." "No, thanks." He grabs her arm again: "Let go of my arm or I'll call a cop and have you arrested." "When you touched me, I could tell." Back inside he snaps at Max's ham sandwich ("Keep it!"); his hands are shaking.
A bluff on the law. "In California a woman can't work more than a five-day week," she says. The 1911 women's hours act set 8 hours a day and 48 a week, with no five-day rule [Cal. Stats. 1911; US Women's Bureau Bulletins 66-II, 144]. Like "I know everything there is to know," it holds ground.
Touch as proof. She reads his hand as the meaning of the ad, and his thoughts half agree. Dick lets both stand: a fair employer and an ageing man taken with her.
Hiring on a hunch. Schilling quizzes trivia, waves off real skills and hires the first applicant on a feeling. Structured interviews exist to stop this, and AI screening tools trained on past decisions learn the same hunches.
Concrete
At ten Dave Gordon finds her in his Richfield station's one chair, in nail polish and "an expensive-looking suit." She borrows five dollars for gloves, then: "He wanted to have relations with me... That was what it was all for. The job, the record store, the ad." She quotes the ad as "'Young woman, must be attractive.'" It said "personable in dress and appearance."
To Gordon a pass means little ("You're all dolled up"). She insists: "But an older man... It's not right!" Offered a shake at "Poster's Freeze," she explodes, "Grow up, will you?", and goes for his job: "you're another Jake... Be a Jake until the army gets you." Gordon: "They're blowing on my ass."
In the truck
- The brush. He has waited at the Wren "a couple times"; she softens: "Maybe I'll become a nun." He asks to be called Dave, not Gordon.
- Kids. She pictures "a little boy and a little girl," since "One kid is too lonely"; he recalls her eating lunch alone at school. She, of school: "Phony! Every word of it."
- The parting. "Don't come around for a while." He: "Sometimes I think you're riding for a fall."
The concrete. Mrs. Bolden has checked the calendar: "This isn't your period at all is it?" Mary Anne says "I quit," claims another job (she has none) and throws a chunk of loose concrete at the old couple, then fragments, "beginning to laugh in amazement and fear at herself." She runs until "blinded by red specks" and hitches back in a Pole's kindling truck.
At noon Taft Eaton bars the Wren: "You can't come in; you're a minor." On Tweany's outside stairs she trips, strikes her shin and screams "Tweany!... let me in!" He opens in his pants, lather on his chin, and carries her in. "I met an awful old man and he did something to me. Now I don't have any place to stay."
The draft, and a freeze. The Korean armistice came on 27 July 1953 [US National Archives], probably weeks after this morning, and draft calls ran on at pre-truce levels into the autumn [C&EN, 21 Sep 1953]. "Poster's Freeze" is presumably Foster's Freeze, founded 1946 [fostersfreeze.com].
The story grows. "personable" becomes "must be attractive"; a hand on the arm becomes "he did something to me." She flees one big man into the arms of another.
The Coombses
The Music Corner, 517 Pine Street, opened "in the early weeks of August 1953": a photograph of Walter Gieseking in the window, the Saint-Saëns Organ Symphony (printed "Saint-Satins") at the door. Danny Coombs, in his thirties, "bird-chested," hands fluttering, and Beth, "a heavy, round-faced blonde," find her own vase on the counter. Schilling, without his glasses, comes up from the stockroom: "The line forms...amazing, how fast." Max, whom "they were afraid of," is at the cocktail lounge.
| They say | Schilling hears |
|---|---|
| "Curiosity"; a Chronicle clipping "Somebody sent us" | "he was a duck in a rain barrel. And he had tangible assets." |
| Washington, Detroit, Los Angeles; a call in Salt Lake City | "Following me" |
| "You're going to sell sheet music, aren't you?" | A job or a plug; he offers a card over the register |
| "You don't feel you owe us something?" | "because I didn't pay her then, I should pay her now?" |
| "Music is booming here." | "My grave or yours? Or all of ours?" |
He pleads poverty: "I'm broke. Most of this stuff is on consignment. My capital went into the remodeling." Beth recalls his joke about lady cellists ("something large between their legs"): "You were delightful." He calls Coombs "that by which vinegar got from the bucket to Our Savior's mouth," a sponge. Coombs: "You should be destroyed." "It had certainly been his mistake, five years ago, to mix with these people." He goes on filing records: "Just being nostalgic."
Two references. Gieseking's 1949 US tour was cancelled amid protests over his Nazi-era record; he returned to Carnegie Hall on 22 April 1953 [Carnegie Hall archives], so the window is topical. The sponge is Matthew 27:48, "filled it with vinegar, and put it on a reed" [KJV].
Consignment. Stock on consignment belongs to the supplier, so it cannot back a loan; a lender sees a thin balance sheet with capital sunk in fittings. Schilling turns that into a shield.
Strange Fruit and White Christmas
In the fall of 1953 she shares a flat with Phyllis Squire, a waitress at the Golden State lunch counter next to the Wren, picked by Tweany, who "Thereby... had solved, in his own mind, Mary Anne's problems." After her Pacific Tel and Tel shift Phyllis reads Fulton Sheen aloud over a Perez Prado mambo.
At the Wren Taft Eaton takes her "by the scruff of the neck": "You ought to stay with your own race, where you belong." Nitz tells a couple that folk music "stopped growing back in the days of James Merritt Ives." She offers "Ol' Man River"; Nitz: "'Ol' Man River' was written by Jerome Kern."
| Song | Tweany's introduction | The record |
|---|---|---|
| "Strange Fruit" | "the bitter terror of the Negro people in their ages of bondage" | A lynching poem; Holiday 1939 |
| "Got Grasshoppers in My Pillow" | "the Negro can sing about his privations"; "innately, a happy person" | Traditional; Lead Belly 1944 |
| "White Christmas" | Unites "both Caucasian and Negro" | Irving Berlin, 1942 |
"Strange Fruit" is "a highly personal communication and not a concert rendition"; nobody claps. "White Christmas" begins with "a cynical smile" and swells to "a throbbing sublimity": "Tweany loved the song." Nitz plays "as if he were pushing a broom," then: "What do you know about the sufferings of the Negro people? You were born in Oakland, California."
Checking the bandstand. "Strange Fruit" is about lynching, not bondage: Abel Meeropol's poem, recorded by Billie Holiday on 20 April 1939 [Library of Congress]. Lead Belly, who cut "Grasshoppers" in 1944, died in December 1949 [MusicBrainz; Louisiana Music Hall of Fame]. Kern wrote the music of "Ol' Man River," Hammerstein the words. James Merritt Ives was the Currier & Ives lithographer [American National Biography]. Roger Sessions, "at Berkeley" says the blonde, left for Princeton in 1953 [Encyclopedia.com].
The summer, remembered
She went to his pad at two-thirty last night; he has been "rather occupied, the last few weeks." "Months, you mean." He made her keep a separate address and soon stopped her staying the night: "You're under age. It's a felony." She: "If it's a felony to do it at three o'clock in the morning, it's a felony to do it in the afternoon." She remembers the hot loft, "slippery with sweat," the radio's "red button." He called her "small and bony and frigid"; to her it felt like a doctor breaking a nasal polyp. Gordon, by implication also her lover, "expected nothing but concavity." Now: "Absolutely nothing. Except my art."
"It's a felony." Dick tells the affair coldly and lets the man's verdict stand. In law Tweany is wrong or bluffing: Penal Code s.261 put the age of consent at 18 [People v. Craig, 17 Cal.2d 453 (1941)], and she is twenty. Majority was 21 until 1972 [NYT, 5 Mar 1972].
Joe
The blonde describes Joe: a Wednesday program on a San Mateo good-music station, a Sunday record concert ("Fifteen or so people"), an aunt who "sold harps in Denver during the Spanish-American War," Century Music in New York "in the twenties." He got her pieces published and is plugging Chad Lemming, who sings about "Thought control, Senator McCarthy." Tweany went once: "A gentleman," who played him "an ancient Lunsford record." Mary Anne: "It gives me the creeps." "Her distress was real, again. But after four months it no longer had the same urgency."
The blonde invites Tweany to hear Lemming; held to "One more set," he asks her to bring Lemming "over to my place." Nitz offers to show the way: "And my girl... I have to have her with me." Then: "My name's Beth, and this is my husband, Danny. Danny Coombs." In their Ford Nitz hugs Mary Anne: "We'll give this guy a hotfoot."
Every road leads to the Music Corner. The man she fled is the town's musical centre, and a white blonde takes Tweany with one invitation. Beth, who wanted Schilling's "contacts," is already collecting them.
A Good Five-Cent H-Bomb
The Coombses' apartment is one huge room with a grand piano and "a kitchen no larger than a pea." Over bourbon and water Mary Anne weighs Beth's "mature and expanded" figure against her own small bust and asks her age: "Twenty-nine." Beth prices "a Bösendorfer" at eight thousand dollars; Mary Anne does not ask what one is.
Nitz: "Stop sticking nails in yourself." Tweany is "a conceited posturer." She: "You're jealous of him because he's big and you're a tiny-man." He knows Tweany's soul from accompanying his "Many Brave Hearts," and predicts she will marry "some hulking pillar of bourgeois respectability." "Why can't you have faith in yourself?"
Chad Lemming sings of the budget, pensions, the FBI, genetics and the bomb ("if Mao Tse-tung makes trouble we will blow the world to rubble"), ending with "What This Country Needs Is a Good Five-Cent H-bomb." Mary Anne, "uninterested in Congress and taxes," sits on Beth's bed remembering "the pressure of his fingers." Lemming is 27, a 1948 Cal chemistry graduate who kept his radiation-lab clearance. Nitz: "Is there any loot in this stuff?" "None that I'm aware of."
| Nitz on Tweany | Beth on Joe | |
|---|---|---|
| Verdict | "stupid... snobbish... a fake" | "a very thoughtful man... also a lonely man" |
| Wants | The big time (Ch10) | "a peaceful town, off the mainstream" |
| Danger | "a conceited posturer" | "ruthless"; "His needs are so strong" |
Beth has known Joe "Five or six years." Told "something did happen in the store," she claims kinship: "you and I are the same age." Mary Anne does the sum, then asks help choosing a bra: "I wish I had a good bustline, like yours." "You poor kid."
Coombs, at "almost two in the morning," sneers at "the first one with a touch of the tarbrush": "no monkey business." Mary Anne offers to show the way.
Lemming's sources. The title rewrites the quip popularised by vice president Thomas R. Marshall, that the country needed a good five-cent cigar [Indiana University Libraries]. "Many Brave Hearts" is the refrain of Asleep in the Deep (1897), a song of drowned lovers [Auburn University].
A count of years. Mary Anne answers Beth's "same age" with a compliment that is really an insult.
Flashbulbs
Tweany sits in his kitchen in his pink shirt and hand-painted tie, eating a sardine sandwich with a bottle of Rheingold over a smeared Esquire; Mary Anne's heart aches at "his arms thick and heavy and powerful." Lemming gushes, and Tweany says "Go on. I'm listening." Lemming croaks his routine, now about President Eisenhower cutting taxes, while Tweany drifts back to "an article on big-league baseball." In the silence a leaky faucet drips.
Coombs wants a picture of the two singers. Tweany: "My agent won't permit me to pose for publicity shots without his consent." Beth sides with Tweany, and, "having ingested her cue," tells Lemming to drop the talking. He protests: "But that's the whole point."
The news
Nitz dusts the buried spinet: "You're going to have trouble getting this out of here." Tweany got it up "with ropes." Then Nitz tells her: "He's moving along to L.A." An offer from Heimy Feld, "who handles those jump concerts," a trial on his circuit. Tweany: "The word 'trial' never came up." Mary Anne: "You should have told me." Nitz: "I waited... Until he was here. So he could answer." "But," she said helplessly, "he didn't answer."
Beth produces a song from her "giant bag" and Tweany swells with "a massive conceit": "I'm always interested in new material." Tweany intones the plot of "Where We Sat Down" (a woman revisiting autumn places with a lover "killed in foreign lands") and sings it at sight. Beth: "An almost terrifying beauty." Nitz: "'White Christmas'... that's the end of you." Tweany: "a casual cruelty can do great harm." "This is my house." Nitz: "Only the top floor."
The frenzy
Beth showers him with a Fauré ballade, a Chopin prelude and "the Liszt B-flat sonata." Tweany: "I love good music... I wish I had more time for it." On a Chopin "Polonaise" he roars "Til the end of time"; Lemming leaps, whacks the ceiling and spins Mary Anne. Coombs, giggling, fires flashbulbs from every angle. Nitz: "They're hopped in another dimension."
- Nitz breaks. "Him, still?" "It's not his fault." "You never give up, do you?" Sick, he hobbles to the bathroom; Coombs, "like some bony spider," photographs him.
- Lemming unravels. To "Poor Butterfly" he rolls under the piano: "What am I now?"
- Mary Anne fights back. In the kitchen during "John Henry," four hands pounding, Coombs aims at her; she hurls a plate that bursts above his head.
A crash. The bathroom is locked; she screams "He's killed himself!" Tweany wakes "with massive reluctance," fetches a key, and finds Nitz passed out by the toilet with a welt on his forehead. Sent to phone a doctor, she stops in the doorway: Beth has stripped and is dancing, "large and pale and gleaming," Lemming strums, Coombs photographs her "again and again."
The raid. Seeing Tweany watch, Coombs screams a racial slur: "Get out or I'll kill you!" Tweany: "This is my house... I do what I want in my house." Sirens; three policemen shove past Mary Anne, who hides in the wet shrubs. Tweany, Beth (in Tweany's overcoat), Coombs and Lemming go in a patrol car. A "dignified Negro man" downstairs watches "with righteous solemnity," the implied caller.
Upstairs she finds Beth's clothes, Coombs's camera and drops of blood where Beth's bare feet met the broken bulbs. She gets Nitz to the couch, his head in her lap. "They missed me," he says with pride. "Only the two of us left, now." A bird calls; dawn is an hour off.
Beth's repertoire. Liszt wrote one mature sonata, in B minor (1853) [Britannica; Yale Music Library]; "B-flat" is a slip. Till the End of Time is a 1945 pop song (Kaye and Mossman, a Perry Como hit) built on Chopin's A-flat Polonaise, Op. 53 [UCSB DAHR; MusicBrainz], so Tweany sings the jukebox lyric over Beth's concert original.
Three performances fail. Lemming's satire meets indifference, Tweany's sincerity is put to use, Beth's seduction ends in a cell. Only Nitz, who refuses to perform, is left with the girl.
The Remington .32
All four were booked for disturbing the peace and disorderly conduct. On "his first full day of freedom" Daniel Coombs lists his wife's men: Schilling, "an Italian boy who ran a vegetable concession," music pupils, then Tweany. "It could go no further."
| Time | Coombs |
|---|---|
| Morning | An hour choosing "a tarnished Remington .32 repeating pistol" |
| Woods | Shoots at birds, then a spaniel |
| 10:00 | Tweany's door locked; car greased |
| After noon | Mary Anne lets herself in, cleans |
| 2:00 | Tweany and Beth arrive |
Corky. Past the highway, rusty since the National Guard, he shoots two boys' springer spaniel, then steps out, asks "What happened?" and hands one a ten-dollar bill for the vet. From a quarter mile off he fires toward them again.
At a Standard station he demands "detergent oil, ten-thirty weight." Waiting on Elm Street at 11:30, he hears Berlioz's Roman Carnival and wonders if it is an opera: "Schilling would know." The shop is "too risky": "Max Figuera would be hanging close by."
Mary Anne opens Tweany's door with her own key; a vacuum roars. At two Tweany and Beth climb the stairs "like a pair of mud wasps." Coombs jogs toward the house, hand in pocket.
Gun and overture. Remington's .32 automatic, the Model 51, was made about 1921 to 1927 [Remington Society of America], so "tarnished" fits. Roman Carnival (1844) is a concert overture from Berlioz's opera Benvenuto Cellini [IMSLP].
Flat narration. The dog and the oil change get the same calm sentences. Max's surname, Figuera, appears for the first time.
Poor Miss Mary Anne
Free until her three o'clock shift, she asks Arnold Gordon for a job at the Pacific Park Leader: sixteen employees, mostly typesetters: no. A wedding date? "No, and there isn't going to be unless he wises up." Gordon: "You're an idealist." Alone, he sees her generation as "Blunt, without piety," able to "see through sham," and feels ashamed.
At Bobo's drive-in a boy from Pacific High plays a record; she names it: "Earl Bostic's 'Sleep.'" She claims ulcers; he prescribes cabbage juice and offers a ride. "Go fly a kite." To three-year-old Joan Louise Mosher and her camellia she is gentle: children, "like Negroes, seemed to mean no harm." She remembers her grandfather's "giant strides."
At the Elm Street flat she changes into jeans, washes dishes, rips clean shirts for rags, scrubs the floor, then sweeps cobwebs onto it. The vacuum blows dust in her face. "How could she put in order the corruption of years?
Two o'clock. "She likes to" clean, Tweany tells Beth. They find her asleep, frowning, and shriek with laughter: "Poor Miss Mary Anne." Coombs bursts in, fires wild and screams a slur. Tweany drags him by the neck to the sink and pulls an ice pick while the women kick and claw: "they'll string you up and lynch you." Coombs breaks free and falls the whole outside flight.
Beth: "He fell... My husband." Tweany, straightening his tie: "Those cops... they're going to be mad." Mary Anne phones. "You were going to kill him." "It was, for her, the final straw." Yet she sends him to make sure Beth "won't say anything about" the ice pick. A policeman from "the other night": "I don't remember you." Over Coombs's body she thinks only that she will miss work.
Period detail. Bostic's "Sleep" (King 4444, 1951) is a jump-style alto version of a 1923 song [King discography], hardly "Progressive jazz." Stanford's Garnett Cheney reported in 1949 that ulcer patients on a litre of cabbage juice a day healed fast [California Medicine 70:10]. Whether Coombs is dead is left open.
Disillusion without escape. She stops believing in Tweany, is laughed at, and still covers for him.
Thank You for Buying the Record
On "a morning in early December" Schilling sweeps his doorway to Handel's Water Music. Mary Anne appears: "I thought you opened at eight." He has hired "Nobody"; Beth Coombs sometimes helps. "You heard about her husband, didn't you?" "Yes." Asked if he remembers her, he is "deeply moved": "You're the girl who wanted a job." On the window ledge, heels off, she audits him: three booths now, is he "making a profit?" Lemming's tapes went to L.A., "but nothing has come of it yet." She thought him "silly."
Coombs, dead
Ch12 left the fall open; here Schilling is "relieved that Coombs was dead": "the mistake of five years ago had finally ceased to plague him." He bares a scar: Coombs broke his wrist with a tire iron, "Then my man Max showed up." Why? "Nothing like that at all." The couple's "manias jigsaw": Danny was expelled "for peeping the girls' gym", later the camera "was his roaming eye"; Beth, an artists' model, met him through his "girl-picture agency." "I'm not sorry to have him gone." Mary Anne: "That's the wrong attitude... He was a human being, wasn't he?" She wore heels "so I'd look older." "You're twenty." "You're a wizard."
The job, on her terms
"Do I get it or not?" "You get it": $250 a month, a five-day week. "Good God, it had been four months. He had waited for her that long." Flats, "But definitely stockings." Then: "Can I have ten dollars right now?" "Because I'm broke." "Maybe I'll never see you again."
At 1:30 she returns with Paul Nitz, repaid his ten dollars and begged to "chaperone" her ("Sure I'm scared"); he offers to "challenge him to a duel". Nitz tests Schilling with "Arnie Scheinburg"; Schilling corrects him to Schönberg, of the Gurre lieder, and is asked whether he feels "cut off from the broad masses." Mary Anne counts the till, sweeps and wants "the counter back": a girl who borrowed money, "set her own moment of appearance" and announced her own tasks.
- His creed. Know every customer by name; answer a Dvořák request with Smetana, Brahms, Suk and Mahler. A new buyer "becomes dependent on that salesperson," so never sell him short: "We're not selling gum or soda pop."
- Her test. Over Nitz's Chávez percussion: does he like it? "No... I don't care for experiments in pure sound." He is "a vocal collector," for lieder; music is "my whole life."
- Her town. "Anyone who would live here is a moron": Jake Lovett, Dave Gordon, "Drinking malts." "You came from outside."
The sale she refused. Schilling's creed and Mary Anne's veto are suitability in miniature: do not sell what the customer cannot use, and value the lifetime relationship over the till.
He knows his stock. Gurre-Lieder is Schoenberg's, premiered in Vienna on 23 February 1913 [Wiener Symphoniker; IRCAM]. Chávez's Toccata for Percussion dates from 1942 [OFCM]. The Schwann catalogue began in October 1949 [The Atlantic, 1964].
Roles reversed. The giant who frightened her now takes orders. She returns only after Tweany has failed her, and sets the terms herself.
The Elf at the Audiophile's Party
He takes her to dinner that night and, four nights later, on Saturday, up the peninsula to a party. The Dodge dates from '48, "A package deal; it came along with Max." He does not mention that his eyes are bad and he once hit a parked milk truck. She wears what look like black silk pajamas, flat slippers and a ponytail "too short" for one: "Is this too arty?" Three times she asks how many people will be there.
Schilling briefs her: host Leland Partridge is "an 'audiophile'", with "speakers as large as houses, diamond cartridges, hi-fi recordings of freight trains and glockenspiels." She once heard a Dixieland pianist with Tweany at The Paper Doll in North Beach: "he was cool." On the radio she guesses "Beethoven"; it is Haydn's Drumroll Symphony. "Will I be as old as you?" Nitz could never "do anybody harm"; Schilling admires that "in the abstract." "Oh, you and your abstract." "I don't feel good."
The party
At the door her fear goes "below the surface" and she walks in ahead of him. Partridge: "Wife? Mistress?" "Counter girl." She takes a drink from Edith Partridge and joins the young clerks around the Diotronic binaural components. Partridge: "She's got savoir faire."
The "terribly fat composer" on the couch is Sid Hethel, "a continent of tissue," fly unsnapped for his belly. His music, says Partridge, is "like a breakfast of maraschino cherries"; Schilling: Hethel "hasn't run out of melody." Hethel is calling the critic Alf Frankenstein "a chauvinist" who favours local talent; someone says Frankenstein will take the chess column from Koltanowski. He greets "Josh" with a bawdy joke about Schilling's briefcase, then, gently, takes her hand: "Doesn't she look elusive to you?" "What's that mean?" He cannot say. Mary Anne: "He's like Nitz, isn't he?... The part I'm afraid of. I wasn't afraid of him." Schilling: "Sid Hethel is the gentlest man in the world."
| Partridge | Hethel | |
|---|---|---|
| Creed | "music is a value term applied to recognized patterns of sound" | Kick bottles twice and call it "A Study in Glass"? |
| Mahler | Binaural lets him hear "as it really sounded" | "Is there a knob or dial... that makes Mahler sound good?" |
| Piano | Wanted it "completely out of the house" | Plays it: "interfered with the future of binaural sound" |
She feels her youth shows: "All I can do is tell people my name." Engineers compare the roll-off of Bogen and Fisher amplifiers; she does not know what it is. The racket from a grille behind a print is the Mahler First: "Would you teach me that?" At 9:30 she wants to stay, and asks to ride a cable car.
The demonstration wrecked. Partridge and Hethel quarrel over sound and music; then a piano starts. Hethel plays in public "on the average of once a year." Partridge: "he's ruining the entire thing." Schilling lifts Mary Anne above the crowd: "Oh, Joseph... look at him." Gasping afterwards, Hethel recalls Schilling at Schirmer and the soprano Elisabeth Schumann, "the one who sang like a child," and half-agrees to visit the Sunday open house: "Good-bye, little Miss Elf."
The drive home
Nitz heard Hethel's "Rustic" Sonata in the booth. "It's so darn confusing." Then: "Wednesday is the inquest" into Danny Coombs. "Coombs ran out and fell"; a laundry delivery man saw it, "only a couple of weeks ago." If they say the wrong thing, "Tweany will go to the flea-bee." He is "strutting around... Now he has a free field with Beth. Good for him."
She sleeps; he carries her up, "about as much as four cartons of records." At the locked door: "We went out together, didn't we?" He kisses her near the mouth; she clings, then stiffens: "No." "We can't go in there; she's in there." She leads him back down the hall.
Real names at a fictional party. Alfred Frankenstein was the Chronicle's music critic from 1934 to 1965 [Archives of American Art]; George Koltanowski's chess column there ran from 9 May 1948 to 2000 [chesshistory.com]. Elisabeth Schumann died in New York on 23 April 1952 [Library of Congress authorities]. The Paper Doll, 524 Union Street (1949-1961), was an early gay supper club [FoundSF]. Hethel and the Diotronic system appear to be invented.
Two kinds of men. She sorts people by what she fears in them, "The hard part." Hethel and Nitz lack it; whether Schilling does is the question the kiss raises.
The Stockroom
Holding his hand she hurries past the Dodge ("Not the car") toward the shop. "Please, Joseph... I don't want to go there," she says of his home. "I'm afraid." He offers to leave her; "Don't leave." She wants to be "downstairs, where it's safe." He bangs his knee on a display table, locks the door; she lights the office heater: "Getting itself warm... nothing else."
"Joseph... why did you kiss me?" "Because I love you." "Are you sure that's it?" When she heads for the basement he shouts and she freezes on the stairs: "I can't stand being shouted at." "I'm afraid something will happen to me... It goes back a long way." She only wanted the Silex coffeepot, drying on the packing table.
What she tells him
- Panic. "I always wanted a place I could run to", but nobody let her in, "or it wasn't where I wanted to be after all."
- Her key. She has come down at night to play records and sit with the door locked. A policeman's flashlight found her; she told him she was "about as okay as I had ever been. But not really okay enough."
- The scar. At eleven she tugged a cat out of her mother's cake bowl, got scratched, and backed through a glass cupboard door.
- God. Stern, lecturing, he reminded her of "the picture of God in Sunday school." "I'm not God," he says. "God's an old-fashioned reactionary."
| July (Ch5) | December (Ch15) | |
|---|---|---|
| Touch | Takes her arm on the sidewalk | Arms round her shoulders |
| Her fear | "You shouldn't have touched me." | "the old image had come back" |
| His move | Grabs her arm again | "Motion would have been a mistake" |
| Result | Refuses the job | "I feel safe" |
He holds her lightly because "it was important that she be able to get away." Then he watches "his large, reddish hands" undo her shirt as if they were someone else's. "Did you do that? You did do it, didn't you?" "Yes." She undresses and tells him to hurry. The sex on the packing table is described explicitly and is summarised here. "It was always something that happened to me; nothing I did." This time it was hers.
It took ten minutes: "If they had, instead, gone up and put on the coffee, it would just now be ready." She shakes herself "like an animal" and wants "hotcakes and ham and coffee."
What the book does not name. He is 58 (Ch16), she is 20 and in her first week on his payroll, and she arrives panicky and half asleep. Dick gives her the decisive words and has Schilling hold still while "the old image" returns, so the scene reads as her choice; her "It goes back a long way" points to the father of Ch2 and Ch4. The age and employment gap goes unremarked.
A safe place, at last. She chose his ground, not his bed: the shop she "had loved" becomes the refuge she never found.
The Blue Dish
The Pacific Star Diner sits "on the rim of the slum business section": a cabbie, two workmen with the Chronicle's sporting green, a solemn Black couple. From a jukebox of "Jazz at the Phil" tunes she plays Roy Brown's "Good Rockin' Tonight," then calls it "pretty terrible." Schilling: "Those men are artists in their field." "But what you like is better." "Not necessarily." "If it isn't better, then why do you like it?" She invites the Greek counterman, "Harry" ("all Greeks are named Harry"); he is "on a diet" of orange juice. At 11:15 walking till sunrise would reach Los Gatos, where he went in 1949 with Max.
Beth, again
At Bill's car wash he recalls his first hour in town and the schoolgirl bound for Foster's Freeze, and pictures Mary Anne at that age in frankly sexual terms. She "hated school." "Buy me something": he picks a simple clay dish glazed a light speckled blue. In a chained picnic park where the kids drank beer to a Zenith portable, he notes "the other one has the duck." She wants Japan: "we'll go there first." If she dropped the dish? "I'd get you another."
From 11:45 they walk the highway two hours to the Golden Glow tavern. "I can't go any farther." "Neither can I." The Yellow Cab costs $9.85; she wants to hike again "When we have the proper shoes." A kiss on the cheek; she keeps the dish. He then remembers his Dodge, parked yards away, "cold and repellent."
Records and recall. Brown recorded "Good Rockin' Tonight" for DeLuxe in 1947; Wynonie Harris's 1948 cover reached no. 1 R&B [Wikipedia; Tulane Music Rising]. "Foster's Freeze" is spelled right here, so Ch6's "Poster's Freeze" was a misprint. Her "all Greeks" quip passes unchallenged, and Schilling adds one of his own.
Made young. A man of fifty-eight who gave up driving walks till two and forgets his car. His Beth story shifts again, and the narrator says so.
She's Got Your Hair
She phones at ten. He is dressing: "I was up at nine." Breakfast if he will "pick up the Sunday paper." Door open on bacon, eggs and the New York Philharmonic; brown slacks, white shirt. "The blimp" (her roommate) "is out" till late: church, lunch, a show. He has quit cigars. "She's a drip."
After breakfast almost nothing is said, yet "the amount of their understanding" is there. A Chopin concerto: "somewhat cheap." "Anybody can enjoy music; it's disliking it that takes training." Her discs are Cal Tjader and Oscar Peterson; Phyllis plays mambo. "I can't afford" her own place. Bruno Walter left Austria in '38, he says, about three weeks before the Mahler Ninth; he promises Walter's Song of the Earth with Kathleen Ferrier. "Play it for me now." Not at her place: the roommate will return.
His place, then the hunt
At three-thirty: redwood panels, picture window, wood smell. Deposit fifty dollars; she has $1.36. "I'll pay for it." He wants to. The owner: "How old is your daughter?" Mary Anne is next door. "She's got your hair. But not quite so red as yours." Receipt in her name. "She's got your hair" names the truth under the surface.
They haul cartons in the Dodge; he wears a Baltimore sweatshirt whose giver's name is gone, and skips the Sunday record concert. She cooks veal; he mashes potatoes. "My mother's a fool." Ed is a "Little shrimp" in leather jacket and steel glasses who grins at the TV. Then: fifteen or sixteen, home at two in a gown; Ed on the couch among beer cans; dress over her face; he did not finish because Rose lit the room. Afterwards a joke, a game. "Christ." She mentions fiancé Dave Gordon. "Dinner's ready."
Walter's chronology, Schiøtz's age. Walter recorded Mahler's Ninth live with the Vienna Philharmonic on 16 January 1938; Anschluss and exile came in March [Library of Congress NRPB; Mahler Foundation]. Schilling has the order backwards. Walter's Das Lied with Ferrier is May 1952 [Mahler Foundation]. Schiøtz (b. 1906) was ~47 in late 1953, not "late fifties"; a 1946 tumour operation cost him his tenor highs [henrikengelbrecht.dk].
Father and daughter. The landlady's mistake is the chapter's thesis: he pays, she plans, and the town already reads them as kin.
He's Just Too Old
At eight, after dinner, they load leftover store paint into the Dodge, both "fearful." "I'm scared." He fetches Paul Nitz, who must reach the Wren before twelve. They pile her cartons in the redwood kitchen, open every window, and each take a room: rollers, rubber-based yellow, cold night air. Nitz softens paint with a coat hanger. She works in jeans, T-shirt and bandana, paint on cheeks and bare feet; her work is "thorough and scrupulous." She will not sleep at Phyllis's: bedding and clothes are here.
In the bedroom Nitz offers a cigarette and Schilling is thrown five years back: Beth painting a kitchen chair in halter and shorts, songs for Allison and Hirsch, the pressure of her body. Old images blur: Beth, Mary Anne, a Baltimore redhead named Barbara. Nitz: "She's a nut, but she's okay." "Mary takes things too seriously... You ever in your life heard her laugh?" "I've seen her smile." "She's a little kid wandering around lost, looking for somebody to find her." She pads in, roller leaking: "This is my house... I could throw both of you out." He sweeps her up to the open sill: "Out you go." She kicks, screams, then smiles: he is "no good at painting" because he is "nearsighted as hell."
Scotch and the sidewalk
At ten-thirty Schilling brings a fifth of Glayva from the glove box. Nitz's face goes "avid": "angel pee, pure and simple." She may have "a tablespoonful"; she grabs, gets an inch in a plastic cup, smells "gasoline," gulps, reaches for water. Nitz: "You better stay away from me awhile." Nitz: it is "not for kids." Schilling feels Nitz's "deep jealousy" and knows it is "just and right"; he has taken her from Nitz's world. They work to eleven-thirty; his counter-bruise knee is swollen. "I'm getting old." Nitz leaves for the Wren; Schilling gives him the bottle in a paper bag and drives him over. She rides along, lonely in the unfinished flat. Outside the fat red doors he suggests going in; she refuses. Then Nitz says it: "He's just too old." "It is good," she answers tightly. "Nothing's as good as you think, Mary." Schilling drives off; Nitz vanishes into the bar with the bag.
| Nitz | Schilling | |
|---|---|---|
| On Mary | "a little kid... looking for somebody to find her" | "I think a lot of her" |
| On the match | "He's just too old" | "Some of the nicest people... strung Jesus up" |
| Gesture | Lifts her to the sill; keeps the Glayva | Gives Nitz the bottle; "Leave her alone" |
The empty bed
On the drive he asks if she is sure; Phyllis has "plenty of loot." She plans prints, mats, clothes for another party. She grabs the wheel in a taunt; he pries her hand loose: "Somebody ought to paddle you." "You sound like my parents." Upstairs the wet ceilings glitter. "It's so barren." She will not stay "half-finished." Hotel: no. "Do you want to stay at my place?" Fatigue invents the offer. He leads her in, shows the double bed, goes for essentials; she unfastens her belt, strips without looking at him, climbs in naked. "Turn out the light." He sits on the edge: she can stay "until" the paint is finished midweek. "Fine." The rug, she says, "looks like water"; the bed seems to float. He locks her in and collects her things from the reeking flat. Back: bed warm, clothes gone. Note on the record cabinet: stay with family tonight, "Until we're really sure," "Love, Mary." He crumples it. "Oh, Christ." He had failed; he had let them drag her away.
One cool line on the bedroom. She undresses in front of him and gets into his bed alone; nothing sexual happens. The crisis is the note, not the body.
Glayva and age. Glayva is a real Scottish liqueur (whisky base with honey and spices), marketed from the 1940s; calling it plain "scotch" is loose [producer histories]. Nitz's charge ("too old") restates the landlady's "daughter" reading from Ch17 without solving it.
Propitiation. The gifted bottle buys Nitz off for an evening; the sidewalk sentence buys nothing. She chooses her parents' house over his bed, and frames it as caution.
Twenty Dollars a Month
At the Reynolds kitchen Rose watches her pour Post Toasties. "Tell me who you're sleeping with." "Just so it isn't" a slur; Mary Anne says it is not. Rose has heard of "a singer at a bar" who is Black, and of a Black man who killed a white man and made bail. She talks diaphragms and friends. Ed appears with lunch pail: "Where have you been the last few months." "Has she started to swell?" Rose pushes into the bedroom: "When was the last time?" Meaning her period; "Last month sometime." Rose forces a hand under her clothes and into her hard belly while Ed watches from the door; Mary Anne screams, throws a shoe, shoves them out, slams the door. Outside they confer; she sobs and plans. Forty dollars still hides in the old purse. She dresses in a dark red suit.
Eaton, Mrs. Lessley, the flat abandoned
At nine she finds Taft Eaton sweeping outside the Wren. She wants "something cheap" in the colored section; the narrator says she needs the comforting presence of Black people. He blames her for Carleton's legal trouble and for losing him to "that big blonde," then writes an address: dump, drunks, "sewer rats... As big as dogs." The house sits between a surgical supply and a TV shop; overturned wine bottle on the porch. Mrs. Mary Anne invents First Presbyterian and Bible reading. She takes the vacant room.
At nine-thirty she unlocks the redwood flat, does not enter: paint smell, cartons, sodden rollers. From downstairs she phones a Yellow Cab. The landlady arrives mid-load: "I'm not renting it." No deposit back: "I'm realistic." "You're getting a free fifty bucks." Landlady threatens to call "your father"; Mary Anne laughs: "Father Joseph, the best father I could hope for. The best goddamn old father in the world." Cabbie: "Girlie, you're nuts" leaving redwood for this. Meter $1.70, tip $2, room $20 a month in advance. Mold, frayed carpet, rocking chair, plywood closet; neon DOCTOR CAMDEN CREDIT DENTIST; she drawers the Jesus-with-lambs print. At least it is "paid for with her own money."
Beth's version
Tweany and Beth find her: Eaton's tip. Shaved, oiled, cologne; she has the heavy bag. They stopped at the store (Joe said she was out), the unlocked flat, and Phyllis's. Subject: the Wednesday inquest. She was served a subpoena, filed it in a carton, and forgot. "If you got served... you have to show up." They sit on the bed. She got tired of "Oregon apples." Beth alone (Tweany sent for warm Golden Glow): the bra question, then 1948, Washington, winter, she was twenty-four. "So you're not the first." Cabin so "nothing could interfere"; songs unpublished until "enough water had gone under the bridge." "Joe Schilling... wants his women." Mary Anne: so the bed was the price of publication. Beth flushes. Mary Anne links Danny's flashbulbs and the naked dance to modelling: "You're a whore." Beth fires back: keeping a job the same way? "That's not what happened." "My God, you're a sentimental whore." Beth claims a sick headache, calls the building the dirtiest she has entered, and goes; Tweany follows. Mary Anne joins the midmorning crowd.
Symphony playing; she walks past Max's broom before she sees the counter. "Look who showed up." Schilling: "I was beginning to worry." Coat downstairs; student gone; new Victor shipment; he is "Like a steel plank." She sends him for coffee. "Why is it up to me?" He stares, clears his throat; she turns to a customer instead. She can tell him about the room later. Or not at all.
Assault staged as concern. Rose's forced abdominal check and Ed's pregnancy quiz are written as parental policing; the chapter does not treat them as care. The racial slur and the newspaper lynching talk sit in Rose's mouth without authorial apology. Mrs. Lessley's house rules (radio, bath curfews) read as period boarding-house practice, not verified against a named ordinance.
Own money, own mold. She trades Schilling's fifty-dollar flat for a twenty-dollar room she can name as hers. Beth's confession confirms the publishing-for-sex bargain Mary Anne had only half heard.
Mrs. Lessley: landlady of the tall narrow rooming house; rents usually to Black tenants; Bible-and-quiet tests. Rose Reynolds: forces the body check. Beth: reframes 1948 as transaction, then flees the word "whore."
The Corner Chair
La Poblana again: their first-day restaurant, candles, checkered cloths, adobe, ivy railing, Spanish-costumed trio. She says "It's peaceful here" but sits "like a little ivory rod," wary, shut off. He orders dolma (rice and beef in grape leaves); she wants "something new." Waiter: no grape leaves in winter, cabbage till April or May. She takes coffee only. Beth and Tweany "looked dire" at the shop; they found her. "The inquest." "What's going to happen to us?" "Nothing is going to happen to us." "Joseph, for Christ's sake, do something!"
He talks around the fear: Dave Gordon, Max's old car-rental boredom, his own wish to retire into a sleepy town. Escape cities: New York or San Francisco, not Los Angeles (smog "mostly propaganda"). Driving school, two or three weeks; light coupés, 1951-53 Ford or Chevrolet, maybe a two-door Olds with hydramatic. Her biggest choice: marry, or a profession. She hated dress design; once thought of nursing; "For a little while I thought of being a nun." "Don't withdraw." Twelfth-grade tests: manual and clerical skill, weak art, decent IQ; sociology paper on social welfare; assembly speech on race relations. Stanford is costly; she "never got anything out of school." He opens the black notebook.
| Plan | His note |
|---|---|
| Town | Leave Pacific Park |
| Housing | Alone: North Beach, Marina, Fillmore, or swank Stonestown |
| Job A | Solo office for a doctor, lawyer, architect (glass, bricks, recessed light) |
| Job B | Giant firm: Shell, Kaiser, Bank of America |
| Her idea | A city record store, "Like Sherman Clay" |
The kick
He thinks he has reached her. Then she says what she did that morning: rented a room, moved by cab, told the landlady to "go jump in the creek." She will repay the fifty. Address? "I'm not going to tell you where it is." "I'm quitting" the store. He offers money over months, wholesaler contacts, Sid Hethel. "I'm going somewhere else." "Don't ask me." All his years and countries feel useless against "This one, thin, frightened, small-town girl." "I just want people to leave me alone." Softly: "I love you." He reaches. She watches the hand as if it were separate, then kicks his ankle hard and scrambles up; coffee spills down her skirt. He snuffles with pain. She walks to a solitary varnished chair in the corner, folds her hands, and sees him shrunken at the table. Patrons become "fish-faces." He does not follow.
A young couple with two children about nine prepare to leave. He asks them to take "that girl sitting there" back to town. The wife speaks to her; Mary Anne goes. He pays, crosses the empty lot to the Dodge, looks for their car, finds nothing. Presently he drove alone back to town.
Stonestown was not an insurance town. Mary Anne says "Some insurance company built it"; Stonestown (opened 1952) was developed by the Stoneson brothers [outsidelands.org; Wikipedia]. Nearby Parkmerced was the Metropolitan Life project [WNP; PCAD]. She may be mixing the two. Sherman Clay was a real San Francisco music retailer. Winter cabbage for "dolma" is ordinary restaurant practice, not a specialty claim.
Masterstroke missing. He scripts her future in ink and then says the one sentence that ends the evening. Love, spoken, drives her to the corner chair; a stranger's family finishes the rescue he cannot.
Two job architectures. His advice splits small professional practice (high agency, thin bench) from large impersonal systems (Shell, Kaiser, Bank of America: room to advance, specialized roles). The same fork still shows up in career and org design: boutique control versus platform scale. Her counter-move (another record shop) keeps the skill and refuses his geography of safety.
Leave Her Alone
Dropped downtown by the family, she walks home past the porch heap of wine bottles, leans on her door "for a long, long time" among unpacked cartons, and lies on the bed, arms at her sides. Morning finds her staring at the ceiling.
The shop without her
At nine Schilling sweeps the sidewalk himself. Max Figuera arrives picking his teeth: "I didn't think she would." He is to come in every day, "Until Christmas, at least." "I told you so." Max merges her with the high-school girl of the first afternoon ("The one drinking the milkshake"): "Small-town girls, they're the worst of all. They sell it high." Schilling sends him to check a Columbia shipment. At one-thirty Dave Gordon, in yellow uniform ("I'm her fiancé"), no longer knows where she lives. "Leave her alone."
Ed at the door
At seven-thirty, over a Decca Christmas order, Gordon returns in a suit with Ed Reynolds from the service truck. Ed is slender, middle fifties, trembling, torn jacket, glasses too small, voice "thin, shrill and unpleasant"; he fears she ran with "colored people" and a man who "murdered a white man." Schilling sees "nothing evil or sadistic in the man." "Go on home... and mind your own business." They knock again; he threatens arrest, then lies: "I gave her her money and she left." When they wait silently at the counter, he tosses them a note: a record wholesaler on Sixth Street, San Francisco.
Alone, he reasons. He can help her "only by not hurting her." "She had been trained to be afraid." Guilt "spread out and diffused itself over everybody," even onto a stranger kicking a tire across the street. "It was not a moral issue. It was a practical issue." Her world might exist "in a hundred years." "He loved her and others loved her, but that was of no use. What she needed was success." He phones the Lazy Wren, tells Nitz to ask Taft Eaton ("He found her a place"), and starts the Capitol order.
Nitz in the doorway
A man fills her unlocked doorway. "It didn't take you long." It is not Schilling. Nitz strokes her hair: "This is sure a ratty-looking dump." "And you ran right into yourself." He lights her cigarette and the gas heater and will care for her: "You took care of me once." He has two weeks off. She plans the ferry to Oakland, North Beach, Kid Ory at the Hangover Club, Playland's slides. "You're a kid." "So are you." Then Schilling returns to her: "How can I live like this?" "You can't." She hurls the cigarette: "I'm not going to die here in this rat hole." Nitz wraps her in the bedcovers and carries her past a hostile Mrs. Lessley, through the slums and past the Leader office, to his own room.
Real places, one slip, one dropped thread. Kid Ory played San Francisco's Club Hangover from May 1953 to November 1954 [Stanford SFTJF; Bailey, Ory timeline]. The Oakland ferry ran until July 1958 [Library of Congress HABS]. Sixth Street is in South of Market, not the Mission District [SF OCII]. Schilling's "nothing evil" verdict on Ed ignores the assaults of Ch4, 17 and 19, and the Wednesday inquest is never mentioned again.
The giant lets go. He lies to her father, misdirects her pursuers, and routes her to Nitz. His last act of love is to leave her story.
The Light Changed
Autumn in San Francisco: old men with L'Italia on the benches, the Catholic church, Coit Tower "like a pre-Christian column." She wears a white smock and copper hoops. A "kindly middle-aged lady" admires the baby; Mary Anne invents "seven other children," then says his father studies afternoons and plays "Bop piano" at the Club Presto. The lady prefers Richard Tauber and Maytime. "Go cry somewhere else." She teases a pigeon and sees the cycle of life: "They could not be touched. They were safe." Nitz ambles up broke: "I guess I gave it to you." "The light changed" and they cross with the crowd.
| Thread | 1953 | Epilogue |
|---|---|---|
| Wish | "a little boy and a little girl" | a son; sons to come |
| Birds | the park duck | a pigeon |
| Fear | "trained to be afraid" | "not frightened" |
Checked. Wikipedia is right that she marries Nitz: the text twice says "her husband." Maytime (MGM, 1937) ends with its hero, also a Paul, dying in the heroine's arms [Wikipedia]. Tauber died in 1948 [Royal College of Music]. No route from rat hole to bench is shown.
Main Points
- Fear is learned, and it drives every choice. Schilling names it in Ch21: "She had been trained to be afraid." Ed's "old, terrible game" (Ch2) and "one certain night" (Ch4) teach Mary Anne that a man's hand means danger, so she refuses the job when Schilling takes her arm (Ch5) and kicks him when he reaches for her hand (Ch20).
- The giant is plural, and every giant shrinks. The grandfather of the "giant strides" is the one love she trusts; Tweany, who "could lift a truck," turns out to have a leaking building and a repossessed Buick; Schilling, who "towered over everything," ends shrunken at a restaurant table.
- Safety has to be her own choice. She refuses his car and his home but leads him to the stockroom: "It was always something that happened to me; nothing I did" (Ch15). She swaps his $50 redwood flat for a $20 room "paid for with her own money" (Ch19).
- Love as rescue fails; love that lets go works. Schilling's notebook plan and "I love you" end in the corner chair (Ch20). His last acts are a decoy address for her father and a call that sends Nitz: he can help her "only by not hurting her" (Ch21).
- She ends with the man who sees through her. Nitz spots "Another plan" (Ch3), calls Tweany "a fake" (Ch9), is left alone with her after the raid (Ch10), calls Schilling "just too old" (Ch18) and carries her out of the rat hole (Ch21). In Ch22 he is her husband.
- Age is the gap nobody closes. A landlady takes her for his daughter, "She's got your hair" (Ch17); she laughs about "Father Joseph" (Ch19). He wants a lover at fifty-eight; what she can accept from him looks more like a father's care, and the mismatch, not a villain, ends the affair.
- Stories grow in the telling. "Personable" becomes "must be attractive", a hand on the arm becomes "he did something to me" (Ch6), and a period excuse covers a missed day (Ch5). Mary Anne revises facts into a version she can live with.
- Beth's cabin is retold three ways, as "his mistake, five years ago" (Ch7), as a night when she was "available" (Ch16), and as a publishing-for-sex trade.
- Performance is tested against authenticity. Tweany, born in Oakland, sings "Strange Fruit" as "bitter terror"; Lemming's satire is ignored; Beth's song is a seduction (Ch8-10). Only Nitz, who refuses to perform, is left with the girl.
- Music marks class and generation. "Music for connoisseurs" against Hank's Music Bar, lieder against bop, Schilling's 78s against her Cal Tjader and Oscar Peterson; in Ch22 she dismisses Tauber and Maytime as "square."
- Selling well is a form of care. Schilling's creed ("We're not selling gum or soda pop") and Mary Anne's refusal to sell Nitz a record he cannot play (Ch13) make the shop the one place she is competent and sure.
- Bad news is information. The rat in the fabric shed (Ch2) shows owners who hear warnings as insolence; Mary Anne's directness is the grandfather's legacy and the town's irritant.
- Touch tracks the plot. Arm grabbed (Ch5), carried by Tweany (Ch6), neck gripped by Eaton (Ch8), carried by Schilling (Ch14) and at last by Nitz (Ch21); the epilogue's pigeons "could not be touched. They were safe."
- The small town is a closed game. Its "odd little games" (Ch2), a place "too frail to survive dislike", and "Anyone who would live here is a moron" (Ch13). Escape to San Francisco, guessed by Gordon and planned by Schilling, happens with Nitz.
- The colour line runs through everyone. Max, Ed, Rose and Coombs use slurs; Eaton tells her to stay with her own race (Ch8); Mrs. Lessley usually rents "only to colored" (Ch19). Mary Anne's feeling that Black people are "like herself" is shown as projection (Ch4).
- Violence arrives sideways. Coombs shoots a boy's dog and then buys "detergent oil" in the same calm sentences (Ch11); his fall is reported, not mourned, and Schilling is "relieved that Coombs was dead" (Ch13).
- Responsibility spreads until no one holds it. Schilling finds "nothing evil or sadistic" in Ed, imagines guilt spreading even to a stranger kicking a tire, and concludes "It was not a moral issue. It was a practical issue" (Ch21).
- Money is independence. $250 a month, "Can I have ten dollars right now?" (Ch13), the deposit she abandons and the room she pays for track how far she lets anyone keep her.
- Women are priced by men. Tweany's "small and bony and frigid" (Ch8), Beth's songs published after the cabin (Ch19), Max's "They sell it high" (Ch21).
- The peace is real but unexplained. It "had come with her baby" (Ch22), and no route from the rat hole to the park bench is shown.
The book as a whole. Dick wrote it 1953 to June 1955 and Arbor House published it in April 1987 [pkdickbooks.com]. Edwin Fadiman Jr.'s June 1955 letter, which led to Dick's rewrite, asked that Nitz, "Mary's eventual choice," be made white rather than a Black man with a disability [Rickman, To the High Castle 308, via philipdick.com], so the blond pianist who marries her was probably shaped by that request. The Don Giovanni frame, with Schilling "seduced and destroyed by a young woman," comes from Wikipedia, citing Rickman (1984); it is not independently verified, and the printed novel fits it loosely, since Schilling is not destroyed but lets go. Gillespie (Nova Mob, 1990) dates the action to mid-to-late 1953, calls the Empory Avenue paragraph "perhaps Phil Dick's best," and sees the town as "basically only a commuter suburb of San Francisco," against Bill's "this a complete town" [philipdick.com]. Weak points: the Wednesday inquest into Coombs, built up from Ch14 to Ch20, is never resolved, and Tweany, Beth, Lemming and Phyllis simply drop away. Ed's abuse (Ch2, 4, 17) and Rose's forced body check (Ch19) are shown plainly, yet Schilling finds "nothing evil" in Ed and nobody answers for them. Slurs stand unanswered, and the age and employment gap in Ch15 goes unremarked. The strengths are the close portrait of a frightened young woman, Schilling's late chapters and the quiet epilogue.
Who's who
| Name | Role | Why they matter |
|---|---|---|
| Mary Anne Reynolds | 20, stenographer, then shop girl | The frightened heroine |
| Joseph R. Schilling | 58, owner of the Music Corner | The giant: employer, lover, lets go |
| Paul Nitz | Intermission pianist at the Wren | Sees through her; marries her |
| Carleton B. Tweany | Singer at the Wren | First giant; affair, then contempt |
| Max Figuera | Schilling's driver | Sneers; "I told you so" |
| Beth Coombs | Potter, songwriter | Schilling's 1948 affair; takes Tweany |
| Danny Coombs | Her husband, photographer | Stalks Tweany with a gun; dies in a fall |
| Ed and Rose Reynolds | Her parents | Abuse and policing |
| Grandfather Reynolds | Rancher, d. 1940 | The one love she trusted |
| Dave Gordon | Gas-station attendant | The "fiancé" she avoids |
| Arnold Gordon | His father, at the Leader | Sees her generation's bluntness |
| Taft Eaton | Owner of the Wren | Bars her; finds her a room |
| Phyllis Squire | Roommate, waitress | Tweany's choice for her |
| Chad Lemming | Topical singer | Satire nobody hears |
| Mrs. Lessley | Rooming-house landlady | The $20 room |
| Tom and Edna Bolden | Owners, Readymade | Rules; the concrete |
| Sid Hethel | Composer | Calls her "little Miss Elf" |
| Bill | Car-wash owner | Sees the giant from below |
About this book
Mary and the Giant by Philip K. Dick, 1987. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
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- Fear is learned, and it drives every choice. Schilling names it in Ch21: "She had been trained to be afraid." Ed's "old, terrible game" (Ch2) and "one certain night" (Ch4) teach Mary Anne that a man's hand means danger, so she refuses the job when Schilling takes her arm (Ch5) and kicks him when he reaches for her hand (Ch20).
- The giant is plural, and every giant shrinks. The grandfather of the "giant strides" is the one love she trusts; Tweany, who "could lift a truck," turns out to have a leaking building and a repossessed Buick; Schilling, who "towered over everything," ends shrunken at a restaurant table.
- Safety has to be her own choice. She refuses his car and his home but leads him to the stockroom: "It was always something that happened to me; nothing I did" (Ch15). She swaps his $50 redwood flat for a $20 room "paid for with her own money" (Ch19).
- Love as rescue fails; love that lets go works. Schilling's notebook plan and "I love you" end in the corner chair (Ch20). His last acts are a decoy address for her father and a call that sends Nitz: he can help her "only by not hurting her" (Ch21).
- She ends with the man who sees through her. Nitz spots "Another plan" (Ch3), calls Tweany "a fake" (Ch9), is left alone with her after the raid (Ch10), calls Schilling "just too old" (Ch18) and carries her out of the rat hole (Ch21). In Ch22 he is her husband.
- Age is the gap nobody closes. A landlady takes her for his daughter, "She's got your hair" (Ch17); she laughs about "Father Joseph" (Ch19). He wants a lover at fifty-eight; what she can accept from him looks more like a father's care, and the mismatch, not a villain, ends the affair.