Insight Editions · No. 198
Voices from the Street
Philip K. Dick
Philip K. Dick's realist novel follows a discontented television salesman in 1950s California as personal resentment draws him toward political extremism and violence.
A study guide to Voices from the Street 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
Voices from the Street is a mainstream novel Philip K. Dick wrote around 1952-53, the dating of editor David Hartwell and biographer Lawrence Sutin; Gregg Rickman places Dick at work on it in June 1952, the month it opens. It went unsold, and it was first published by Tor in 2007, twenty-five years after Dick's death. Sutin thinks Gather Yourselves Together (Volume 01) came two or three years earlier, while Paul Williams put Voices first. Reviewers read Cedar Groves as Oakland, and Jim Fergesson draws on Herb Hollis, owner of the Berkeley shops University Radio and Art Music, where Dick worked as a young man. The book is dedicated "To S. M." and carries an epigraph from the sociologist C. Wright Mills, from his study of the new middle class, White Collar (1951).
The story is a fall and an aftermath. Stuart Hadley, 25, is a salesman at Modern TV Sales and Service, 851 Bancroft Avenue, on $250 a month plus 5% of his sales. He has a wife, Ellen, 22, who is about to give birth, an owner who half wants to make him manager, a sister he idolised, an old college friend who still likes him, and a tidy flat. He hates all of it. The book follows him over a little more than a year as he goes looking for something larger: first a prophet, Theodore Beckheim of the Society of the Watchmen of Jesus, then a woman, Marsha Frazier, who edits a handsome and antisemitic quarterly called Succubus and turns out to live with Beckheim. Each offers him a version of what his wife names in Chapter 4, in the book's most exact sentence about him: "A hundred years ago it was called grace. It's a search for someone he can have faith in." Each lets him down, or seems to, and he lets down everyone else.
The novel tests Mills's claim that people of Hadley's kind are "betrayed by what is false within them": every outside enemy he finds, from the masses to the Jews to the store to his wife, dissolves on contact, and what is left at the end is a man with one eye, a lot with one oak tree, and a plan.
- Part One, "Morning" (Chapters 1-5). Fergesson opens his store like a god making light while Hadley wakes in a cell after a drunk (Chapter 1). An old woman with a broken radio tells him he does not belong in the store, and he answers with a shoplifted plate and a fantasy of shooting a television's eye (Chapter 2). Dinner with the Golds breaks down over war and God, and the name Succubus first appears (Chapter 3). Fergesson weighs the chain stores and the gamble of buying O'Neill's, and Ellen tells him what her husband is really looking for (Chapter 4). The florist Horace Wakefield takes Hadley to hear Beckheim, whose voice takes him over (Chapter 5).
- Part Two, "Afternoon" (Chapters 6-12). Pete is born and Fergesson sits with Ellen on a Sunday (Chapter 6); the same Sunday Hadley visits his sister Sally Sorrell and her husband Bob, who builds tracts for veterans and bullies him (Chapters 7-8). Marsha meets Hadley, believes his lie that he is "a painter" and gives him her creed over lunch (Chapters 9-10). Beckheim reads Hadley's wallet aloud, says "I can't make you well... But you can," and enrols him with a rare blue card for $1.50 (Chapter 11). That night, on the coast road, Hadley coerces Marsha, learns "I'm living with Ted," and tears up the card (Chapter 12).
- Part Three, "Evening" (Chapters 13-20). At an August dinner the Fergessons offer him the managership at $300 a month plus 1% of gross, less than he dreamed (Chapter 13). Wakefield tells him how rare the blue card was, and he finds the store firm but "not big enough to be a world" (Chapter 14). The paintings he lied about come home, and Marsha, who has left Beckheim, waits for him outside Modern (Chapter 15). At a motel in San Sebastian Heights he rapes and beats her, takes her car, lifts Pete from his bassinet and leaves him locked in the car outside a bar (Chapter 16). He is turned away from Beckheim's lecture, fights Dave Gold and is fired for a hundred dollars (Chapter 17). A night of drink in San Francisco ends with a truck (Chapter 18), a strange bed, a broken window in an empty car and a transient hotel (Chapter 19), and on Sunday his key will not fit Modern's new lock and he goes through the glass door head first (Chapter 20).
- Part Four, "Night" (Chapters 21-22). Blind in one eye, he lives with Ellen and Pete in a basement flat, scrapes cheap paint off walnut and learns to fix things (Chapter 21). Over the following year he takes manual jobs, turns down Fergesson's offer of his old job, plans a tool-rental shop, buys a lot in a farm town called Woodvalley and tells Ellen, "It isn't anybody's fault" (Chapter 22).
- The method. Dick alternates Hadley with the points of view of Fergesson, Ellen, Alice, Wakefield and Marsha, so the reader nearly always knows more than Hadley does. He works through objects (a bottle of celery extract, a wallet, a blue card, a set of keys, a stack of paintings, a Waring blender, a snow globe, a glass door) and through mirrored scenes that return, changed, at the end.
The epigraph frames the whole book. Mills wrote of the white-collar class that "They find it harder to locate their external enemies than to grapple with their internal conditions. Their seemingly impersonal defeat has spun a personally tragic plot and they are betrayed by what is false within them." Dick sets out to dramatise that sentence and, for most of the book, does. Hadley's enemies keep changing: the "masses" who watch television, the McCarthy men, the Jews in Marsha's magazine, Fergesson, Bob Sorrell, the store, the baby, Ellen. None of them holds still long enough to be fought, and each time he strikes at one he hurts someone near him. What is false within him is harder to name, and the novel gives several names for it: a grand longing with no object, a childish fury that the narrator calls "archaic," a hunger for a father who will not let him down, and a vanity that lies easily and believes its own lies.
Three would-be fathers stand over him. Fergesson is the owner who made his store out of nothing in 1932, taking it in place of about two and a quarter years of wages, who opens it each morning like a creation and calls his staff "my little flock," and who thinks late in the book that if he had had a son he would have wanted one like Hadley. Beckheim is a Black preacher of about fifty-five, born in Vinegar Bend, Alabama, with a cosmology of water and fire, who refuses the part of a father outright and hands responsibility back to Hadley. Bob Sorrell, his sister's husband, is the boom-time builder who sells veterans houses at "five bills down" and expects to get "the shacks back in six, eight years." Hadley, the only one of them with a child, abandons his.
Three women carry the cost. Ellen carries the baby, the rent, the diagnosis and in the end the man. Alice Fergesson, childless, engineers the promotion with Ellen and later tells Hadley to get out. Marsha recruits him with flattery and a creed, falls in love with him, and is raped and beaten for it, then vanishes from the book.
How the novel is built. Dick divides the book into four parts named for the hours of a day, "Morning," "Afternoon," "Evening" and "Night," and lets the day stand for a life: the morning of hope, the afternoon of choosing, the evening of collapse and a night that is, oddly, full of sun. Inside each part the point of view moves. Hadley carries most of the book, but Fergesson opens it and closes Part Three, Ellen opens and closes the marriage, Alice and Wakefield each get a chapter's opening, and Marsha gets one long passage in which she watches Hadley turn into someone else. Time is precise and slightly unreliable: the book names days, dates, prices and hours, and then lets them drift, so that five weeks from late August becomes "late-September sun" and Marsha is twenty-six in one chapter and thirty-two in another. Several scenes are told twice or answered later: the same Sunday from Ellen's side and from Hadley's, the coast road against the motel, the locked door from outside and from inside.
| Part | Chapters | Time | Main viewpoints | What it carries |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Morning | 1-5 | Thursday, June 5 to the weekend of June 7-8, 1952 | Fergesson, Hadley, Ellen, Wakefield | The store as a made world; Hadley's resentment; Ellen's diagnosis; Beckheim's sermon |
| Afternoon | 6-12 | Late June birth; a Sunday in mid-July to the following Thursday night | Fergesson, Ellen, Hadley, Marsha | Pete, the Sorrells, Marsha's recruitment, the blue card, the coast road |
| Evening | 13-20 | An August dinner; then Thursday to Sunday at the end of August | Alice, Wakefield, Hadley, Marsha, Fergesson | The promotion, the motel, Pete abandoned, the firing, San Francisco, the glass door |
| Night | 21-22 | "Late-September sun" to late July 1953 | Hadley, Ellen | The basement, the walnut, manual work, the rental plan, Woodvalley, "nobody's fault" |
Chapter map
| Ch | Title | In one line |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Thursday Morning, June 5, 1952 | Fergesson opens Modern like the first day of Genesis; Hadley wakes in a cell, is asked "What the hell are you?", steals a plate and goes home to Ellen, who kisses his "timid, anxious mouth"; he leaves without kissing her |
| 2 | "You Don't Belong Here" | An old woman with a broken radio tells him "it isn't here"; Beckheim's face on a poster; Hadley dreams of shooting a television's single eye |
| 3 | Dinner with the Golds | An Okinawa newsreel ("They grinned"), Mills in the living room, a quarrel over war and God, and the first mention of Succubus |
| 4 | Grow or Shrink | Fergesson fears the chains and eyes O'Neill's; Alice and Ellen plan a promotion; Ellen names Hadley's search: "it was called grace" |
| 5 | The Watchmen | Wakefield and the cranks gather; the memory of a girl hit with a hoe; Beckheim's sermon on natural law, the gun rack and "It will not suffice to plead that you made no choice" |
| 6 | Strawberries on Sunday | Pete is born; Fergesson sits with Ellen, finds Hadley's absence "out of our hands" and hears that he lacks discipline |
| 7 | Baby | The same Sunday at the Sorrells': Bob's tracts at "five bills" down, Sally's teasing, the boy who smashed his toys |
| 8 | The Waring Blender | Bob's single-bid haul of 342 flats' furnishings; "This is my house"; the worst quarrel of the marriage over a castoff blender |
| 9 | The Painter and the Magazine | Hadley lies that he is "a painter," Marsha believes him, and Succubus turns out to be beautifully printed hate |
| 10 | Siegfried's Parents | Marsha's creed over lunch: identity plus an enemy, a slur on Beckheim followed by "But," and the drive down the coast |
| 11 | The Blue Card | Hayes Hole, Beckheim's catechism, the wallet read aloud ("This is Stuart Hadley"), "It's up to you," and the card for a dollar fifty |
| 12 | Night on the Coast Road | Coercion that is "not a sexual thing," "I'm living with Ted," the paintings left in her car and the blue card torn into the gutter |
| 13 | Dinner at the Fergessons' | Alice's viewpoint, radiant heat, the $400 sale, the offer at $300 plus 1% of gross, and the store as a "neat little cosmos" |
| 14 | The Manager's Thursday | Wakefield's white card and "only a few dozen" blue ones; "You can't live in a store"; Alice says "Out!" |
| 15 | The Pictures Come Back | The paintings come home with a note; Marsha leaves Ted, waits outside Modern and is forced into "Yes"; "I'm suffering. And I want to share it" |
| 16 | San Sebastian Heights | Identical ranch houses, a motel entry as "Mr. and Mrs. Hadley," rape and a planned beating, Marsha's car, Pete taken |
| 17 | "I Want My Money" | Fergesson's poker cellar under the marchers, the usher who wants a white card, a slur on Dave Gold, the fight, a hundred dollars and the sack |
| 18 | The Blindfold | San Francisco at night: buses as beasts, "To pass the blindfold on," "His own fault," a trial of voices, a bar, and a truck |
| 19 | Not Even California | A German couple's bed, "My fault," a window opened expertly, "Somebody had noticed Pete," and Preovolos's hotel with maps of nowhere |
| 20 | "Let Me In!" | Stolen maps, a Hudson on easy terms, a key that will not turn, Fergesson's snow globe, the glass, "Most of him, anyhow," and "It's my fault" |
| 21 | Mister and Mrs. Mole | One eye, a basement flat, a broken mirror, repossession, walnut under white paint, and a man who is "not Stuart Hadley at all" |
| 22 | A Whole Bunch of Things | Tile at night, "I'm not coming back," tool-crib discipline, the rental plan, Olsen's "I'm a bum," Woodvalley, a calm kiss, "It isn't anybody's fault" |
Thursday Morning, June 5, 1952
About these chapter divisions. The book prints Voices from the Street in four long parts (Part One: Morning, Afternoon, Evening, Night) with no chapter numbers or titles. The novel was written around 1952-53, rejected by publishers and published only in 2007. Its epigraph, from C. Wright Mills' White Collar (1951), says these people "find it harder to locate their external enemies than to grapple with their internal conditions" and are "betrayed by what is false within them." The first chapter is the first test of that sentence.
When and where. Thursday, June 5, 1952, the novel's only fully dated morning. Two clocks run side by side. Fergesson's: 8:30 a.m. in the parking lot off Cedar Street, a few minutes on the sidewalk, the store, the Health Food Store next door, the telephone. Hadley's: 5:45 a.m. in a cell of the Cedar Groves jail, the desk, a cab, home at 6:15, back into bed by 6:30, Ellen's alarm at 8:00, then the walk along Mason Avenue to the store. Dick tells Fergesson's 8:30 first and then goes back three hours to give Hadley's dawn, so the two men's mornings arrive at the same shop door from opposite ends. The night before (Wednesday night) happens offstage and survives only in Hadley's broken memory: the library at closing, bars, the fight, the police car.
People in this chapter. Jim Fergesson: owner of Modern TV; small, muscular, middle-aged, red face "with wrinkles and wisdom," blue serge suit, cigar; drives a Pontiac (Chapter 4 gives his age as forty-two). Betty: weary, steel-spectacled woman who runs the Health Food Store next door. Olsen: Modern's "spiderlike" repairman, absent at opening. A woman on the telephone: wants her radio back. Stuart Hadley: Modern's salesman since college; blond, blue-eyed, slim, "intelligent but puffy face." Ellen Hadley: his wife, brown hair, brown eyes, weeks from giving birth. Police: a baiting cop, a desk sergeant, a third fetching the sack, two more watching. A cabdriver with a health warning. Two truck drivers in black jackets, McCarthy men, seen only in memory. On the walk: the Italian greengrocer at the Lucky Market, a jewelry-store clerk, an old lady in Wetherby's Stationery, and the waitress of the Golden State Café. Named but offstage: Sally, Hadley's sister, whom he must "pick up" today.
A sky with two hours to live
The first sentence sets the date and the weather together: "Thursday morning, June 5, 1952, came bright and hot." Moist sunlight lies over stores and streets; the "cold sprinkle of night" steams up from the lawns toward a "blue-glass sky." Dick then gives the sky a life span. It is an early-morning sky, and "soon it would bake away and shrivel": an "oppressive white haze" will drift in from the Bay and hang "lusterless over the world." But it is only eight thirty, and "the sky had two hours to live."
The joke is small and it sets the method of the whole book. Dick gives a weather report the shape of a death sentence, and a clear morning becomes a thing that will be used up by mid-morning. Every major figure in the novel will be shown in some version of this condition, bright at the start and spoiled by a haze from outside, and Hadley's whole crisis is the feeling that his own brightness has already been used up at twenty-five.
Weather as a clock. The opening paragraph runs two timers at once: the calendar (Thursday, June 5, 1952) and the sky's "two hours to live." Dick's novel is full of clocks (the alarm that "sings" in Ellen's bedroom, the clock over the counter in the next chapter, the calendar on the cash register), and they all count down toward something unwanted. The Bay haze is a real feature of the region's summer mornings, and Dick uses it as the first image of a bright thing smothered by a grey one.
Fergesson drives in
Jim Fergesson rolls down the windows of his Pontiac, pokes out an elbow and takes "vast lungfuls of damp summer-morning air." His gaze is "benign," though "distorted by a residue of indigestion and nervous fatigue," the first sign that the contented owner is not quite as contented as he looks. He drives from Cedar Street into a half-empty parking lot, parks, turns off the motor and sits a moment lighting a cigar. Other cars "slithered in." The street is waking: cars swish past, people stir, and in the cold air their movements set up "metallic echoes from the office buildings and concrete walls."
He climbs out, slams the door and crunches across the gravel, "hands in his pockets, heels clicking loudly." Dick's portrait is compact: "a small, muscular man in a blue serge suit, middle-aged, face red with wrinkles and wisdom, puffy lips twisting the column of his cigar." "Wrinkles and wisdom" is the store's own legend about its owner, and the old woman in the next chapter will repeat it in her own words: "a wise kindness in his face."
On every side merchants roll down their awnings "with elaborate arm motions," a town performing its morning. A Negro is sweeping trash with a push broom into the gutter; Fergesson "stepped through the trash with dignity," and "The Negro made no comment...early-morning sweeping machine." The ellipsis is in the text, and it lets the sentence slide from a man into a machine in one breath, the way Fergesson's attention does.
The man and the machine. The sweeper is the first Black character in the novel and he is not given a name, a face or a word; the narrative voice, close to Fergesson, turns him into an "early-morning sweeping machine." Read it as Dick's record of how a white shopkeeper of 1952 sees the street, not as the book's last word: the same novel puts a Black preacher, Theodore Beckheim, at the centre of its moral argument, and its Watchmen meetings are crowded with Black working people (Chapter 3). The period word "Negro" is the text's throughout.
The secretaries and a woman for the store
Outside the California Loan Company a group of secretaries clusters before opening: coffee cups, high heels, perfume and earrings, pink sweaters, coats tossed over "sharp shoulders." Fergesson "gratefully inhaled the sweet scent of young women." Their laughter and whispers pass back and forth, "excluding him and the street." The office opens and they "tripped inside with a swirl of nylons and coattails"; he glances back appreciatively.
Then comes a small business plan made out of desire. "Briefly, he longed for one of them, any one of them." The thought converts at once into management: "Good for the store...like the old days. A woman adds class, refinement." He runs through the options in his head:
- Bookkeeper? Rejected: better someone "where the customers can see her."
- On the floor. A woman in view "Keeps the men from swearing; keeps them kidding and laughing."
- The old days. "Like the old days" implies there was once a woman in the store, a memory Dick does not explain.
Desire turned into a staffing decision. Fergesson cannot simply want one of the secretaries; he has to make the want useful to the store. That conversion, feeling into business, is his whole character in miniature, and it is the opposite of Hadley's, whose business keeps turning into feeling. The idea of "a woman where the customers can see her" will come back in the novel's last part, where Modern's future and the women around it are bound up together.
"Morning, Jim," someone calls from Stein's MensWear. "Morning," Fergesson answers without stopping, his arm held behind him, fingers "casually trailing," the gesture of a man secure on his own block.
The store like a little old suit
In front of Modern TV Sales and Service he halts and fishes out his key, and "critically" surveys "his small, old-fashioned possession." Dick gives the shop its defining simile: "Like a little old suit, the store steamed dully in the morning sunlight." The owner wears a blue serge suit; the store is an old suit too, his second skin, and in Chapter 3 Dave Gold will call the man himself "out of another century... Virtually a living fossil."
The inventory of the morning-after shopfront:
- The sign. "The archaic neon sign was off."
- The doorway. "Debris from the night lay scattered in the entranceway."
- The windows. "The TV and radio sets in the windows were murky, uninteresting shapes."
- The clutter. "Records, signs, banners..."
- The carton. He kicks a pasteboard milk carton out of the doorway; it rolls away "caught by the morning wind."
He "plunged his key in the lock and pushed open the door." The key matters: keys run through the novel from this first page (Hadley's keys in the police sack a page later) to the last part, where a key no longer fits a lock and a glass door becomes the boundary of a world.
Let there be light
Inside, "Here no life existed." Fergesson squints and spits away "the first stale breath that hung inside the shop." In the rear "the ghostly blue of the night-light rose like marsh gas over a decaying bog." Then follows the paragraph that gives the novel its first and most quoted image, and Dick builds it as a list of switches:
- Main power. He bends down and clicks it on; "the big neon sign spluttered on," and the window lights warm "to a faint glow."
- Air. He fixes the door wide open and "caught up some of the sweet outdoor air", holding it in his lungs as he moves about the "dark damp store."
- Sets and machines. He turns on "banks of sets, display signs, fans, machinery, equipment, intercoms." "The dead things came reluctantly back to life." A radio blares, then "a long row of TV sets."
- The night-light. He "advanced on the night-light and destroyed it with a single jerk of his hand."
- The booths. He "ignited the listening booths" round the "dusty, disorganized front counter," the record-store booths where customers once played discs before buying.
- The sky. He grabs a pole and "dragged back the skylight."
- The Philco. He throws "the Philco display into whirring excitement" and carries it to the back.
- The Zenith. He "illuminated the luxurious Zenith poster."
Then the summary that turns a shopkeeper into a creator: "He brought light, being, awareness to the void. Darkness fled; and after the first moment of impatient frenzy, he subsided and rested, and took his seventh day", which turns out to be a cup of black coffee.
Genesis in a radio shop. Dick models the paragraph on the first chapter of Genesis: the void ("no life existed"), the separation of light from darkness (the night-light "destroyed"), the firmament opened (the skylight dragged back), creatures brought to life ("dead things came reluctantly back to life"), and the seventh day of rest. The joke has a serious edge. For Fergesson the store is a made world, ordered by his hand. In Chapter 13, newly promoted to manager, Hadley himself calls it "a neat little cosmos, an orderly square of firmness" set against "An infinite chaos of shifting shapes," and pictures opening it "on a bright summer morning" with the hurrying secretaries, the awnings and "the Negro sweeping trash into the gutter": this chapter's morning, imagined as his own. In the same passage he fears he will "destroy the safety of his microcosmos." Hadley's tragedy is that he lives inside another man's creation, wants it, and distrusts himself inside it.
The seven days of Modern TV. 1. Void: "Here no life existed"; stale breath, marsh-gas night-light. 2. Light: main power, neon sign, window lights. 3. Breath: the door fixed open, outdoor air held in the lungs. 4. Life: sets, signs, fans, machinery, intercoms, the "dead things" revived. 5. Darkness destroyed: the night-light killed "with a single jerk." 6. Heaven opened: listening booths lit, skylight dragged back, the Philco set whirring, the Zenith poster lit. 7. Rest: "took his seventh day," a cup of black coffee.
The brand names are exact for the period. Philco and Zenith were among the leading American radio and television makers of 1952, and the "luxurious Zenith poster" and the Philco display are the manufacturers' own promotional furniture: the creator works with materials supplied by much bigger gods. Chapter 4 will make that dependence the subject, as Fergesson weighs the chains and the distributors that could swallow a small shop.
The cups under the counter
Coffee comes from the Health Food Store next door, and Dick pauses on the evidence of how long that habit has run. Under the front counter of Modern are "piles and heaps of cups, spoons, and saucers." Among them are "Bits of stale doughnuts and buns mixed with cigarette ashes, matches, Kleenex." Dust lies over them; "years passed and new cups were added; the old were not removed."
The store's geological record. The cups are a small comic image of the shop's whole condition: an orderly ritual on top (the daily coffee) laid over years of unremoved sediment. Fergesson's creation is bright at 8:30 and filthy underneath, and Dick keeps the dirt in view: the "dusty, disorganized front counter," the "debris-littered desk" and "dusty photos of nude girls" upstairs (Chapter 2). When Hadley in Chapter 13 calls the store "an orderly square of firmness," the cups are the quiet rebuttal: the order was always laid over a heap nobody clears.
IN PRACTICE. "New cups were added; the old were not removed" is as exact a description of legacy accretion as an architect could want. Banks and large firms add systems, interfaces, reports and controls every year and rarely retire the old ones, so the estate carries layers nobody uses but nobody dares to clear. The same applies to AI work, where prompt libraries, model versions and evaluation sets pile up fast. Fergesson's morning ritual works because the clutter is out of the customer's sight; in a regulated firm, examiners and incident reviews eventually look under the counter.
Betty and the Health Food Store
As he enters, Betty "dragged herself heavily from the back" and lifts "a tired arm to greet him." She carries "a vast damp rag wadded and sopping under her arm"; her face is "lined with fatigue" and her steel-rimmed glasses sag. "Morning," he says. "Morning, Jim," she wheezes "with a weary, friendly smile," and goes for the Silex coffeemaker, the glass vacuum brewer that turns up again in Hadley's kitchen a page later.
He is not the first customer, and Dick describes the clientele with an eye that is half amused and half repelled:
- The women. "A few middle-aged women, well dressed and chatting quietly," at the counter and tables, eating cracked wheat and skim milk and drinking "an all-grain beverage."
- The salesman. In the rear, "a nattily dressed salesman from the gift shop" "daintily nibbling at dry butterless toast and applesauce."
- The stock. On his way out Fergesson passes sugar-free peaches and pears, "nonfattening acorn-meal cookies," jars of honey, sacks of wheat meal, dried roots, bins of nuts.
His coffee comes. "Thanks," he murmurs, and rolls a dime to Betty from his "vaguely pressed trousers," a ten-cent cup. He kicks the screen door open and edges past a date-and-apple display rack on which rests a poster of Theodore Beckheim. He catches "a momentary glare of disapproval from the stern-faced, beetle-browed minister," and then is "free on the sidewalk, away from the heavy sickening odor of powdered goat's milk and female perspiration."
Beckheim's first appearance is a poster that disapproves. The prophet who will dominate the novel enters as a printed face in a health-food display, and his first act is to glare at the store owner's coffee. Dick ties the two shops together from the first page: next door to Fergesson's electric creation sits a shop of purity diets and a preacher's image, and the coffee that ends Fergesson's "seventh day" has to be carried past him. In Chapter 2 the same face, in a larger photograph in the window, will work on Hadley in exactly the way it fails to work on Fergesson.
The first call
Back on the sidewalk, Fergesson notes who has not come in. "Nobody had entered Modern ahead of him." Olsen, "the spiderlike repairman," is nowhere in sight; neither are the salesmen. The list of absences is also a list of the store's daily trade:
- "No elderly woman had appeared with a withered little radio to be fixed."
- "No young couples wanting to finger expensive TV combinations."
He carries the coffee carefully down the sidewalk and into the store, and the phone begins to ring. "Damn," his mouth forms softly. Dick slows the moment into a comedy of reflexes: "The cup teetered as conflicting motor responses traveled up and down his arm." The "thin black liquid" sloshes over the edge as he sets it down and sweeps up the phone. "Modern TV."
"Is my radio fixed yet?" a woman's voice "shrilled." Half listening, he gropes for a pencil. She "breathed harshly in his ear, a beast jammed up against him, muzzled by the phone." "What is your name, ma'am?" Then the line that Dick makes the emotional key of the store owner's day:
A certain sweet kind of early-morning despair filled him: it had already begun.
Her complaint is specific: "Your man took the insides out sometime last week and promised to have them back Wednesday, and so far I haven't heard a thing from you people. I'm beginning to wonder what sort of place you're running there." Fergesson gropes for the service-call sheet and turns "the stiff yellow pages."
Outside, the world goes on being young without him. The "moist sunlight" still filters down; "Slim high-breasted young women still clattered by"; cars "hissed sleekly along the damp streets." "But there was no deceiving himself: life and activity were outside and he was inside. The primordial old woman was on the telephone." Scowling, he "gouged a few bitter words on the sheet," "sharp jabs of disgust." The machinery of the day takes him over: "The grinding wheels had begun devouring his soul. The reality of the workday had begun...for him, at least."
The section ends on the owner's grievance, the grievance of every small employer:
The burden was on his shoulders; while his employees lay sleeping in bed or dallied at breakfast, Fergesson, the owner of the store, was reluctantly beginning the leaden task of looking up the woman's old radio.
The creator becomes the servant in one phone call. Fergesson's morning moves in five minutes from god ("He brought light, being, awareness to the void") to drudge ("the leaden task"). The young women outside and the "primordial old woman" on the line are the two poles of the store's world: the life he glimpses through the window and the trade that actually pays. His complaint that his employees "lay sleeping in bed" is literally true of one of them: at that hour Hadley is asleep in Ellen's arms after a night in jail. The irony is Dick's, and the reader learns it on the next page.
| Old woman | Where | What she wants | What she says about the store |
|---|---|---|---|
| The caller (Ch1) | On the telephone, 8:30 a.m. | The "insides" of her radio, promised Wednesday | "I'm beginning to wonder what sort of place you're running" |
| The customer (Ch2) | At the counter, late afternoon | Fergesson to look at the radio in her bag | "You don't belong here" |
| Fergesson's fear | "No elderly woman had appeared" | "a withered little radio to be fixed" | The daily trade he resents and needs |
5:45 a.m.: the cell
Dick cuts back in time: "That morning, at the other end of town, at exactly 5:45 a.m., Stuart Hadley woke up in a cell of the Cedar Groves jail." Someone is banging on the metal bars. Hadley lies on the cot and "cringed furiously to himself" until the noise dies, "hoping it had gone. But it hadn't gone." "Hadley," the cop yells, "time to get up."
He lies "wadded up, knees drawn up against his stomach, arms wrapped around him," "still frowning, still waiting, still mutely hoping it would go away." The posture is a foetus's, and Dick will return to it: the grown man curled against the day, waiting for it to leave. Keys jangle, bolts slide, the door rolls back and the cop comes up to the cot and speaks "in Hadley's exposed ear": "Come on. Time to get out of here, you stupid son of a bitch."
The waking is a slow uncoiling, told limb by limb:
- Feet. "First his feet extended themselves and groped for the floor."
- Legs. "Then his legs stretched out, long and straight."
- Arms. "His arms released their grip; with a grunt of pain he sagged to an upright sitting position."
- Eyes. He keeps his head down, "brows drawn together, eyes almost shut," shutting out "the harsh gray light."
"What the hell are you?" The cop's insult is the novel's question. He does not ask "who" but "what," and the rest of the morning answers it in turn: a Red (the sergeant), a queer (the sergeant again), "an intellectual... a thinker. A dreamer" (Hadley), a lost husband (Ellen), an ageless thing of ivory (Ellen asleep beside him), a handsome catch (the waitress). Nobody's answer fits, Hadley's least of all.
The property sack
At the desk a sergeant pushes "a sheaf of papers" and "a thick fountain pen" at him. A third cop fetches the sack; two more lounge at a table "watching dully." Five policemen for one hungover salesman, and the count will grow in Hadley's own telling.
The sack is inventoried in full, and Dick makes Hadley put each thing back "to their proper places," the fastidious man restoring himself object by object:
- Wallet (the wallet that, in Chapter 11, a prophet will read like a file).
- Wedding ring.
- Eighty cents in silver and two paper dollars.
- Cigarette lighter, but no cigarettes.
- Wristwatch.
- Ballpoint pen.
- A copy of the New Yorker, which he drops in the wastebasket by the desk.
- His keys.
$2.80 Everything left in the sack: eighty cents in silver, two paper dollars.
About $34 What is gone: "He had spent, lost, or been robbed of the rest."
$2.00 The cab home, which takes the paper dollars.
"Thirty dollars" What he tells Ellen he lost, two hours later; Chapter 3 has her repeat it as "thirty dollars, maybe more."
$10 to $15 The household money in the teapot, which he takes as he leaves.
5:45, 6:15, 6:30, 8:00 Waking in the cell; home; back to bed; the alarm.
The money is the first thing he counts. "Two dollars. He had spent, lost, or been robbed of the rest. In all, about thirty-four dollars was gone." Then he notices the back of his hand is badly cut; "somebody had put a Band-Aid on the groove." The unknown kindness is one of many in the book that Hadley never registers: someone in the night bandaged him.
The Picasso plate
"What's that in your coat pocket?" the sergeant asks, pointing. Hadley pulls out "A large crumpled piece of shiny paper," spreads it flat: "a color reproduction of a picture: Picasso's Clown Family with Chimpanzee." One edge is jagged; "probably he had torn it from a library book." He has "a vague memory of wandering through the public library, as it was closing, its lights dimming one by one."
Which Picasso. No Picasso is catalogued as "Clown Family with Chimpanzee." The picture that fits is Famille d'acrobates avec singe (Family of Acrobats with Monkey), a 1905 Rose Period work in gouache, watercolour, pastel and ink on cardboard (104 x 75 cm), owned by the Gothenburg Museum of Art since 1922. It shows a harlequin father, a mother holding a baby and an animal usually described as a baboon looking up at them, composed like a Holy Family. Whether the slip is Dick's or Hadley's, the choice is exact: a drunk young man about to become a father has torn from a public book an image of a poor travelling family gathered round a newborn. [Wikipedia; Gothenburg Museum of Art]
Theft from the library of art. The plate is the first of the novel's portable objects of identity, the things Hadley carries as proofs of who he wishes he were (later: the wallet, the paintings, the blue card). He tore it out as the lights dimmed, in the one public place in Cedar Groves devoted to culture, and the act is both hungry and destructive. Chapter 2's daydream of a cultivated stranger's flat, with "modern prints on the walls," shows what the torn page was for.
After the library, his memory has only a sequence: "a lot of walking around in the evening darkness. Then the bar. Then another bar. Then the argument. And after the argument, the fight."
"Joe McCarthy"
The sergeant's questions and Hadley's answers are short, and each one is a small joke against the man who gives it:
- "What was it about?" "Joe McCarthy."
- "Why?" "Somebody said he was a great man." Shakily he smooths his "short-cropped blond hair," wishing for cigarettes, a bath, a shave and "steaming black coffee" fixed by Ellen.
- "What are you, a Red?" "Sure. I voted for Henry Wallace."
- The sergeant's verdict. "You don't look like a Red." He studies "the hunched-over young man." Even in filthy clothes Hadley has "a sharp-cut look": "Blond hair, blue eyes, an intelligent but puffy face. He was slim, almost slender, with a slightly feminine grace." "You look more like a queer. Are you one of those San Francisco queers?"
- Hadley's self-description. "I'm an intellectual. I'm a thinker. A dreamer. Can I go home now?"
"Sure. Are all your things there?" Hadley returns the empty sack: "Every one of them." "Sign the paper, then?" He signs, waits "with leaden patience" (the same "leaden" Dick gave Fergesson's task), realises the sergeant is finished with him and walks "soggily" to the stairs. A moment later he is on "the gray sidewalk, blinking and rubbing his head."
McCarthy, Wallace and the sergeant's slur. Senator Joseph McCarthy had been the country's loudest anti-Communist since his Wheeling speech of February 1950; in June 1952 he was campaigning for re-election in Wisconsin, and an argument about him in a bar was a perfectly ordinary way to start a fight. Henry Wallace ran for president in 1948 on the Progressive Party ticket with Idaho senator Glen H. Taylor and won 1,157,328 votes, about 2.4%, and no electoral votes [US Election Atlas]; to the sergeant a Wallace voter is a "Red." Chapter 3 shows Hadley's Wallace vote was Dave Gold's doing and did not last. The sergeant's "San Francisco queers" is the period's police contempt for the city's gay world, and it fixes San Francisco early as the place a respectable Cedar Groves man is not supposed to belong to; Hadley wakes there, beaten and lost, on his worst night (Chapter 18).
"A thinker. A dreamer." Hadley's answer is ironic and sincere at once. He offers the sergeant the most flattering identity he owns, and offers it "dully," as a password for release. It is the first statement of the self-image Dick will test for the whole novel: a sensitive man who believes he belongs to a higher world than the one he works in, and who has so far produced, as evidence, a page torn from a library book.
The cab and the health warning
The two dollars get him a cab. The ride is short; "there were almost no cars out yet." The sky is "hazy white, cold"; a few people stride along "blowing pale breath ahead of them." Hadley sits "Slumped over, hands clasped together," and brooded.
He rehearses the coming scene. "Ellen was going to screech. As she always screeched when something of this sort happened." The "something of this sort" says it has happened before. Worse than the screech is "the long-suffering silence that had grown, in the last month, until it was unbearable." Should he make up "a complicated story"? "Probably not."
"Got a cigarette?" he asks the driver.
"Smoking causes lung cancer," the driver answered, eyes on the empty street.
"That means no?"
"No, I don't, no."
An early warning, said in a cab. The driver is ahead of his time, but not by much. The two landmark case-control studies linking cigarettes to lung cancer appeared in 1950: Wynder and Graham in JAMA (684 patients) and Doll and Hill in the British Medical Journal. The idea reached a mass American audience with Reader's Digest's "Cancer by the Carton" in December 1952, six months after this morning [JAMA; US v. Philip Morris findings; Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society]. A cabdriver who knows it in June 1952 is a well-read crank, and he belongs to the novel's gallery of health obsessives that begins next door at the Health Food Store and continues with Wakefield in Chapter 2.
What he hates most is explaining the lost money. He cannot remember which bar; "probably it was several bars." Only one memory is sharp, and Dick gives it in fragments: "the two black-jacketed toughs, those two truck drivers, those two McCarthy supporters"; "The cold air outside the bar as the three of them had stumbled out and tangled"; "The sharp wind, the fist in his stomach and in his face"; "The sidewalk, very gray and hard and cold"; then "the police car and the struggling trip to the jail."
"Here we are, mister." The driver rips the receipt from the meter and climbs out "all in one busy motion," a man of purpose beside a passenger with none.
Home at 6:15
The neighbourhood is "absolutely silent." Hadley unlocks the front door of the apartment building, climbs the carpeted stairs, walks the hall: "No radios. No sounds of flushing toilets." It is "still only six fifteen." His own door is unlocked. He pushes it open, "Hesitantly preparing himself."
The flat is the first full picture of the marriage:
- The living room. "as always, was dark, messy, smelling faintly of cigarettes and overripe pears."
- The wife's state. "Ellen had long ago ceased exerting herself."
- The shades. Down; he can hardly see as he passes through, "already pulling off his coat and unbuttoning his shirt."
- The bed. Through the open bedroom door, "In the great rumpled bed his wife lay asleep," on her side, "tousled brown hair" over the pillow and her bare shoulders, the sheet and her blue nightgown. He hears her "low, labored breathing" and, "satisfied," goes into the kitchen.
He is putting on the Silex when her voice comes, "clear and sharp. 'Stuart!'" Cursing, he goes back to the doorway. She is "sitting bolt upright, brown eyes huge with alarm." "Morning. Sorry I woke you." She stares, nostrils quivering, face distorted, saying nothing, until he grows uncomfortable: "What's the matter?"
With a cry, Ellen springs from the bed and trots toward him, arms out, "hot tears dribbling down her cheeks." He "retreated," but "her vast, bulging form descended on him." "Stuart, where have you been?" The interrogation that follows is a duet of fear and evasion:
- "Where did you sleep? You're all... cut!" "I'm okay. Go back to bed."
- "Where did you sleep?" He grins evasively: "In a thicket."
- "You got in a fight, didn't you?" She knows the script: he went downtown "for a beer...and you were going to the library." "With savages, yes."
- "In a bar?" "In Africa."
- "And you were in jail." "They called it that. But I never believed them."
The comic exits. Every answer Hadley gives is a joke that moves the event somewhere else: a thicket, Africa, savages, a jail he "never believed" in. The habit is charming and evasive at once, and it fits the policeman's question ("What the hell are you?"): he answers facts with fictions. Chapter 10 shows the habit grown up, when he tells Ellen a whole invented story about "stockbroker customers." The "savages" and "Africa" are also the first instance of the colonial and racial picture language that runs through his thinking.
Silence. "Then outrage and exasperation replaced alarm." Dick describes it as a change of substance: "The bloated softness of her body hardened." "Stuart," she says quietly, "lips thin and pressed tight together, 'what am I going to do with you?'"
"Sell me," he said.
"I can't."
"You haven't tried. Your heart isn't in it."
The exchange is a salesman's joke from a salesman, and it gives away more than he means: he thinks of himself as merchandise, something Ellen owns and might dispose of. He wanders back to the kitchen "to see how his coffee water was doing."
Suddenly she is behind him "holding on to him desperately." "Come to bed. It's only six thirty; you can sleep two hours." "I'm coffee-oriented." "Forget your coffee." She reaches out and shuts off the gas. "Please, Stuart. Come to bed." "I slept." But his body aches for sleep, and he lets her "drag him from the kitchen, into the amber-dark bedroom." By the time his shorts and socks are off, "his body sagged with weariness."
"Fine," she whispers as he sprawls against her. "That's fine," pressing "her harsh fingers" against his hair, ear and cheek. Dick names her need plainly: "This was what she needed: the immediate presence of him." He sleeps "With a great yawning sigh." She stays awake, "holding on to her husband, pressing him tight, feeling the minutes slip away from her one by one."
Ellen and the clock
The next passage is told from Ellen's side and is the most tender writing in the chapter. It opens with the alarm, which Dick treats as a living thing:
- The song. "In the absolute stillness of the bedroom, among the motionless half shadows left from night, the clock began to sing." Its "tinny whirry metallic voice" hums "faintly, softly, thoughtfully to itself," then "its noise picked up urgency."
- The light. The noise meets "the cold white morning sunlight" spilling through muslin curtains over "the icy asphalt tile of the floor, the fluffy scatter rug, the chair and dresser and bed and heaps of clothing."
- The hour. "It was eight o'clock."
Ellen reaches out "her bare tan-fleshed arm," finds the clock and, "no sound at all," shoves down "the cold little stud protruding from its brass top." The clock hushes; it ticks on, "but its noise was over." She turns to see if she has woken him. He has not heard it. "Thank God for that. She wished he would never hear it."
She wished she could keep it back until the metal wheels and springs had sagged into rust, and its dull hands were broken and gone. She wished... well, it didn't matter. Because soon he would have to wake up. She had only delayed it.
Ellen against time. Fergesson's morning was a creation; Ellen's is a holding action. She cannot stop the day, only delay it, and her wish that the clock's wheels and springs might have "sagged into rust" is the private counterpart of the sky that "had two hours to live." The novel is often read as Hadley's story, but its first intimate point of view after Fergesson's is hers, and it is the point of view of someone who loves him and already knows she cannot keep him.
The world outside begins anyway: birds stir in the shrubbery, which "danced violently as birds landed in it"; a milk truck roars down the empty street; "Very far off the Southern Pacific train made its way up the track, heading toward San Francisco," the direction in which Hadley will later look for a different life. Ellen draws herself up, holding the covers up as "a shield between him and the window," "Cutting off the sounds, the bright cold sunlight. Protecting him with her body." Then Dick states her situation in one sentence: "She loved him; his indifference, his gradual drift away from her, seemed to make her own hunger greater."
She watches him sleep. His face is "blank and pale"; his hair, "dribbled across his forehead, was strawlike"; even his lips are colourless; "The stain of gray beard" blurs into "the puffy whiteness of his flesh." He sleeps on, "not knowing about the clock," "Not knowing she was risen up beside him, was hovering over him."
Then the chapter's great image: "In sleep, he was ageless." Not a man, not an adolescent, "certainly not a child; perhaps a very old man, so old that he was no longer a man, a thing left over from some archaic world, primordial, but cold and chaste as ivory."
Dick extends the image through a run of hard, white substances: "Something carved from bone, a tusk, shaped from passionless calcium: without rancor or excitement or knowledge." He is "An innocent thing too old to care, alive but not yet wanting," content to lie in some "attainment of something beyond activity." Ellen's wish follows: "She wished he could always be like this, utterly peaceful, not needing, not suffering, not driven by any knowing of things."
But the peace does not hold even in sleep. "The corners of his pale mouth twisted up into a tight, childish frown. A sullen, uneasy distaste; and with it a growing terror."
Ellen's two pictures of Stuart asleep. 1. The ivory figure: ageless, "primordial," "cold and chaste," bone, tusk, "passionless calcium," "without rancor"; the man she would keep if she could, a Stuart with no wants. 2. The dreaming fighter: a "tight, childish frown," "distaste," "terror," saliva on the chin, a scratched hand batting at "an invisible presence"; the man who wakes. The first is her wish, the second her knowledge. The word "primordial" links her wish to Fergesson's "primordial old woman" on the telephone and to Beckheim's face, "some primordial giant," in Chapter 2: three uses of the word in two chapters, each pointing at something older than the 1952 town.
She guesses his dream: "his fight, his shadowy ordeal with the enemy. The mist-dripping battlefield where dim shapes struggled, he and vague antagonists. Grappling with opponents he barely understood." She has seen it before: "the blind, dazed, head-downward fight he put up. Mindless brawling for goals too tenuous to comprehend, or put into words." It is the best summary of Hadley in the novel, and Dick gives it to the wife he will later betray.
He twists; "A tiny ooze of saliva" slides down his chin, "a body fluid escaping from him." Perhaps he is "sleeping again on the hard cot of the jail. Perhaps he was dreaming of unconsciousness." "One scratched hand came futilely up, batted and struck at an invisible presence. He was still dreaming of the fight. And of defeat."
The fight is with nobody. Ellen's reading of the dream anticipates the Mills epigraph exactly: Hadley's enemies are "vague antagonists," "opponents he barely understood," "an invisible presence." Last night the enemy happened to be two McCarthy men; tomorrow it will be the minister on the hill, the rich, the Russians, his wife, the Jews, the store. The novel's long argument is that the opponent is inside, which is what Ellen, half-asleep at eight in the morning, already sees.
Waking at eight
"Stuart," she says sharply. He grunts; his eyelids flutter; "all at once his quiet, guileless blue eyes gazed up at her, wondering, baffled, a little frightened, startled to find her there." Dick adds a parenthesis that defines him: "Not knowing where he was (he never knew where he was) and not understanding what had happened to him." (The dashes round "he never knew where he was" are rendered here as brackets.)
"What do you want for breakfast?" "Nothing." The whole night is already "indistinct, dreamlike. Already, it was slipping away from him." "I've got a hangover. Christ." "I'll fix coffee," Ellen says gently. "No, the doctor says you can't."
A small kindness the wrong way round. "The doctor says you can't" is the one moment in the scene where Hadley looks after Ellen rather than the reverse: her pregnancy doctor has told her not to be on her feet, and he refuses the coffee he was "oriented" toward at 6:30. Dick lets the kindness pass in half a line. It matters because the chapter is otherwise a catalogue of what Hadley takes (sleep, comfort, money) and of what he resents.
He gets to his feet ("God"), looks at the bed "with weary longing," scratches "his naked furry chest," and "laboriously tottered" down "the icy hall" to the bathroom, where he urinates with the door half shut, flushes and pads back. Dick does not spare the body: this is a hungover man in an ordinary flat, not a romantic intellectual.
The money, in instalments
The confession of the lost money comes in three pieces, each smaller than the truth:
- First. At the bedroom door: "I lost some money," "wanly." "That's all right. Forget about it and go wash."
- Second. After the shower, teeth, shave and comb: "Thirty dollars." "We can talk about it later."
- Third. He belches: "I'm sorry. Can I take something from the household money?" "I guess so," "reluctantly."
| Figure | Source in the text | What it shows |
|---|---|---|
| About $34 gone | Narrator, at the jail desk | The real loss |
| $2.80 left | The police sack | Spent at once on the cab |
| "Thirty dollars" | Hadley to Ellen | He shaves four dollars off the truth |
| "ten or fifteen dollars" | The teapot, taken whole | "Something" becomes "all the money there was" |
| "$10.84" | His pocket, Chapter 2 | What is left of her money by afternoon |
| "thirty dollars, maybe more" | Ellen, Chapter 3 | She did the sum herself |
Obediently he takes "his razor and blades from the dresser drawer." "Hot water roared in the shower, and he climbed gratefully into it." He "systematically brushed his teeth, shaved, combed his hair." The order is the order of a man who cares for his appearance before anything else, and it is the order he restores first.
The starched white shirt
From the dresser he takes "a starched white shirt. The smell of it cheered him up." Clean shorts follow, then "his carefully pressed and hung-up blue slacks." Dick describes a real pleasure: "A kind of eagerness filled him; the joy of fresh fabrics and clean smells took away the staleness of night." This is Hadley's one dependable happiness, the feel of good clothes, and Chapter 3 will set his "delicately perfumed" grooming against Dave Gold's dirty shirt.
But behind him "in the dark, moist bed," Ellen lies watching, and he can feel "her avid eyes on him." He sees her as a body: brown hair over her shoulders, "the swollen globes of her breasts," and "Her vast bulging middle stuck up grotesquely: not many more weeks now." Then his own thought, which is the chapter's darkest:
The baby... ultimate burden. He would never get away then, and it was already oppressively close.
"He would never get away then." The sentence reveals the shape of Hadley's wish. He is not planning to leave; he wants the possibility of leaving, and the baby will close it. Every daydream that follows in Part One (the park, the country, Mexico, Beckheim, San Francisco) is a door he wants to keep open. Ellen's "avid eyes" and the "ultimate burden" belong to his point of view, which is why they are so ungenerous; a page earlier Dick showed her love from the inside.
The park, the horseshoes, the country
"I don't think I'll go to work," he says "gloomily." "Why not? Don't you feel better? After you've had something to eat..." His answers form a short sequence of escapes, each punctured by Ellen's plain facts:
- The park. "It's too nice a day. I'm going down and sit in the park." His body stirs "restlessly." "Maybe I'll play football with the kids."
- The facts. "They're still in school. And it isn't football season."
- The substitute. "Then I'll play baseball. Or pitch horseshoes."
- The country. He turns to her: "You want to go out in the country this weekend? Let's get out of here; let's get out where we can roam around."
- The body. Ellen touches her middle: "I shouldn't, you know." "That's right."
His thought as he looks at her is one of the cruellest phrases in the chapter, and it is double: "The great fragile tub of flesh...center of the universe." Both halves are true for him. She is a burden and she is the centre, and the ellipsis holds the two together.
A grown man's truancy. Football with schoolboys, horseshoes, roaming the country: Hadley's escape fantasies on this morning are a boy's. Ellen answers them as a mother would ("They're still in school"), and the roles of the marriage are set: he plays the child, she the adult who knows the season. Chapter 3 shows the cost of that arrangement from Hadley's side, when he describes Ellen as "a generative principle, not a person."
His version of the fight
"Darling, do you want to tell me about last night?" He does not, "but the firmness of her voice meant the time had come." His account is half confession and half performance:
- The scale. "It wasn't a real fight. We were too drunk... We just sort of swung and cussed at each other."
- The boast. "Reflectively": "I think I got one of the bastards, though. A big one."
- The politics. "The cops think I'm a Communist... As they hauled me in I was yelling, 'Come on, you fascist bastards, I'll take care of all of you.'"
- The count. "Were there just two?" "Four cops, two fascist bastards." (The narrator showed five police at the station; Hadley's arithmetic is never quite the narrator's.)
- The place. "Outside a bar. It started in a bar. Or at the public library. Maybe it was a couple of librarians."
"Stuart, why did it happen? What's wrong with you?" He does not answer. He puts on his powder blue coat and stops at the mirror "to examine his face, his hair, his teeth, his swollen eyes," and plucks "at a pimple on his smooth-shaven chin." The question about what is wrong with him is answered with an inspection of his looks.
"Fascist bastards." The word Hadley shouts at two McCarthy supporters on Wednesday night is the word Dave Gold will use on Friday night for Marsha Frazier's circle ("Fascists... Friends of Ezra Pound"). The novel's plot runs between the two uses: the young man who brawls against fascists in June will, within weeks, be drawn to a woman whose magazine is fascist and to her antisemitic creed (Chapters 9 to 12). Dick plants the irony in a drunken joke.
"It's Sally, isn't it?"
Ellen names the real tension at last: "It's Sally, isn't it?" "Yes." "You're tense." "You bet your goddamn life I'm tense." The narrator explains only this: "It was today he had to pick her up."
- Ellen's offer. "Do... you want me to go with you?"
- Hadley's refusal. "I'll pick her up alone." The narrator gives the reason: "The last thing he wanted was to have Ellen tagging along, getting in the way, making the situation even worse."
- The chore. "Maybe you can clean up the apartment."
- Breakfast. "Aren't you having any breakfast?" "I'll catch it downtown."
A thread the text drops. The chapter sets up a definite errand: today Hadley must pick up his sister Sally; he may need "the truck" (Modern's delivery truck); "It would still be this way tonight, when he brought his sister home." Nothing in Chapters 2 and 3 carries it out. The rest of Thursday is spent at the store; on Friday night (Chapter 3) Hadley tells Dave Gold that Sally is "married. Living up in Berkeley" and that he would not write to her for money, as if no visit were in the air. Sally does arrive later, with her husband Bob Sorrell, in Chapter 7. Why Sally makes him so tense the novel leaves for Chapter 7, where the reader sees what she is to him.
From the teapot in the kitchen he takes "all the money there was, ten or fifteen dollars," and crams it into his pocket. The "something" he asked for has become everything. The living room is "still messy and still smelled of overripe pears." He does not expect Ellen to clean it: she will "perhaps empty the ashtrays, and then, exhausted, return to bed." "It would still be this way tonight, when he brought his sister home. He was resigned."
"Wish me luck," he says at the door. She has got up and is tying on "her heavy blue dressing robe": "Will you be home first? Or will you go directly up?" "Depends whether I get the truck. I'll call you." And then the gesture the chapter has been preparing: "Without kissing her good-bye he waved, grinned, and stepped out into the hall."
The kiss he does not give. Ellen kissed him awake at eight ("gently touched her lips against his timid, anxious mouth"); he leaves without a kiss, with a wave and a grin, the salesman's farewell. Between the two lies the whole marriage as Part One presents it: her steady love, his drift, the money he takes and the burden he fears. The narrator does not comment, and does not need to.
The walk to work
"Unless it rained he walked to work." Today "the jogging bounce of his shoes" makes his head ache, and by the time he turns onto Mason Avenue "his vision danced with nausea"; "in his condition he couldn't keep down a glass of tomato juice."
The walk is a short parade of the town's small-trade faces, each greeted by habit:
- The Lucky Market. "the Italian greengrocer" puts out "his long trays of grapefruits and oranges" and waves; Hadley "waved mechanically back."
- The jewelry store. He nods "Out of habit" to the clerk.
- Wetherby's Stationery. He nods to "the little dried-up old lady," another old woman of the town, a day before the one who will tell him he does not belong.
- The Golden State Café. In the doorway lounges "the petite black-haired waitress" in a "trim uniform, red skirt and blouse, pert hat buried in her dark curls." "Hi," she calls shyly.
The narrator knows it is a son. "About to be presented with a son" is one of the few places where the narrator steps ahead of the characters. Chapter 3 shows Hadley still worrying that "it might not be a boy" ("It had to be a boy"), and the baby, Pete, is born at the end of June (Chapter 6). The foreknowledge is a quiet signal that the story is told from after the event. Note also that Ellen in Chapter 3 says "the baby wasn't on his way," so the household already speaks of the child as a boy.
Grinning, Hadley goes on down the sidewalk "and into the dark shadows of the store." The chapter's last sentence is the counterweight to Fergesson's creation at 8:30:
Into the familiar interior of silence and darkness, the place where he had worked since college.
Two entrances, one store. Fergesson walked into a dark store and filled it with light, sound and breath. Hadley walks into the same store some time later and Dick calls it "the familiar interior of silence and darkness," as if the creation of 8:30 had never happened. The difference is not in the building but in the men. For the owner Modern is a world he made; for the salesman it is the cell he woke in at 5:45, with better lighting.
| Jim Fergesson | Stuart Hadley | |
|---|---|---|
| Wakes | At home; at the lot by 8:30 | 5:45 a.m., a jail cot |
| Arrives by | His own Pontiac | A $2 cab, then on foot |
| Looks | Middle-aged, blue serge suit, cigar | Blond, slim, starched white shirt, powder blue coat |
| First act | Switches on the lights: "being, awareness" | Collects $2.80; about $34 gone |
| Coffee | A dime's worth from Betty | The Silex put on, then the gas shut off |
| Women seen | Secretaries: "Good for the store" | The waitress: "a free TV demonstration" |
| The old woman | On the phone: "what sort of place" | The stationery lady; tomorrow's customer |
| Burden | "The burden was on his shoulders" | "The baby... ultimate burden" |
| Store is | A creation, then a grinding wheel | "silence and darkness" |
What the chapter sets up. In about five thousand words Dick has laid every line of the novel: the store as a made world and its owner as a small god (Chapters 4, 13, 20); Beckheim's face in the Health Food Store (Chapters 2, 5, 11); politics as brawl, McCarthy and Wallace (Chapter 3); money lost, undercounted and taken (Chapters 2, 3, 19); the marriage as Ellen's holding action against Hadley's drift (Chapters 6, 8, 21); the baby as a closed door (Chapter 7 onward); the fight with invisible enemies (the whole of Part Three). The subject, stated through two men on one morning, is white-collar men of 1952 who feel imprisoned by the decent life they chose.
"You Don't Belong Here"
When and where. The same day as Chapter 1, by every internal sign: Hadley is still sick from the night before, Ellen "was probably still asleep in bed," and he thinks he "had got up too suddenly this morning." Yet at the end of the chapter the calendar on the cash register reads June 6 (see the warn box on dates). Clock times: 12:30 by the Health Food Store clock, with twenty minutes of his lunch hour left; four o'clock when he goes back in for the celery extract; then a "hot late-afternoon" street while Fergesson is out "half an hour" on a prospect. Places: the Health Food Store (its counter, its window display of dates and nuts with Beckheim's photograph); Jack's Steakhouse (only imagined); Cedar Groves Junior High School gym (remembered); Modern TV Sales and Service, its front counter, the office up the narrow back stairs, and the sidewalk outside; across the street the Peninsula Travel Agency; and in passing the National Hotel, where the old woman has a room, and Pop Michelson's garage, where a puppy was once found.
People in this chapter. Stuart Wilson Hadley, 25, hungover, broke, in an expensive suit. Betty, the weary counter woman at the Health Food Store (from Chapter 1), who calls him "Stuart." Ira Silberman, "the skinny little Jew boy" of Hadley's junior-high memory who climbed the rope he could not. Jack, the Greek owner of Jack's Steakhouse, palming change. Theodore Beckheim, present only as a glossy photograph: leader of the Society of the Watchmen of Jesus, coming up from Los Angeles. Horace Wakefield, a florist, "a drab little man in a striped suit," steel-rimmed glasses, wisp of a mustache, gold teeth, eater of tapioca pudding, reader of Bernard Shaw on vaccination. Jim Fergesson, owner of Modern, busy, furious, then gone on a prospect. Olsen, "the huge bent-over serviceman," up from the basement to help at the counter. A "dumpy colored woman" buying a phonograph needle. Joe Tampini, "the handsome black-haired Italian boy who managed the deliveries," shy and hopeful. The old woman with the lumpy shopping bag and a radio in it, a resident of the National Hotel for thirteen years. A plump young man in an English suit who drives off in a European sports car. Remembered: Hadley's grandmother in Baltimore, his father, a high-school physics teacher, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Twelve thirty, nothing eaten
Chapter 1 left Hadley on the Modern sidewalk at nine in the morning. Chapter 2 picks him up at lunch, and Dick skips the morning entirely: the working hours in the store are not worth narrating, which is the point. Hadley "sat hunched over his food in the back of the Health Food Store, picking irritably at his plate of tossed green salad and creamed chipped beef on toast." The clock over the counter reads twelve thirty. He has twenty minutes left on his lunch hour and has been sitting there forty minutes "and he hadn't eaten a thing." So the lunch hour began at about ten to twelve, and by half past he has already spent two thirds of it doing nothing.
The room is "full of chattering women." They annoy him; "everything annoyed him." His stomach is queasy and his head aches dully, the hangover still at work. He begins "aimlessly ripping his napkin up and wadding it into a ball." He thinks of Ellen, "probably still asleep in bed. Sometimes she stayed in bed until three or four in the afternoon." He wishes he were with her, because "this ceaseless shrill laughter was too much to stand."
Two retreats in one breath. In a single paragraph Hadley wants to be in bed with a sleeping wife and, a line later, at Jack's Steakhouse with "a plate of red beans and pork and rice and hot coffee." Both are refuges from the room he is actually in. The chapter keeps doing this: every place Hadley stands in, he would rather be somewhere else, and every somewhere else turns sour the moment he imagines it properly.
Jack's Steakhouse, imagined to death
He should have eaten at Jack's Steakhouse, he thinks, and then his queasy stomach takes the thought apart. Dick gives the passage over to a run of grotesque metaphors, each one meaner than the last:
- The walls sweat. "There'd be the smell of grease and dripping French fries oozing from the walls," with "Drops of shiny fat like perspiration squeezed from the plaster, ignited by the fry cook at his sizzling grill."
- The businessmen. "Clouds of cigar smoke manufactured from the dirty jokes of businessmen who squashed themselves together in booths like juries of vegetables."
- The catalogue. Jack's is "a grotto of jukebox noise, an outhouse of smoke and bathroom grunts, a steam bath of Chronicle sporting-greens and toothpicks and spilled ketchup." The Sporting Green is the San Francisco Chronicle's sports section, printed on green newsprint, a real Bay Area detail.
- The locker room. "Stuart Hadley didn't belong in its gymnasium of sweat and oniony hamburger smoke; could a sensitive man eat dinner in a locker room, surrounded by dirty underwear and athlete's foot?"
The word "belong" turns up here, in the first page of a chapter whose title is "You Don't Belong Here." Hadley is already sorting places by whether he belongs in them, and his answer about Jack's is that a "sensitive man" does not. By the end of the afternoon an old woman will apply the same test to him in the store and give the same answer.
The rope and Ira Silberman
The steakhouse slides into a memory. "Eating at Jack's Steakhouse was squatting in junior high school, in the perspiration and fatigue of his earlier youth." The "fat, successful men" of the booths, Hadley decides, "had belly-shoved their way directly there from gray shorts and tennis shoes and shower taking," and had brought their old Bicycle athletic supporters, now "dark strings of rot."
Then the memory proper. The steakhouse "maintained Stuart Hadley at the moment of climbing the rope suspended from the ceiling of the Cedar Groves Junior High School gym." He hung there "in agony, jeered by upturned faces," clinging below the knot that marked success, and then fell "exhausted, drained, to the polished floor." Dick gives the image its own sentence: "Stuart Hadley, swinging from the ceiling, a fly above mouths of many spiders..." And after him, "the skinny little Jew boy Ira Silberman had swarmed up, Asiatic, competent, grinning."
The memory ends on commerce. "Jack, of Jack's Steakhouse, was Greek. Grinning over the cash register he palmed change with competent fingers; hand over hand it was taken in, the eternal ritual." The rope climbed hand over hand and the change taken in hand over hand are the same motion. Competence, in Hadley's mind, belongs to outsiders (the Jewish boy, the Greek owner) and it grins at him.
The prejudice is Hadley's, and it is a pattern. "Skinny little Jew boy" and "Asiatic" for Silberman, and the Greek owner's "competent fingers" over the till, are the first of many ethnic sneers in Hadley's head. Later in this chapter he is "convinced that Beckheim was a Negro" and "had never liked Negroes"; in Chapter 3 he wonders how he "could have got mixed up with Jews." Dick does not endorse these thoughts, and the novel's plot tests them hard (the "Negro" Beckheim becomes the man Hadley most longs for, and the open antisemites of the Succubus crowd are shown as the book's real poison). But the passages are ugly, and a reader should see them for what they are: the resentment of a man who reads other people's competence as an insult.
Note the town. The gym was in Cedar Groves, so Hadley went to junior high in the town he still lives in. That does not sit easily with what the novel says elsewhere about his childhood (Chapter 3 places him in high school with Dave Gold, and the character notes for the volume have him born in New York and raised in Washington, D.C.). The gym memory may simply belong to a family move, but it is one of several places where Dick's facts about Hadley's past do not quite line up.
Everyone else's errands
The paragraph after the memory finds Hadley already outside, watching the street. "He wondered where the people hurrying past him were going. So fast... no doubt it was somewhere important. Somewhere momentous." He pictures them "all with significant errands, all gripped by purposeful goals. Involved in complex schemes and projects... cosmic doings." This is the morning walk of Chapter 1 again: other people's purpose seen from outside, and envied.
He crosses the street "reluctantly." "His steps dragged; he didn't want to return to the miserable little store. Anything to delay it." He considers hiding "down in the crapper," and then "upstairs. Upstairs to the dull-faced customers."
The face in the window
Before he goes in, he stops at the window of the Health Food Store, where "a big glossy photograph of Theodore Beckheim" sits "in the middle of the date and nut display." Hadley "stopped before it for the hundredth time; it had been there since May." Beckheim "was coming up the coast from Los Angeles, where he and his people made their headquarters."
The face first. "The man's heavy dark face glared back at Hadley; vaguely, he felt uncomfortable. The man was incredibly commanding, powerful. His great black eyes and massive-ridged brow made him look like some primordial giant, a legend from the distant past." Under the photograph, the notice:
Will speak at the Watchmen Hall at 8 o'clock June 6, 7, 8. Admission free. Donations gratefully received. "Purity: the Bible Tells the World Order of Tomorrow." Lecture followed by discussion. Everybody invited! Society of the Watchmen of Jesus
The "he" is almost certainly "the" with its first letter swallowed by the scan, and the dash is the typesetter's.
What the poster promises is worth listing, because Hadley will collect on almost every item. Three nights (June 6, 7, 8) at 8 o'clock. Admission free, "Donations gratefully received," which is the economics of every revival meeting. Purity and a World Order of Tomorrow, which is an apocalypse dressed as a programme. "Lecture followed by discussion," a promise of personal contact. And "Everybody invited!", a phrase that lands hard on a man who has just told himself he belongs nowhere.
The picture has been there so long that Hadley "knew every line and circle of it. It was as if Beckheim were really someone he knew and not a remote public individual, a leader of a religious sect." He reads the name, the Society of the Watchmen of Jesus, and his mind fills in the rest: "A worldwide society... pamphlets, a weekly newspaper sold on street corners. Followers in South America, Africa, in Iceland and Iran. Power of the Bible... healing by the Word."
The Watchmen are a composite, not a real sect. No "Society of the Watchmen of Jesus" existed. Dick's details (a Los Angeles headquarters, a weekly paper sold on street corners, a worldwide following, healing, a coming World Order, free admission and donations) borrow from several real movements of the 1930s to 1950s: the Jehovah's Witnesses (street-corner papers, the "Watchtower," a coming kingdom), the Los Angeles healing evangelists, and the mail-order mystical societies. The name points at the "watchman" of Ezekiel 33, who warns the city of the coming sword. Chapter 5 will show the society's inner life, and Wakefield, met a few minutes from now, turns out to be a member.
Why the face works on him
The longer Hadley looks, the more familiar the face becomes, and Dick gives the sequence carefully:
Why the face works on Hadley. 1. Roosevelt: "For a while it reminded him of Franklin Delano Roosevelt." 2. Father: "then it was like his father, as he dimly remembered him, big and deep-voiced, strong." 3. Teacher: "somewhere in the heavy black brow was the stern gaze of a high school physics teacher," who "strode down the hall with firm step and steady gait, in a long white robe that billowed behind him like Saint Paul's." 4. Recruiting poster: it gives "the same nervous, uneasy feeling as the Army recruiting posters." 5. Split response: "One part of his mind told him they had made it that way on purpose and the whole thing was high-pressure salesmanship. And another part quavered and glowed, and down inside his chest his heart turned soft like mushy bacon fat melting in the pan." 6. Summation: "his feeling was all the previous feelings rolled into one, as if all the men who had attracted him were present now."
| Figure in the face | What he stood for | Where it returns |
|---|---|---|
| Franklin Roosevelt | National father, the dead president of Hadley's childhood (FDR died April 12, 1945) | Fergesson's hatred of FDR and his circle surfaces late in the novel |
| Hadley's father | A dimly remembered, deep-voiced, strong man, dead in a car crash (Chapter 3) | Fergesson as substitute father throughout |
| Physics teacher in a white robe | Authority with a touch of the priest ("like Saint Paul's") | Beckheim on the platform, Chapter 5 |
| Army recruiting poster | A face built to make young men enlist | Beckheim enrolls Hadley and hands him the blue card, Chapter 11 |
Two things stand out. The first is that Hadley knows he is being worked on ("high-pressure salesmanship") and is worked on anyway. He is a salesman himself, and he can see the method; seeing it gives him no protection. The second is the food image. His heart turns soft "like mushy bacon fat melting in the pan," a few minutes after he has turned his stomach on the grease at Jack's, and a few minutes before Wakefield tells him that pork fat rots in the gut. Desire, in this chapter, smells of the frying pan.
The man he despises, the man he wants. "And for another thing, he was convinced that Beckheim was a Negro. He had never liked Negroes... It didn't make sense." He is also "convinced that most of Beckheim's followers were metallic, chattering old women, like the ones who munched salad and tapioca pudding at the counter," and "He hated women like that." Dick builds Hadley's attraction out of the very things he says he hates. The hunch is right on both counts: in Chapter 5 Beckheim is "the great black man" on the platform, and in Chapter 10 Marsha Frazier tells Hadley flatly, "Beckheim is a Negro." The old women are there in force too, from Mrs. Krafft onward.
Four o'clock: the florist and the celery extract
Dick cuts straight from the poster to "The clock read four." Three and a half hours have passed without a word. "Right now the Health Food Store was almost empty. The women had all skittered back to their offices and homes." Betty is "heavily clearing the dirty counter of dishes and cigarette ashes and half-empty coffee cups crammed with wadded paper napkins" (Hadley's wadded napkin among them, perhaps).
At a table sits "a drab little man in a striped suit, steel-rimmed glasses perched on his nose, a wisp of a mustache above his thin mouth," quietly spooning tapioca pudding and reading a magazine. Hadley sits at the counter, "hands clasped before him on the moist oilcloth surface."
"What is it, Stuart?" Betty asks, "wearily, with the faint trace of a smile."
"Give me a bottle of fizz water and one of those little jars of celery extract. So I can make a celery phosphate."
The man in the pin-striped suit pushes his magazine aside. "Stuart!" he calls "in a thin friendly voice. "By golly, how's the boy?"" This is Horace Wakefield. "Hi, Wakefield," Hadley answers "noncommittally," and is waved over with a spoon and "a gold-toothed jovial grin."
The conversation that follows is a small masterpiece of a monomaniac working through his set pieces:
- The article. "I'm reading an interesting article on vaccination," the "little dried-up prune of a man asserted proudly. "By Bernard Shaw, the great English playwright. You might be interested.""
- Hadley's dodge. "I have to get back to the shop." Then, politely: "How are things in the flower business?"
- The flower. Wakefield, "solemn and dignified when his flower shop was mentioned," offers "a nice bright purple carnation for your buttonhole," then studies Hadley's suit and corrects himself: "with that suit maybe a white gardenia would be better. The purple would clash. Something white, I think... yes, a gardenia." Even a crank, faced with Hadley, sees the suit first.
- The vaccine. Leaning in, he "grated in his ear: "It's like pumping arsenic in a child's bloodstream. Billions of corpses of dead germs. Ground up and pumped into the child. Diabolical! Read this article."" He pushes the magazine "insistently against Hadley's wrist." "They spread disease all over the world. The only real way to health, as any sane person knows, is through proper eating."
- The creed. "Remember, what you put in your stomach comes out of your soul. Isn't that right?" Raised voice: "Isn't that right, Betty?" "Yes, Horace," Betty answers wearily, lugging the two bottles to the counter. "That will be a dollar forty, Stuart."
- The cancer. Wakefield catches Hadley's wrist "with his thin, cold fingers." "You know what causes cancer? Eating meat. Pork and beef fat, especially pork. Lamb fat is the most difficult substance known to digest. It lodges in the lower gastrointestinal tract and putrefies. Sometimes a lump of lamb fat lodges for weeks, rotting and stinking."
- The garbage dump. "A man turns himself into a garbage dump. Stinking mounds of filth and rubbish, flies and worms buzzing around. There's those trichinosis worms in pork. They burrow into your muscles, all through your body. Big soft white worms burrowing, burrowing..."
- The coda. He shudders, goes back to the pudding, and says "quietly as he intently spooned up the last of the pudding": "Remember, Stuart. What you put in your stomach comes out of your soul."
Fact check: Shaw on vaccination. Wakefield's authority is real. George Bernard Shaw (1856 to 1950) was a lifelong and vocal opponent of vaccination; he attacked it in the long preface to his play "The Doctor's Dilemma" (1906 to 1911) and in letters and articles for decades, and he was a famous vegetarian, which explains why a meat-hating crank would carry his essays. Shaw had died in November 1950, about a year and a half before this scene, so the "great English playwright" is a fresh memory (he was in fact Irish, a small slip that is Wakefield's, not Dick's). Wakefield's medical claims are nonsense: meat does not cause cancer in the simple way he says, and lamb fat does not lodge in the gut for weeks. Trichinosis from undercooked pork was a real and common risk in 1950s America, which is the grain of truth every crank needs.
Wakefield is the Watchmen in miniature. He is introduced as a food crank, and Chapter 5 reveals him as a member of the Society, who heard Beckheim speak in Los Angeles "late last fall" and remembers the early days when "it was just healing then. We hadn't found God." His creed ("What you put in your stomach comes out of your soul") is the society's philosophy in kitchen form: the body is a battlefield of purity and contamination, and the outside world pumps poison in. The poster's single word, "Purity," and Wakefield's terror of "corpses of dead germs" are the same idea at two scales. Dick introduces the cult through its most harmless-looking member, sitting under its own advertisement.
Back at Modern: Olsen, the needle, Tampini
Hadley pays for the bottles and steps "out of the Health Food Store into the blazing sun." He has "a vague idea he had mulled over the last few weeks" (Dick never says what; the context suggests the idea of leaving Modern, which the chapter's last pages make explicit). He hugs the bottles "carefully" down the sidewalk and plunges "into the cool gloom of the TV shop, his eyes on his feet."
The store is busy. "Fergesson was surrounded by customers at the front counter. Olsen, the huge bent-over serviceman, had come up from the basement to help him. He was resentfully finding a needle for a dumpy colored woman and at the same time answering the phone." Hadley, the salesman, walks past all of it. "Fergesson shot Hadley a look of wild fury, but Hadley was intent on his two bottles." He carries them "through the store and up the narrow back stairs to the office."
Olsen's two bodies. Here Olsen is "the huge bent-over serviceman." Elsewhere in Part One he is described as small and spidery. The difference may be one of mood (Hadley sees people as he feels about them) or a draft inconsistency; either way the reader should not try to build a fixed picture of him from this line alone.
In the office, at the desk making out his pickup tags, sits "young Joe Tampini, the handsome black-haired Italian boy who managed the deliveries." He "smiled up shyly." Dick's gloss on him is generous: "a sensitive youth lingering hopefully on the periphery of the store's social life."
"What you got there, Mister Hadley?"
Hadley, rummaging in "the debris-littered desk" for "a stained tumbler and finally a bottle opener," mutters: "Something to drink. What's it look like?"
"Do I get some?" Tampini "smiled wistfully, but Hadley promptly turned his back and ignored him." "You wouldn't like it."
The snub passed down. Hadley spends this chapter feeling ignored, dismissed and placed outside. The one person in it who looks up to him, a "sensitive youth" on the "periphery," gets his back. Hadley treats Tampini exactly as he fears the world treats him, and he does not notice. Dick sets the scene in the office, the clutter of Chapter 1 still all around ("filing cabinets, piles of invoices and bills, dusty photos of nude girls, pens and pencils, the old Royal typewriter"), so the pecking order is acted out in the store's nerve centre.
The celery phosphate refused
Dick skips forward again. The next line is Hadley's: "Drink it," he urges Fergesson "good-naturedly."
"What in the name of God is it?"
"A celery phosphate. It's good for you... Try it. It's got an unusual taste but once you get used to it it's really fine."
"Fergesson snorted with disgust." The store is "finally empty; rows of TV sets bellowed to themselves below the office." Olsen "had escaped back down to his service department"; Tampini is out in the truck "for the final deliveries of the day." Then the charge: "Where the hell were you? You took an hour and a half for your damn lunch. I ought to dock you."
Hadley's response is a lesson in how a guilty man argues. "Indignation rose up in Hadley. He angrily withdrew the tempting glass." "That's not so. I got stopped by a streetlight, that's all. Maybe a couple of minutes." Then Dick lets us inside: "The whole thing had become indistinct to him; he couldn't see any use in talking about it. Hadn't he just bought over a dollar's worth of celery extract for Fergesson?" And, hotly: "Sure. Take it out of my pay."
"What's the use," Fergesson mutters to himself. "I'm going out on a prospect. I'll be back in half an hour... It's probably stone dead by now." He goes down the stairs and "rapidly out the front door."
The gift as defence. The celery phosphate is Hadley's peace offering, bought with money he cannot spare after a day that began with Fergesson finding his teacups and his lateness. It is also an excuse made solid: you cannot dock a man who has just bought you a health tonic. When Fergesson refuses it, Hadley takes the refusal as the injury and forgets the lateness. Fergesson's mutter, "It's probably stone dead by now," is about the prospect (a sale gone cold while he was covering the counter alone), but it also lands on the drink, whose fizz is already going.
Three Philcos, and sleep
Alone in the office, Hadley "sighed and lit a cigarette." He knows he should go downstairs: "there were three new Philco TV combinations to be adjusted and set up. The job was his; he had the patience and dexterity to sit tinkering endlessly, day after day." Instead he sits at the desk, cigarette in hand, "idly touching the side of the celery phosphate glass." He sips it. "the fizz had already begun to go, and what remained was stale and vegetable and not exciting."
What he is actually good at. Dick drops in, almost in passing, that Hadley has "the patience and dexterity to sit tinkering endlessly." He is a capable technician of the store's machines. The skill is real and he despises it; it is not the kind of work a sensitive man with a dozen hand-painted neckties is supposed to do. A "Philco combination" was a console that combined a television with a radio and phonograph in one cabinet, the big-ticket item of a 1952 TV shop.
Then the old woman comes in, and Dick slows the scene to a crawl. "An old woman dragged her way into the store and stood puffing and sagging before the front counter, her vast lumpy shopping bag resting on the floor." She pants and mutters and darts "quick suspicious glances around the deserted store, impatient for the salesman to make his appearance." Hadley watches her "mildly" from the office above.
Sleep climbs his body like a tide: "A dull, numbing tiredness crept through Hadley's bones. Lazily, the miasma drifted up like gray cigarette smoke, into all parts of his body. First his feet, then his legs and hips, his shoulders, finally his arms and hands drifted off to sleep. His chin wobbled and sank."
She reminds him of "his grandmother whom he had visited in Baltimore. Only, her face was too hard and mean. Her eyes darted restlessly. And she was smaller and older." He idly guesses at her errand, and the guesses are a salesman's inventory of old stock:
- A broken Atwater Kent radio in the bag.
- A paper sack of dusty old radio tubes, "each one wrapped in newspaper," to be checked.
- An immense floor-model combination in the service department "it would take three men and a donkey to haul up."
- "A package of Kacti needles for her windup phonograph."
Fact check: the old stock. Atwater Kent was a real Philadelphia maker of radios, one of the biggest in the late 1920s, which stopped making radios in 1936. In 1952 an Atwater Kent was a museum piece, sixteen or more years old, which is exactly why Hadley imagines one in an old woman's bag. Kacti was a real brand of cactus-spine phonograph needles (made from cactus spines, gentler on shellac records than steel), sold in the 1930s and 1940s; a "windup phonograph" needing them is again the technology of an earlier generation. The donkey is Hadley's joke and turns up again in his life: he carries a donkey-roast joke card in his wallet.
He yawns. "the sound attracted the woman's attention. Guiltily, Hadley moved into motion." He stubs out the cigarette and "clumped stiffly down the stairs to the main floor. His legs wobbled under him; he could hardly push behind the counter." Everything is "lost in a drifting haze of sleepiness," and his mind goes to the self-improvement regime he did not follow that morning: he "should have got up slowly, breathed deeply with each motion. Maybe taken an ice-cold shower. At least had a methodical breakfast. The whole day had started off wrong... Now that it was ending, his last energy was dwindling away."
The old woman
The scene that names the chapter runs about a page and a half. It is worth taking almost line by line.
"Can I help you?"
"Two tired, crafty eyes, ancient and faded, gleamed up at him." "You work here?"
"Yes."
"That's funny," she says, with "bright suspicion on her seamed face." "I've never seen you before." "Firm conviction entered her voice and hardened there." "You're not the man who waits on me when I come in."
"Hadley could find no words of protest."
"No," she says, "with a half-plaintive, half-weary shake of her head. "You're not the man who waits on me. The man who waits on me is much older. You're just a boy.""
"I've worked here for years," Hadley says, stunned.
She describes the right man: "The man who waits on me is darker and shorter. He has a good face. He is a kind, helpful man. He understands my radio. He's waited on me for thirteen years. Ever since I came to California and took my room at the National Hotel."
"I have a wife," Hadley says helplessly. "I'm not a boy."
She goes on as if he had not spoken. "This man owns this store. He fixed my radio when nobody else would even look at it. He has a way with radios. There's a wise kindness in his face. There's no kindness in your face. Your face is empty and cruel. It's a bad face. It's pretty and blond, but it's a bad face."
"You want Mr. Fergesson," Hadley manages. "He's not here. He's out somewhere."
"Mr. Fergesson is the man who waits on me," she says emphatically, and demands to know where he is and when he will be back: "I have my radio here in my bag. I want him to look at it. He can tell me what's wrong. Nobody else can."
Hadley offers the store's three remedies. "He'll be back in half an hour. Maybe you want to wait for him. Or maybe you want to leave the radio." "No. I can't leave my radio." "You can wait, then." "Do you think I could wait half an hour? An old person like me can't stand on her feet that long." "I'll find you a chair." "No."
She moves to the door, the bag dragging, and searches his face "with her tired, disappointed eyes." "Are you sure you work here, young man? I've never seen you before. Are you sure you're not just waiting?"
"I belong here," Hadley says thickly. "I'm not just waiting."
Her last word:
"You're waiting here for the man to come back. The man who owns the store. No, you don't belong here. I can tell. I don't know where you belong, but it isn't here."
"She wandered heavily away."
| The old woman's portrait | Fergesson ("the man who waits on me") | Hadley ("just a boy") |
|---|---|---|
| Age | "much older" | "just a boy," "young man" |
| Looks | "darker and shorter" | "pretty and blond" |
| Face | "a good face," "a wise kindness in his face" | "empty and cruel... a bad face" |
| Skill | "He understands my radio," "has a way with radios" | Offers to take the radio in; she will not let go of it |
| Standing | "This man owns this store" | "just waiting" for the man to come back |
| Record | "thirteen years," fixed it "when nobody else would even look at it" | "I've worked here for years" (she has never seen him) |
| Verdict | The one who belongs | "you don't belong here... I don't know where you belong, but it isn't here" |
13 years The old woman has been coming to Fergesson since she took her room at the National Hotel, which puts her arrival in California around 1939. That is about half of Hadley's whole life. "I've worked here for years," Hadley says, and in the old woman's ledger his years do not count at all.
The old woman does not see a salesman; she sees a boy waiting for the owner to come back, and she is right. She is a kind of oracle, the first of several strangers who tell Hadley the truth about himself. Her test is not employment but trust earned over time: the man who fixed her radio when no one else would, who "understands" it, whom she will wait for and to whom alone she will hand it over. Hadley has the job and none of the standing. Note also what she says about his face. Hadley spends his money on looking right: the suits, the ties, the perfume. She looks at the result and calls it "pretty and blond" and "bad." The surface he has invested in is exactly what condemns him.
Why she will not leave the radio. "I can't leave my radio" is the most touching line in the scene. For an old woman alone in a hotel room, the radio is company, news and music, possibly the only voice in the room at night. To leave it with a stranger is to go home to silence. She will come back "some other time" rather than trust it to the wrong man. Dick lets a minor character state, in plain terms, the thing the novel's TV shop actually sells: not appliances but voices, the "voices from the street" of the title, piped into lonely rooms.
The single eye
The words stay with him. "Hadley stalked numbly over and snapped off the row of blaring TV sets. They sank into sudden silence, and at once the dim emptiness of the store rose up around him and suffocated him." He cannot bear the silence either, so "He turned one set back on and then convulsively made his way out of the store, onto the front sidewalk."
From there he watches the old woman cross the street "with a knot of drab shoppers" until she is lost from sight. "What did the old woman mean? Who was she?" Behind him, "Inside the dim store the TV muttered to itself; its single eye flickered fitfully in the murky shadows. Shapes came and went, diffuse figures of men and things that hovered temporarily and then passed on."
He turns his back on the store and does something deliberate with his senses. "He persuaded his ears to fill up with the honk of car horns, the staccato stamp of human feet on the hot late-afternoon sidewalk; he managed to exclude the dead sounds exhausted of color and life, the sullen cry and fuming from inside the store." Against the plate glass, hands "forced deep in his trouser pockets, he fervently inhaled the warmth of sun and people, the flow of bright activity."
But "still the old woman's words whined in his head," and he agrees with them: "She was right; he didn't belong in the store. He wasn't really a television salesman. Longingly, he watched the people pass. He should be out there with them, a part of them. Hurrying by, not cut off and isolated in the stagnant backwater of a little dried-up store."
Inside dead, outside alive. Dick sets up a clean opposition here, which the rest of the novel will turn inside out. Inside: "dead sounds exhausted of color and life," a single flickering eye, shapes that hover and pass, a "stagnant backwater." Outside: horns, feet, sun, "the flow of bright activity." By Chapter 13 Hadley will reverse it completely, seeing the store as "a neat little cosmos" and the world outside as "An infinite chaos of shifting shapes." The television's "shapes" that come and go "diffuse" are the first sketch of that chaos, kept for now on the screen.
The plump young man
Along the sidewalk comes his dream of himself. "a well-dressed young man. He was somewhat plump, but immaculately groomed. A soft-bodied man in an expensive English suit, shoes obviously hand-fashioned. His hair was thin, black, faintly shiny. A rich aliveness glowed in his brown eyes as he glanced briefly at Hadley. His nails, his cuffs, his bearing, everything about him, spoke his breeding, a Continental background."
The man turns into a parking lot, climbs into "a tiny European sports car," and "zoomed from the lot, out onto the street. In a moment the car and its driver were gone, lost behind a bulging GM truck." Hadley's last thought is the funniest and saddest line in the chapter: "Alas, he didn't even know what kind of car it was."
Fact check: the young man's library. Béla Bartók (died 1945), André Gide (Nobel Prize 1947, died February 1951) and Marcel Proust (died 1922) are the expected furniture of a 1952 aesthete. Louis-Ferdinand Céline is not neutral furniture. He was a great novelist and also the author of virulently antisemitic pamphlets in the late 1930s; he fled France in 1944, was convicted in absentia of collaboration in 1950 and amnestied in 1951, a year before this scene. Hadley puts him on the shelf as a sign of sophistication. Dick almost certainly meant the name to mean more: within hours (Chapter 3) Hadley meets the Succubus crowd, Paris-minded aesthetes whom Dave Gold calls "Friends of Ezra Pound... Anti-Semites."
Taste without knowledge. Hadley can imagine the cushions, the mats, the phonograph and the authors, but he cannot name the car. His sophistication is a catalogue of signs learned from magazines and other people's apartments, without the knowledge underneath. The same gap appears in reverse with the Philcos: he knows the machines in his hands and does not value that knowledge at all.
The staple gun
Back inside, he stands "in black gloom as his eyes adjusted. The chill of the old woman, the gray smell of age and death, had finally begun to drift away." He picks up "the heavy-duty staple gun from the counter and fired staples here and there. The gun had always comforted him; he loved to operate it." Dick lets the scene go wider than it needs to: "Fiercely, staples clicked against the walls, the display racks, onto the floor, behind the television sets."
Then the climax of the tantrum. "gripping the gun like a serious weapon, Hadley advanced on the muttering, flickering TV set in the center of the row and fired point-blank in its face. The staple bounced back gratifyingly and he wandered away." But the toy is used up: "As often before, he now fired staples at random, but no more satisfaction remained: he had exhausted the gun's possibilities." He tosses it back on the counter and stations himself in the doorway, "gazing moodily out at the passing people and plucking at his coat pocket for his cigarettes."
Shooting the single eye. The television he shoots is the one he left on, the one whose "single eye" flickered at him while he stood outside. He shoots it "in its face," a few minutes after the old woman has told him his own face is bad. The gun is a weapon for a man with no target: he cannot fire at Fergesson, or at the old woman, or at himself, so he fires at the machine that keeps watching. "As often before" tells us this is a habit, and "exhausted the gun's possibilities" tells us the habit has stopped working. The violence will find other outlets later in the book, far less harmless ones.
One plain sentence follows: "The old woman was right. He had to leave the store." It is the chapter's decision, and it is the first time Hadley states it without hedging. The "vague idea he had mulled over the last few weeks" now has a name.
The puppy in the rain barrel
From the doorway his mind goes to an image Dick has never shown us. "He thought about the dog, the puppy he had plucked from the box in Pop Michelson's garage. Death, dropped in a rain barrel, discarded like debris. Useless waste, old papers and tin cans. Rescued by accident... passed from hand to hand." And then the reading of it, the bleakest sentence Hadley thinks all day:
"And that was his life; that was how he lived. Wandering aimlessly, drifting, passed here and there at random. Without purpose. Saved by accident, condemned by other accidents. In a meaningless world."
"Saved by accident, condemned by other accidents" is the chapter's philosophy in one line: Hadley sees himself not as a man who acts but as an object that things happen to.
An orphan memory. "The dog, the puppy" is introduced with a definite article, as if the reader already knew it. This is the only mention of Pop Michelson or the puppy anywhere in the novel (a search of the whole text finds no other). Either Dick cut an earlier scene that set it up, or he meant the casual "the" to show how often Hadley has turned the memory over. Note too that the puppy was "dropped in a rain barrel," meant to drown, and "plucked from the box" by Hadley himself: in the memory he was the rescuer, but in the reading of it he becomes the puppy.
The two lines of the novel. The puppy image ("passed from hand to hand," "saved by accident") anticipates the second half of the book with uncomfortable precision. Hadley will be passed from Fergesson to Marsha to Beckheim and back, rescued from the street by strangers after his worst night (Chapter 19, where an old couple tell him "We hit you with our truck") and shut out, in the end, by a lock that no longer takes his key. The "meaningless world" is what Beckheim's sermon and Marsha's theories will both promise to replace with meaning.
Mexico for $140
"Across the street glowed a neat attractive neon sign. The Peninsula Travel Agency." The window offers a trip to Mexico: "a brightly colored poster showed a brown-skinned woman with white teeth and black hair and magnificent half-bare loins. Welcome to Mexico. Land of warmth and sunshine. Song and laughter. Come to sunny Mexico. One hundred forty dollars."
He gets out his wallet. "Ten dollars, the remains of his wife's household money" (the bills he took from the teapot that morning, Chapter 1). From his coat pocket he shakes out "eighty-four cents in change," and with it the true inventory of the man: "match folders, paper clips, slips of dirty paper with customers' names, pencil stubs, and the remains of a paper napkin."
"That was all he had in the world. That was the bones, teeth, and dust of Stuart Hadley. That was what would lie in a little pile in his coffin through all the ages. A pocketful of trash and ten dollars and eighty-four cents."
He throws the match folders in the waste box and stuffs the money away, and then he extends the inventory to the rest of his estate: "this, and a swollen sleep-drugged wife lying in a messy bed; a drawer of unpaid bills; eight or ten expensive suits; endless shirts and socks and handkerchiefs and hand-painted neckties."
| The afternoon's escapes | What it offers | Why it fails |
|---|---|---|
| Bed with Ellen | Sleep, warmth, nobody's demands | Ellen is "swollen sleep-drugged," and he must work |
| Jack's Steakhouse | Red beans and pork and rice, hot coffee | It turns into the junior-high gym and the rope |
| The crapper | A few minutes' delay | "but then: upstairs" |
| Celery phosphate | Health, a gift to Fergesson, an alibi | Refused; the fizz goes flat |
| Sleep at the desk | Escape from the Philcos | The old woman walks in |
| The sidewalk crowd | "the flow of bright activity" | He can only watch it pass |
| The plump young man's life | Bartók, Gide, a European sports car | He cannot even name the car |
| The staple gun | A weapon, a release | "exhausted the gun's possibilities" |
| Mexico | Warmth, sunshine, "half-bare loins" | $140 against $10.84 |
| Beckheim's lecture | "Anything to break the monotony" | It is free, so it is the one that stays open |
$10.84 against $140 Hadley holds about one thirteenth of the price of the Mexico trip, and all of it is his wife's household money. Ten days remain before the next paycheck, and "in the middle of the month there were no sales commissions." The arithmetic is the chapter's trap made exact: every escape on offer costs money he does not have, except one.
The calendar, and June 6
"He examined the calendar pasted on the cash register. Ten days before the next paycheck came; and in the middle of the month there were no sales commissions. It was June 6, the fly-soaked middle of summer. An expiring procession of empty afternoons lay stretched out ahead of him, and nothing else. He couldn't go to Mexico on ten dollars; he was stuck fast, glued tight."
"But on June 6 Theodore Beckheim arrived from Los Angeles and spoke. Nervous hunger twitched through Hadley. That was something, perhaps. Anything to break the monotony. Any hope, any straw." And the last line, spoken as if signing a register: "He would go listen to Beckheim. Stuart Wilson Hadley would be there."
The date drifts. The novel's first heading is "Thursday morning, June 5, 1952." This chapter is plainly the same hungover day (the same lunch hour, the same "this morning," the same household money), yet the calendar says June 6. In 1952 June 5 really was a Thursday, so the heading is internally sound; the calendar line is the odd one out. Chapter 3 then has Hadley insist he must go to the lecture "tonight," and later passages call the evening a Friday, which fits June 6. One reading is that Chapter 2 is in fact Friday and Dick simply let the hangover run on for two days; another is that the calendar is a slip. The phrase "in the middle of the month," used of June 6, is also loose.
A grammatical hinge. "But on June 6 Theodore Beckheim arrived from Los Angeles and spoke" is in the past tense, as if it had already happened, though Hadley is looking forward to it. It is worth noticing because it is the novel's first hint of the narrator's foreknowledge: the event is already history to whoever is telling the story.
The chapter's chain of mirrors
Every person and image Hadley meets this afternoon tells him the same thing in a different voice: you are not where you should be. The chain below follows them in order.
The chapter's structure: refusal, verdict, decision. 1. Refusals. Hadley refuses food (the lunch), work (the Philcos), and other people (Tampini, Wakefield's article). 2. Refused. He is refused in turn: Fergesson spurns the drink and threatens to dock him; the old woman will not trust him with her radio. 3. Verdict. The old woman states the judgment aloud: "you don't belong here." 4. Agreement. "She was right." 5. Release. The staple gun, which no longer works. 6. Self-reading. The puppy: "Saved by accident, condemned by other accidents." 7. Accounting. $10.84 and a pocket of trash. 8. The one open door. Beckheim, free, tonight.
A CLOSER LOOK
What the chapter does well, and where it strains. The old woman scene is among the best things Dick wrote in the early 1950s: plain dialogue, a minor character with a fully realised life (the hotel room, the radio, the thirteen years), and a verdict that the whole novel goes on to test. The weaker passages are the set-piece metaphors at the start ("juries of vegetables," "a grotto of jukebox noise, an outhouse of smoke"), where a young writer piles on images to show Hadley's nausea and the pile becomes the point. The prejudice is a deliberate part of the character study and is consistent across the book, but Dick gives the reader very little distance from it inside Hadley's head; the distance comes later, from the plot. On fact: Shaw, Atwater Kent, Kacti, Philco, the Chronicle's Sporting Green and Céline's status in 1952 all check out.
IN PRACTICE. The old woman's test is the one every customer applies to a bank or a service firm: not "do you work here?" but "are you the one who understands my radio?" Continuity of memory (knowing her history, her hotel, her radio) does more for that trust than fluency does.
What the chapter sets up. The verdict ("you don't belong here") that drives Hadley out of the store and, much later, back to its locked door; Beckheim as a face that sums up every father figure, and as a Black man whom a prejudiced Hadley is drawn to; Wakefield and the creed of purity that will be the Watchmen's; the money trap ($10.84, ten days to payday, no commissions); the staple gun as violence without a target; Céline on the dream shelf as a hint of the Succubus crowd; and the puppy as Hadley's self-image: rescued by accident, passed from hand to hand.
Dinner with the Golds
When and where. Friday evening, June 6, 1952 by the novel's own clues: Hadley says "Friday's the worst day of the week, this damn working late" and dreads "tomorrow: Saturday!", and the Watchmen meeting is "tonight," the first of the three nights on the poster (June 6, 7, 8). Dinner runs late; at almost eleven by Hadley's wristwatch the Golds leave and he goes with them. Places: the Hadleys' apartment (living room with the TV set, the big easy chair, the couch, a card table set up for dinner; the kitchen with its stove and refrigerator); the dark, deserted sidewalk outside; the Golds' old Cadillac; the Watchmen Hall, a square yellow wooden building downtown; the Golds' apartment, grimy and full of books; and, in talk and memory, the Reverend Anderton's house on the hill, high school, the 1948 Wallace campaign, an Okinawa newsreel, Tokyo under fire, Berkeley (Sally), "back east" (Hadley's mother), and North Beach in San Francisco.
People in this chapter. Stuart Hadley, 25, "clean shaven, delicately perfumed, well dressed, handsome in a boyish, vacant-eyed Nordic way." Ellen Hadley (born Ainsworth), heavily pregnant, the hostess. Dave Gold, Hadley's friend since eleventh grade, writer of "articles and editorials for labor and left-wing publications," pipe smoker, horn-rimmed glasses, no tie. Laura Gold, his wife, loud, "permanently heavyset," a Progressive who speaks Yiddish with Dave and sings Spanish Civil War songs. Talked about: the Reverend Anderton and Mrs. Anderton, the rich minister and his "tall English ash-blonde" wife; Olsen, who helped deliver their set; Fergesson, "a living fossil"; Hadley's dead father (a New York doctor), his mother back east, his married sister Sally in Berkeley; Dave's father, a wood finisher and Wobbly; the physics teacher who ran the chess club; Henry Wallace and Glen Taylor; Joseph McCarthy; Roosevelt. Seen: Theodore Beckheim, "the big dark man," for a moment; his audience. At the Golds': a bass-voiced man, "a tiny young woman," "a slender young man," girls in toreador pants, a "tiny white-haired thing with huge china-blue eyes," and Marsha Frazier, about thirty, owner and editor of Succubus.
Dave on the couch
The chapter opens on a contrast Hadley cannot stop staring at. "Dave Gold, the living embodiment of Hadley's ties with the past, lay stretched out on the couch in the Hadley living room, sleeves of his white shirt rolled up, hairy thin arms stuck out, legs crossed, pipe between his fingers." Hadley sits across from him "in the big easy chair by the TV set." In the kitchen, Ellen and Laura "shrieked and chattered about the dinner that was slowly baking itself to death in and around the stove."
Dave in close-up: "In the years since college, Dave Gold's body had become paler, thinner, and more furry. He had changed his gold-rimmed glasses to horn-rimmed glasses. His trousers were still too big, too impressed, too dirty. His shoes needed resoling. His teeth were dirty. He needed a shave. He wore no tie; his furry, sunken chest was visible above his sweat-crumpled yesterday's shirt." And his standing: "He earned his living writing articles and editorials for labor and left-wing publications; he had a national reputation of one sort or another."
Hadley, by contrast, is the dressed man of Chapter 1: "clean shaven, delicately perfumed, well dressed, handsome in a boyish, vacant-eyed Nordic way." He "could not refrain from noticing what a bum his friend Dave Gold looked like." The thing that needles him most: "that somebody who wore no tie, who didn't use Arrid, could have a national reputation of any kind. It was absolutely without sense."
The suit versus the reputation. Hadley has the clothes and no standing; Dave has the standing and no clothes. Hadley's whole economy of self (the perfume, the ties, the pressed suit) assumes that appearance earns respect, and Dave is living proof that it does not. Arrid was a real cream deodorant made by Carter Products from the mid-1930s and heavily advertised; Hadley's yardstick for a man's worth is a magazine ad. "Vacant-eyed" is the narrator's word, not Hadley's, and it echoes the old woman's verdict in Chapter 2: a pretty face with nothing behind it.
"You're looking at me funny," Dave says. "What's the matter?"
"I was just thinking. Some things haven't changed. You're still the way you were, only more so."
"I wish you were," Dave answers. "I never thought you'd wind up this way, working in a TV store." It is the old woman's judgment again, from a friend this time and in a kinder voice.
The history of a friendship
Dick then gives the friendship's history in a compressed run of facts, and the dates matter.
High school Hadley and Dave in the chess club together, run by the physics teacher "with his flowing white cape" who "discussed Darwin and Einstein with them in the long afternoons when school was out." Both are Democrats, wear Roosevelt-Truman buttons (so 1944, the only Roosevelt-Truman ticket) and fight "Republican youths from the wealthy houses up on the hill." Dave takes Hadley to the Young People's Socialist League, where Hadley "gave up twenty-five cents for the success of the revolution, a concept he had previously been ignorant of."
College Dave gets onto "the university literary magazine and the monthly humor magazine and the weekly newspaper."
1948 Dave persuades Hadley to join the Independent Progressive Party and hear Henry Wallace and Glen Taylor. Ellen Ainsworth types mimeograph stencils for Students for Wallace.
After November 1948 "When Wallace ingloriously lost, Stuart Hadley left the IPP." Dave joins the Civil Rights Congress and starts Russian at the California Labor School in San Francisco.
June 1952 Dave is a known left-wing journalist; Hadley sells televisions.
Fact check: the political markers. All real. The Young People's Socialist League was the youth wing of the Socialist Party of America. The Independent Progressive Party was the California arm of Henry Wallace's Progressive Party in 1948; Wallace, Roosevelt's former vice president, ran with Senator Glen H. Taylor of Idaho and won about 2.4 percent of the national popular vote (roughly 1.16 million votes), a heavy defeat that fits "ingloriously." The Civil Rights Congress (1946 to 1956) was a Communist-aligned legal defence group, and the California Labor School in San Francisco was a left-wing adult school; both were placed on the U.S. Attorney General's list of subversive organisations in the late 1940s. So Dave's path after 1948 is the one that, in 1952, could get a man investigated, which gives his talk about McCarthy below its edge. Hadley left at the point where staying became dangerous.
Two fathers, and Hadley's antisemitism
The kitchen breaks in. "Laura Gold's loud raucous laughter brayed out over the sounds of boiling water." The apartment is "warm, cozy with food smells, bright with yellow light, close with the presence of people and untarnished possessions." Then Dick gives the two women the same merciless close-up he gave Dave:
- Ellen. "tubby and awkward, waddled about the kitchen, her soft brown hair tied back with a rubber band, her blue maternity suit bulging in front of her." Her legs look "spindly and pale"; "she wore white bobby socks and laceless moccasins, no makeup or nail polish. Her skin was lightly freckled, soft, almost milky; her lips and eyes were colorless."
- Laura. "a permanently heavyset woman with coarse black hair, thick ankles, grubby hands, and protruding teeth. She wore a gray sweater, rumpled black shirt, and hiking shoes. Her nose was warty and bent."
Looking at Laura, Hadley thinks the chapter's ugliest thought: he "wondered to himself how he could have got mixed up with Jews. Of course, Dave was different from most of them: he wasn't a pusher. But still, he had a lot of Jewish habits: he had their uncleanness... He chewed his food with his mouth open, left greasy bits of food around his plate, stains on books..."
Hadley's antisemitism, stated plainly. This is open, stock prejudice ("a pusher," "their uncleanness," the warty, bent nose), and Dick puts it in Hadley's head without a narrator's correction. The novel's answer comes in the plot rather than in comment. The man Hadley sneers at is the one person who tells him the truth and drives him home; the people who share Hadley's prejudice in earnest are the elegant Succubus crowd at the end of this chapter, whom Dave identifies as "Anti-Semites," and they turn out to be the novel's most dangerous characters. Hadley's prejudice is shown as part of his emptiness, a borrowed contempt that fills the space where convictions should be. It remains hard reading, and the description of Laura is written to share his disgust.
He tries to trace how the friendship began, and finds it in class solidarity that has since come apart. "Dave Gold, whose father was a wood finisher at a furniture factory, a workman with a lunch pail and overalls; Stuart Hadley, whose father had been a wealthy upper-middle-class doctor in New York before his death in an auto accident." In high school both wore "a white shirt and jeans," "common dress against the rich boys from the hill, who dressed in expensive slacks and sweaters and drove polished cars, who belonged to fraternities and held dances." Then: "Later, the common dress and common party had broken down. What had seemed to be a deep sameness between them had dissolved into overt difference."
The difference is in the fathers. "Dave Gold's father had been a Wobbly, had been beaten up and jailed. Had served on picket lines, distributed Marxist leaflets. Stuart Hadley's father had been a respectable doctor with a practice and office and reputation, a dignified professional-class man who had driven his wife and children about in a LaSalle, and belonged to the AMA." And so: "Looking back, he could see that the Young People's Socialist League had been for him only an academic lecture, a presentation of ideas, like physics and chess."
Why the friendship drifted. For Dave, politics is inherited experience: a father beaten on picket lines. For Hadley, it was a school subject, chosen alongside chess and physics, and dropped when the course ended. The Wobblies (the Industrial Workers of the World, founded 1905) were the most militant American union of the early century, and their members were routinely beaten and jailed. The LaSalle was General Motors' prestige marque below Cadillac, made from 1927 to 1940, and the American Medical Association was the doctors' professional body. Each detail fixes the two families on opposite sides of the class line the boys pretended, in jeans, not to see.
Friday, and Fergesson the fossil
"Have you listened to a word?" Dave asks. "A word, maybe, out of all I'm saying?"
"No," Hadley admits. "Sorry... I'm all beat out from working. Friday's the worst day of the week, this damn working late."
"It's over. You can relax."
"I'm too tired to relax. And there's tomorrow: Saturday!"
Dave, the labour writer, is appalled: "I can't understand how they can work you six days a week. Can't you get yourself into the AF of L retail clerks' union? Has anybody ever tried to unionize your store?"
"Fergesson would close down first."
Dave has seen him: "Is he the one I see, middle-aged man in an old-type blue suit, with a vest and pocket watch? My God, he's out of another century. Virtually a living fossil." Then the political reading: "He doesn't believe in unions? Little businessmen identify themselves with big business; he probably has ambitions to get a chain of stores."
"That's right." "You think he ever will?" "He may. He's been saving up. Some kind of deal."
Dave predicts the plot. "He probably has ambitions to get a chain of stores" is a throwaway diagnosis that the novel fulfils: in Chapter 4 Fergesson is already set on buying O'Neill Appliance, a second store on the highway, and later he makes Hadley manager of Modern. Dave reads Fergesson as a type (the small owner who sides with big capital), and the type turns out to be accurate as a forecast while missing the man entirely. The Retail Clerks International Association was the AF of L union for shop workers, so Dave's question is a practical one; Hadley's answer tells us how far organised labour was from a small TV shop in a 1952 suburb.
The calendar settles, mostly. "Friday's the worst day" and "there's tomorrow: Saturday!" make this evening Friday, and the Watchmen meeting "tonight" fits June 6, the first night on the poster. So Chapter 2's calendar (June 6) fits this evening, while Chapter 1's heading (Thursday, June 5) fits the hungover morning. Either Chapter 2 is a different day from Chapter 1 or the novel's first day and a half run together. See also Ellen's "night before last" below, which counts back from Friday to the jail night correctly but gets the hour wrong.
The minister's whiskey
Hadley changes the subject to his grievance of the day. "You should have been along with me earlier." He and Olsen "delivered an RCA combination to a minister up on the hill. Huge house. Immense garden. Like a monastery... probably brought over from Europe. His wife, one of those tall English ash-blondes. Both of them looked like kings."
"King and queen," Dave corrects. (A small joke with teeth: Hadley's language for the rich slips into fairy tale, and Dave tidies it up.)
"We set up the combination, got the yagi set up on the roof." (A Yagi antenna, the directional aerial of early TV reception, needed in 1952 to pull in the San Francisco stations.) "When we were through, Anderton, the minister, offered us a drink. Whiskey, beer, whatever we wanted."
"Fine," Dave says approvingly.
Hadley "stirred with wrath. "A minister! Offering people liquor; you call that fine?"" He gets up and pulls down the shades, as if to shut the hill out. "I don't think ministers ought to have liquor around."
"Did you take the drink?"
"Just to be polite. I wanted to get out of there. If ministers serve whiskey who's going to keep people from doing wrong? He didn't even wear a special collar, just a regular business suit. And all that luxury. I thought a minister was supposed to live in a little barren room. And he shouldn't marry."
"You're thinking about medieval monks."
Hadley paces. "I don't see that there's any spirituality when a minister has a big wealthy house and garden and a wife and liquor like every other successful businessman. That's all it is... another business." "True," Gold admits. Then Hadley's broadside:
"There's nothing left of religion! You go to a church and the minister reads out of a best-selling novel. He's nothing but a psychologist. They go out and tell soldiers it's fine with Christ to kill the enemy; that's what God wants."
Why the minister matters. Hadley wants a religion that costs something: poverty, celibacy, a barren room, a man set apart by a collar. The Reverend Anderton is the comfortable postwar Protestant establishment, with a house like a monastery and none of a monastery's rules, and Hadley's outrage at him is the hunger that Beckheim will feed. The Watchmen offer exactly what Anderton lacks: a prophet set apart, a coming judgment, demands. Dave, the rationalist, finds the hunger quaint ("medieval monks"). The minister who "reads out of a best-selling novel" and is "nothing but a psychologist" fits the real religious mood of the early 1950s, when Norman Vincent Peale's positive thinking and Fulton Sheen's television talks made faith a form of self-help.
Korea, and the stage directions
Dave notices something: "Back when we were in school you hoped all the Japs and Germans would be wiped off the map. It's interesting; now you're not responsive to prowar slogans."
"They hurried the Korean War along too fast," Hadley says.
Gold grins. "Yes, they should have waited a little longer. They should give time for the depression to come in between, so people are glad to go off and fight. This time they got their stage directions fouled up."
Ellen and Laura come in and lower themselves into chairs ("in the kitchen the dinner continued patiently drying by itself"). "What's this about stage directions?" Laura demands. "The war," Dave says.
Fact check: Korea in June 1952. The Korean War began on June 25, 1950, and in June 1952 it was in its second year of stalemate, with armistice talks dragging at Panmunjom; the armistice came on July 27, 1953. Dave's sarcasm about "stage directions" (a war launched before a depression has made young men glad to enlist) is a Marxist reading of war as a managed economic event. Hadley's own position is muddled: his objection is that the war came "too fast," which is a complaint about timing, not about war.
Ellen: "If the baby wasn't on his way"
"I wish you wouldn't talk about the war," Ellen says, shivering. "Everybody's always talking about it; every time I turn on the radio or the TV or pick up a magazine or go past the headlines, there it is." To Laura: "If the baby wasn't on his way, they'd have taken Stuart. Of course, his liver trouble helps... but you never know."
Laura, "in her brash, loud, stupid way": "See, they're going to need kids growing up for the next war. They're planning ahead." She "bellowed with laughter" and fumbles "in her greasy sweater for cigarettes."
Fact check: the draft and the baby. Ellen's fear is grounded. Under the Korean War draft, fathers could be deferred in Class III-A, and paternity deferments stayed in force until President Eisenhower ended new ones in August 1953. Hadley's "liver trouble" is his 4-F condition (the novel elsewhere gives him a "permanently ineligible" certificate), so the baby is a second shield he does not strictly need, which makes Ellen's "you never know" the voice of pure anxiety. "On his way" also shows Ellen, like Hadley later in this chapter, assuming the baby will be a boy.
Hadley glares at Laura, then at his wife, who sits "placid and undisturbed, as if the book, not the contents of material, was the element to which she objected." This sets off one of the longest interior passages in the chapter, and one of the most revealing:
- Men's talk is an invasion. "When men said it, the sanctity of the home was invaded. The menace of outside war was brought close."
- The exclusion. "Another woman, any other woman, was in many ways closer to Ellen than he was. Even this crude imitation of femininity was on the inside, party to secret revelations and references. There were regions he couldn't claim, areas he couldn't enter, even in his own home."
- The conclusion. "Another dimension existed to women; he had never penetrated it. No man could. Women were the metaphysics of the world."
"How can we not talk about it? It's all around us!" "That's why I don't want to hear about it," Ellen says simply, and smiles "dreamily around the room, contented with this shoddy collection of guests." "Stuart, get some music on the radio, not that news commentator talking away."
The fecund vegetable
Then the narrator, closely tied to Hadley, turns on Ellen with a cruelty that should stop the reader:
Hadley believes Dave sees it too: "this transformation from sharp-eyed practical little bride to massive vegetable." Dave nods "not in agreement, but in comprehension."
Misogyny in the narration. Here the hostility is not only Hadley's thought but the narrator's language, and it runs through the chapter: Laura "brayed," "bellowed," "screeched like a macaw," is a "Progressive witch of the present"; Ellen "waddled," "lumbered," is "vast and swaying." "Women were the metaphysics of the world" turns women into a mystery that excludes men, and "a fecund vegetable" turns a pregnant wife into a crop. A reader should hold two things at once. Dick is drawing Hadley's mind precisely, and the novel later gives Ellen real force and judgment: in Part Four, while Hadley recovers, she is "working as a typist and stenographer at a downtown business office." But in 1952 Dick's narrator does not keep his distance, and these passages read as the book's own blind spot as much as its hero's. The "learn typing and shorthand" line is worth remembering: it is the life Ellen escaped by marrying, and the one she returns to.
"Cold wind of witches"
Dave turns the war talk to home. "There's hysteria in the air. Cold wind of witches... the fear of death. Cunning men prey on this, feed on this. McCarthy, a clever man."
"Don't mention that rat!" Laura protests, "making a disgusted, furious spitting motion. "That fascist!""
Witches in 1952. Dave's "cold wind of witches" lands in the right month. Arthur Miller's "The Crucible," the play that made the Salem witch trials the standing metaphor for McCarthyism, opened in January 1953, half a year after this scene; Dave is reaching for the same image before it was famous. Senator Joseph McCarthy's campaign had been running since his Wheeling speech of February 1950, and in mid-1952 he was near the height of his reach. For Dave, a Civil Rights Congress member writing for the left press, the "fear of death" in the air is also fear of the subpoena.
"The women were united in bonds of not wanting to hear things distasteful," the narrator adds, "a common bond that connected them, the mystical psychology of the separate female race." Hadley, speaking only to Dave, "harshly continued the conversation where it had been interrupted."
December seventh, and the man on fire
"Sure, I approved of fighting the Nazis and Japs. I was glad as hell when we got in the war. Roosevelt said the Axis was the enemy of mankind and I wanted to wipe them off the map. I was so excited December seventh I couldn't eat dinner."
"That was a Sunday," Ellen says "nostalgically, deflecting the conversation again. "I remember, my aunt and uncle were over for the afternoon. Relatives, all so stiff and formal. I was just dying to go off to the show... There was some Maria Montez picture showing.""
Fact check: Pearl Harbor and Maria Montez. Ellen is right: December 7, 1941 was a Sunday, and the news reached the West Coast around midday, so a family Sunday afternoon is exactly where she would have heard it. Maria Montez, the Dominican-born Universal star of Technicolor adventure films, was a fair choice for a girl dying to go to the show in late 1941: "South of Tahiti" came out in October 1941, though her biggest hits ("Arabian Nights," "Cobra Woman") came later. The detail is Ellen's whole method in the chapter: she turns history into a home memory and steps out of the argument.
Hadley goes on, looking only at Dave. "Roosevelt told us they had to be totally defeated: not a stick or a stone left standing. Now I look back and I can't understand how I could have felt that way." Then the memory at the heart of the chapter:
"There was a movie, a newsreel. A Jap running out of a bunker on Okinawa. Some GI got him with a flamethrower. There he was running along and burning up... Incinerating, a blazing torch. Everybody in the theater clapped and laughed. I laughed, too... I must have been crazy."
"In wartime," Ellen shrugs. "Yes," Hadley says. "In wartime. The time you believe anything... I was only a kid. How was I supposed to know we were being snowed? I trusted them." He recites the propaganda he swallowed: "the Japs were submen, beasts... Look at their little bandy legs. Look at their buck teeth. Look at their nearsighted eyes... half-blind little savages. Treacherous?"
"Yes," Dave corroborates. "They were treacherous." "What else?" "They grinned," Dave says. "As they raped women and bayoneted babies they grinned."
The newsreel as conversion. This is Hadley's one genuine moral experience, and it happens in a cinema. The image works on him the way television works on his customers: it arrives in a seat, among a crowd, and the crowd's laughter is part of it. What turns him is the contrast between the cheering and the small "thin silent" man "trying not to burn up." The beetle a child pokes "hour after hour" ties the scene to Hadley's own childhood (compare the boy he once was, who wanted the enemy "wiped off the map"). His politics after 1945 is not a theory; it is the memory of a sound in a theatre.
Fact check: Okinawa and Tokyo. The Battle of Okinawa ran from April 1 to late June 1945, and the flamethrower clearing of Japanese cave and bunker positions was filmed and shown in American newsreels. The firebombing of Tokyo on the night of March 9 to 10, 1945 (Operation Meetinghouse) killed roughly 80,000 to 100,000 people, more than either atomic bomb's immediate toll, and burned about sixteen square miles of the city. The order of Hadley's memory fits: he cheers Tokyo (March), then sees the Okinawa newsreel (spring or summer), then stops cheering. Hadley would have been about eighteen in 1945, so "I was only a kid" is a stretch he uses to excuse himself; his 4-F liver kept him out of the war he cheered.
"They grinned." Dave's two words carry the whole mechanism of wartime racial propaganda: the enemy's face is made into evidence of the enemy's nature. Dave then turns it forward: "Now it's the Russians... Only they don't grin. And they're great hulking fellows, not small and bandy-legged." The enemy changes shape and the method stays. It is the most lucid moment in Dave's part, and it is also, given Dave's own politics, self-serving: the new enemy is his side.
"Wait for the bomb"
Hadley refuses the new war in advance:
"He grinned a little. "I guess I'm a godless atheist, too."" (Note the grin: the word Dave just gave the enemy, now on Hadley's face.)
Ellen gives the standard answer: "But look at the lives we saved... So many of our boys would have been slaughtered... The bomb ended the war." Hadley: "Death ends everything... Where are we going to stop? After the godless atheists come the just plain starving." "It's not our fault," Ellen says vaguely. "And look what happens when we try to help them: they hate us. They're envious."
"They're envious... because they know our wealth doesn't belong to us. They know it's stolen. They know where it came from; they know part of it should be theirs. We're rotten with wealth and opulence. We deserve to get slaughtered. Can't you feel it? Don't you know it? Our sin, our guilt. We deserve the punishment that's coming."
Guilt looking for a judge. This speech is the bridge to Beckheim. Hadley has arrived, on his own, at the Watchmen's message: a rich, proud nation deserves punishment, and punishment is coming. What he lacks is someone to say it with authority, and in the next room of the novel a man is saying it from a platform. Note the slide in his logic, from "we used the bomb" (a fact about policy) to "we deserve to get slaughtered" (a wish). The wish for punishment is personal before it is political: it is the voice of the man who woke in a cell that morning.
Ellen recognises "the hard emotionless glaze that rose to the surface when the man's deepest wellsprings of discouragement had been touched," and it frightens her. "Sit down and behave yourself," she snaps. He keeps pacing. "This country is evil. We're big and rich and full of pride. We waste and we spend and we don't care about the rest of the world." Then to Laura: "A minister I met today poured me a highball. He had a big luxurious home and a lovely wife and an eight-hundred-dollar television combination and a refrigerator full of liquor."
Ellen fights back
$800 The Andertons' RCA combination, as Hadley prices it twice; more than three months of Hadley's $250 monthly base pay.
Two a.m. When Ellen says he came home "the night before last."
Thirty dollars, maybe more What Ellen later says he lost on that night (Chapter 1's narrator: about $34).
A couple hundred Hadley's savings "for hospital expenses," and less by now.
$100 Fergesson's loan to him when he married.
Contradiction: "two a.m." Counted back from Friday, "the night before last" is Wednesday night, which is right for the bar fight. But in Chapter 1 Hadley does not come home at two; he is in a cell until 5:45 and reaches the apartment about 6:15. Later in this same chapter Ellen herself says "you didn't come home until the next morning." The two a.m. line is either a slip by Dick or Ellen confusing it with an earlier night (her "you're always sitting down in some cheap bar" suggests a habit). Flagged, not corrected.
Then Ellen asks the question under the argument: "What'd she look like?" "Who?" "His wife."
Hadley's memory goes back to the house. As he and Olsen crouched adjusting the set, Mrs. Anderton "had appeared at the foot of the stairs. One hand resting on the banister, she gazed coolly at them, a tall slim figure in a floor-length robe, dark blond hair spilled around her shoulders, face calm, noble." "She was beautiful," Hadley said sincerely. "A princess."
The contradiction is the character. In ten minutes Hadley has said the minister's luxury is sinful, the nation deserves to be slaughtered for its wealth, and the minister's wife is a princess. Dave hears inconsistency. The novel shows a single feeling: Hadley wants the beautiful life and hates himself and the world for not having it. "It's not right" is a moral judgment holding envy inside it, which is exactly what Ellen accuses him of. And "A princess" in front of his pregnant wife, who has just been called a vegetable by the narrator, is the cruelest line he speaks all evening, the more so because he says it "sincerely." Ellen rises, "frigid with hostility": "I think I smell the roast. Stuart, go wash for dinner."
"You ought to quit your job"
Alone with Dave, Hadley asks: "What do you know about the Society of the Watchmen of Jesus?" "Not much." "They're having a meeting tonight." "That's so." Then Dave's advice, the most direct anyone gives Hadley in the book:
"Stuart, it's none of my business, but you ought to quit your job. You're eating your heart out, working at that run-down little TV shop. You shouldn't be working for that man. What do you care about television? Get the hell out of there."
"How? Christ, this is no time to quit, with the baby coming." Dave works through the options, and each answer tells us something:
- Savings. "A couple hundred for hospital expenses." The narrator: "It wasn't really that much; he didn't know exactly what it was down to by now."
- His mother. "I hate like hell to write back east. I want to make this alone. I... don't write to her unless I really need the money." (So he does write, when he needs to.)
- His sister. Sally "is married. Living up in Berkeley. I'm sure as hell not going to write them for money." He snaps: "You never knew Sally; you never met her in your life." Dave, mildly: "She was always around... I've known you since we were in the eleventh grade." Hadley "loathed the thought of dirty, sloppy Dave Gold knowing his sister, even being in the same world as his sister."
- Life insurance. "I can borrow on my life insurance if I have to." The narrator: "He had already borrowed on it, of course; now he wondered if it had really been hit for all it was worth."
- Fergesson. "I could even borrow from Fergesson... He lent me a hundred bucks when we got married." Dave: "Crumbs. He probably got it back from your salary." "How else would he get it back?"
| Source of money | What Hadley says | What the narrator adds | Real state |
|---|---|---|---|
| Savings | "A couple hundred" | "It wasn't really that much" | Unknown even to him; earmarked for the birth |
| Mother back east | "I want to make this alone" | He writes "unless I really need the money" | Available, at the cost of pride |
| Sally in Berkeley | "Sure as hell not" | Anger, class shame about Dave | Closed by pride |
| Life insurance | "Borrow on it if I have to" | "He had already borrowed on it" | Possibly exhausted |
| Fergesson | Lent $100 at the wedding | Repaid from salary | The employer as lender: deeper dependence |
| Household money | (not mentioned to Dave) | Taken from the teapot in Chapter 1 | Zero; Ellen cannot buy ice cream |
Sally, and "eleventh grade." Hadley's "you never met her in your life" is flatly contradicted by Dave's "She was always around," and the narrator sides with Dave by showing Hadley's anger rather than his evidence. Sally will matter later; here she is introduced as the respectable family Hadley wants to keep apart from his left-wing Jewish friend. "Since we were in the eleventh grade" also fixes the friendship's start at about age sixteen, around 1943 to 1944, which fits the Roosevelt-Truman buttons of the 1944 campaign.
"You never come to union meetings"
Dave, refilling his pipe, gives his own speech, a mirror to Hadley's guilt sermon:
C. Wright Mills in the living room. Dave is voicing, almost word for word in spirit, the argument of C. Wright Mills's "White Collar: The American Middle Classes" (1951): a new middle class of clerks, salesmen and office workers, politically inert, without the old proprietor's independence or the factory worker's solidarity. The novel's epigraph is a sentence from Mills ("They find it harder to locate their external enemies than to grapple with their internal conditions... they are betrayed by what is false within them"), so Dave's speech states the book's sociological thesis out loud, and Hadley, the white-collar salesman, is its specimen. The irony is that Dave sees the mass from a car window and a supermarket aisle, as a spectacle, the same way the Succubus crowd will see Beckheim.
Dinner, and the ice cream
He hears Dave and Laura arguing in the other room and wonders if he has "destroyed the evening." "It wasn't often that any of his old high school friends came over; he liked to see Dave, in spite of everything, in spite of Laura." "Sorry. I don't feel so hot." "You never feel so hot," Ellen rasps. "You just have to stop acting this way! Can't you see how unfair it is to everybody?" "It's unfair to me; what am I supposed to do, turn my feelings on and off the way you work that stove? All right... I'll laugh and tell funny stories; is that what you want?"
He "gouged slimy-hot pie from its store pan." Ellen "slammed the refrigerator door and smashed the quart carton down beside the pie." Alone, "he spooned the mushy ice cream... cold sticky rivulets trickled down his wrists, into his cuffs and sleeves." Then, at the sink, Ellen's "brief, explosive tirade of despair":
"God, this awful grocery-store ice cream: if we weren't so broke all the time we could have had hand-packed ice cream from the drugstore. And you didn't have sense enough to put it in the freezer."
"Oh," he says, "remembering now. It was he, after all. He had brought the ice cream home and absently laid it with the apples and oranges at the bottom of the refrigerator." He tries: "You know you could have got it this noon when you shopped. Take it out of the household money."
The household money. Chapter 1 showed Hadley taking "all the money there was, ten or fifteen dollars," from the kitchen teapot after losing about $34 in the bars. Here, two days later, is the consequence: the hostess of a dinner party cannot buy decent ice cream, and the ice cream is soft because he put it in the wrong place. Every quarrel in the kitchen is a quarrel about that teapot. Ellen's "thirty dollars, maybe more" is close to the narrator's $34; she knows nearly to the dollar.
Ellen knows he hit a man. "When you were in that fight and knocked that man down." In Chapter 1 Hadley told her almost nothing; she seems to have learned the details since (from him, or from the police, the text does not say). It is a small sign that the marriage keeps its accounts in silence and then settles them all at once.
He leaves his pregnant wife alone with the dishes and the television, on the night of the quarrel, to chase a sermon.
The Cadillac
"They walked down the dark, deserted sidewalk, heels clicking loudly in the night." "I think you better go back inside," Laura brays. "Your wife's going to be mad at you." Hadley says nothing.
"The Gold car was a tired old Cadillac, without paint or color, a rusting heap of iron that jutted up like a World War I Army tank."
Inside it "smelled of beer and wet upholstery and burned oil." Hadley pushes aside "heaps of old magazines, cushions, a few knobby potatoes fallen from a shopping bag," and rests his feet "on the exposed springs of the seat ahead." "Laura's driving," Dave explains. "My night vision's too lousy." His pipe "wheezed and glowed like a distant factory." The motor "coughed and spluttered, then came on with a furious roar"; "a cloud of blue gas settled around him." "This is really living," Dave comments.
"Want to stop at a bar and have a couple of drinks? Or you want to go directly to our place?" Laura roars through an intersection and a stop sign. "Let me off downtown," Hadley says. "Downtown!" Laura yells. "What do you mean, downtown? Downtown isn't a place. Downtown's a bourgeois concept!"
A Cadillac for the left. The Golds drive the brand that meant success in 1950s America, but theirs is a wreck "without paint or color," a tank from the last war. It is their politics in metal: an old heavy machine, still running, choking its passengers. Laura's "Downtown's a bourgeois concept!" is the joke version of the same thing, an ideology that can turn a street address into a class position. Dick gives the Golds real warmth (they take Hadley where he wants to go, against their judgment) and real absurdity.
The finite core
The fumes, the bucking, the "blinding headlights from the state highway beyond the edge of town," and Ellen. Then, out of the apartment, "cool sense told him that it wasn't Ellen; it was himself. It was the thing inside him, the restless dissatisfaction, the blind striving toward something intangible and unknown. He would not, he could not, destroy his marriage; it meant too much to him. Ellen, and the baby."
"He tried to picture the near future. The three of them; but it might not be a boy. If it was a girl things would be odd, peculiar, mystical. It had to be a boy; it had to be an entity he understood. There were already too many things beyond his comprehension; his marriage had to remain a finite core around which he could collect himself."
The boy as a fixed point. This is the "women were the metaphysics of the world" idea carried to the unborn child: a daughter would be another region he could not enter. He wants the family to be "a finite core," something closed and knowable in a "universe of chance" (the phrase comes at the end of this chapter). The baby is a boy (Pete, born at the end of June), and Hadley's "it had to be" is answered, but the core does not hold: in Part Three he takes the baby from the house in the middle of the night. The self-diagnosis here ("it wasn't Ellen; it was himself") is accurate, and he will spend the novel unable to act on it.
"That holy-roller conclave"
"Listen," Dave says gravely, "are you going to that holy-roller conclave?" "I am, yes." "Why, that's crazy. They talk about Armageddon. That's nut stuff!... That's the most ignorant form of... stupidity! Stupidity, you hear me? Don't you get mixed up in that."
"I'm open-minded enough to go by and hear what they have to say."
Dave tells him what they will say: "Some madman gets up there and raves and screams and slobbers..." and mocks the congregation in a minstrel-show voice. "You're going there to hear them call Communists hell-hordes of Satan, atheistic godless Antichrist." He orders Laura to turn the car round: "If you want to go, you can walk."
Dave's mockery. Dave imitates the worshippers in a racist stage-Black dialect (the line is not reproduced here). The man of the Civil Rights Congress, who would defend Black defendants in court, sneers at Black worshippers in a car, and the novel lets the irony stand. When the three walk into the hall a few pages later, the congregation is "many of them Negro, most of them plain working-class": the very people Dave's politics claims to serve and Dave's mockery holds in contempt. It is one of the sharpest observations in the chapter and Dick never comments on it.
The hall
Inside: a small lobby with fiberboard walls and pinned notices, two small doors, and then the hall.
"Foolishly, embarrassed, they stood inside the door, pressed together, conscious suddenly of the rows of quiet, humble, unmoving people. The three of them had invaded a vast chamber of silence and attention. Dipping waves of rapt faces, many of them Negro, most of them plain working-class, ordinary citizens in jeans, overalls, cheap suits, cotton dresses."
On the platform, the speaker is answering a woman's question, "addressing her, and all the room at the same time." The audience is "hushed with that tense hunger that comes at the end of a protracted suspense." The three feel the rapport as "incomprehensible"; "at first they were outside it; and then, as they became drawn into the flow of speech, the lecture abruptly ended."
"Like a plate of water overturned." "With a single flowing motion, like a plate of water overturned, the rows of people slid from their chairs and headed up the aisles. Perfectly expressionless, impassive, they came rapidly forward." "Jesus," Dave says. "Let the steamroller get by." The three shelter at the foot of the stairs while "the torrent burst into the antechamber and out onto the sidewalk." Then the crowd dissolves "into the night gloom," and "the three people found themselves alone." Dick gives us Beckheim's power by its effect on others before we hear a full sentence from him: a crowd that moves as one body and does not see three strangers in its way.
Who is in the hall. Note what the Golds' politics predicted and what is there. Dave expected a "madman" who "raves and screams and slobbers." What they find is silence, attention, plain working people, and a speaker answering a question. The left's working class is here, in overalls and cotton dresses, and it has come to a prophet, not a union meeting (Dave's complaint, "you never come to union meetings," answered within the hour). Hadley "caught only a fleeting glimpse of the big dark man, heard a few fragments of his words," and is "dazed with disappointment."
"It's over," Laura says, disappointed (she too had wanted to see it). In the car: "What's the matter?... Say something." "Like what?" "It's not my fault it's over." "I'm not blaming you." Then Laura, honking at a milk truck: "That man was talking about Jonah and the whale! Like Sunday school, yet!"
Jonah. Laura laughs at the subject, but the subject fits Beckheim's message: Jonah is the prophet sent to tell a great, wicked city (Nineveh) that it will be destroyed. Jonah runs from the task, is swallowed, and is delivered to preach anyway, and the city repents. For a man who has just told his dinner guests that his rich country "deserve[s] the punishment that's coming," it is precisely the right sermon to have missed. Dick also plants a joke: Hadley, too, is a man in flight from the thing he is called to.
The Succubus crowd
"At the Gold apartment lights burned." The door is unlocked; Dave "hesitated, scowled, shrugged," and opens it on a room of people. "Hi, Dave!" "Where the hell have you two been?" "The door wasn't locked... We came on in." "It's about time you folks got home!"
Hadley, glum, thinks of walking home or catching "a crosstown bus." He recognises the type "from college":
- Music. "Paul Robeson records, spirituals and work songs. Albums of jazz... Bix Beiderbecke and Mezz Mezzrow. Lute music of the seventeenth century."
- Girls. "in black toreador pants and sandals, turtleneck sweaters, hair plastered down and stringy," gazing "limply up."
- Young men. "Thin young men, quaintly dressed, slippery hipped... with languid observations hanging like sugar from their lips."
- Their reason. "What are you doing down from San Francisco?" "Oh," said one of these children of paradise, "we came to hear the talk." "We came to hear Theodore Beckheim." "And it was charming!"
Laura, pulling off her coat: "This is the bunch from Succubus... I should have known they'd flock down for this thing." "It had never occurred to him that there was a type of person Laura Gold found objectionable." The Gold apartment itself: "ancient dust-heavy carpets and stale cabbage," torn curtains "greasy with grime," "unfinished manuscripts... around the rusty Underwood typewriter, mixed with yellowed copies of the Nation and People's World," a jar of peanut butter, soda crackers, "a carton of sour milk."
Fact check: the room's references. All real. "The Nation" is the old liberal weekly (founded 1865); "People's World" was the West Coast Communist daily, published in San Francisco, so the stack on Dave's desk is itself a political label in 1952. Paul Robeson, the singer and actor, had his passport revoked in 1950 for his politics; playing his records was a statement. Bix Beiderbecke (cornet, died 1931) and Mezz Mezzrow (clarinet, Chicago jazz, author of "Really the Blues," 1946) were cult figures of the jazz revival. "Children of paradise" alludes to Marcel Carné's film "Les Enfants du Paradis" (1945), an art-house favourite. The guests' taste (folk, early jazz, lute music, Robeson) is the bohemian mix that became the North Beach Beat scene a few years later.
Marsha Frazier
"Among the guests one figure stood out. A woman, leaning against the wall, hands in the pockets of her jeans." She is "older than the others, taller, less extravagant, more dignified." Laura, growling: "That's the old succubus herself. She owns it. Dave did an article for her... the whole thing's arty and mystical... reactionary crap." She retreats to the bathroom "to express herself in private."
The portrait: "She was perhaps thirty. High-cheeked, reddish hair thin and cut short... With her neatly pressed jeans she wore a green-checkered sports shirt, a western-style leather belt, a heavy silver buckle." Her "gray eyes" turn on Hadley for a moment, "curiosity," then back to Dave. "What did you think?" she asks "huskily." "We didn't hear anything. And you know what I think of that junk."
OCR or slip: "the tall, thin women." The text reads "Dave stood facing the tall, thin women," plural, though only Marsha is meant (a few lines later she is "the tall, slim woman"). Probably a typesetting slip in the book. Flagged, not corrected.
Then the sentence that sets the novel's second half moving:
"I'm trying to find out if Beckheim is basing his movement on quietism... A reaction, too, but not the same kind. You're thinking of nonviolence; quietism was more like the Friends' concept of individual inspiration... the first heresy... Protestant sense of individual conscience."
Fact check: quietism. Quietism was the doctrine of the Spanish priest Miguel de Molinos, whose "Spiritual Guide" (1675) taught a passive, wordless surrender of the soul to God; it was condemned by Pope Innocent XI in 1687 and Molinos died in prison. Marsha's linking of it to the Quakers' "inner light" and the Protestant individual conscience is a loose but defensible intellectual-history move. "The first heresy" is her exaggeration. The point for the plot is that she approaches Beckheim as an aesthetic and intellectual object, a movement to classify, while the people in the hall wanted to be saved.
Hadley trips over "the ankle of a small girl crouched in a heap, listening raptly. A tiny white-haired thing with huge china-blue eyes and the body of a ten-year-old boy. She smiled at him sweetly and turned back to hear."
Laura again: "These North Beach intellectuals... Queer, every one of them. Degenerate dilettantes. No social conscience." She drops an armload of beer cans "in the center of the moth-eaten carpet": "Help yourselves. Sorry, no glasses."
Laura's insults. "Queer" and "degenerate" are Laura's words, and the narrator's sketches of the "slippery hipped" young men lean the same way. North Beach in 1952 was San Francisco's Italian bohemian quarter, home to bars, poets and the first gay-friendly spaces in the city; City Lights bookstore opened there in 1953. Laura, the Progressive, shares the period's homophobia and turns it into a political charge ("No social conscience"). Dick is again recording, without correcting, the prejudices of his left as well as his right.
The song and the window
"The can opener was tossed around. In the background Paul Robeson's rich deep voice rolled forth lower and lower; the record seemed to be gradually slowing down."
"And all your tears of sorrow, / And all your tears of sorrow, / And all your tears of sorrow, / Mamita Mia, / We shall avenge them, / We shall avenge them."
Fact check: the song. The lines are the English refrain of "Los cuatro generales" ("The Four Insurgent Generals"), the Spanish Republican song mocking the generals who rose against the Republic in 1936, with its "mamita mía" refrain. It was recorded in English and Spanish by American left singers in the 1940s, and antiwarsongs.org lists a Paul Robeson version, so Dick's attribution is plausible. It is probably the same "Spanish civil war song" Laura screamed in the car. The slowing record is the chapter's image of the Old Left: the voice is still rich, the turntable is running down.
Hadley stands at the window. "Streetlights glowed yellow here and there, without pattern or visible design. A universe of chance... random particles swirling and settling without meaning." It is the "finite core" fear, seen from outside: a world with no order, which Beckheim's Armageddon would give order to.
Dave comes over. "Do you know her?" "No." "She runs this high-type quarterly up in San Francisco. Critical articles on T. S. Eliot and Jung. Short stories by Capote's bunch... or worse." "I know. Succubus." Dave offers to drive him home: "it'll give me a chance to get out of here... Maybe Marsha will be gone when I get home." As they go, "the tall, slim woman" asks, "You're leaving?" "I'll be back." Hadley's last sight is of "Marsha Frazier, arms folded, already continuing her talk in the same low, indifferent tone."
The name. A succubus is a female demon who comes to sleeping men; "Succubus" as the name of a literary quarterly is an arch joke, and for Hadley it will become a plain description. Marsha is named fully only in the chapter's last lines, after we have seen her coolness, her interest in Beckheim as a specimen, and her one glance of "curiosity" at him. That glance is the start of the affair that takes up much of the middle of the novel; from Part Two she seeks him out. The magazine's diet (Eliot, Jung, "Capote's bunch") is the high-culture modernism of the period, conservative in politics and mystical in taste, which is what Laura means by "arty and mystical... reactionary."
"Fascists"
On the stairs Dave explodes: "They never stop. Talking, I mean. That's not the worst of it, either... I should have known this Watchmen stuff would bring them out of their holes. Goddamn fungus: turn over a rock and look what you get."
Hadley: "Is she the woman you did that article for? The one you got in that argument with, and she never printed it?"
"Fascists," Gold muttered. His voice was bleak, troubled with the ring of unhappy foreboding. "Friends of Ezra Pound." He and Hadley strode gloomily down the sidewalk to the car. "Anti-Semites." Furiously, he tugged open the car door. "Hop in and let's go. I'll probably wreck us along the way... but I want to get you home. The less you see of those people the better."
Fact check: "Friends of Ezra Pound," and the night vision. In 1952 Pound was confined at St Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, having been found unfit to stand trial for treason over his wartime broadcasts for Mussolini's Italy, which were full of antisemitism. In 1949 he was awarded the first Bollingen Prize for poetry ("The Pisan Cantos"), and the award caused a national scandal. To be a "friend of Ezra Pound" in 1952 meant belonging to the literary circle that defended him, and Dave's line joins that circle to fascism and antisemitism in three words. Two continuity notes: Hadley's "she never printed it" and Laura's "Dave did an article for her" can both be true (written, quarrelled over, unpublished); and Dave, who said his "night vision's too lousy" to drive, now insists on driving Hadley home himself ("I'll probably wreck us"). The risk he takes is the measure of his fear of Marsha's people.
The irony Hadley does not see. Dave calls the Succubus people anti-Semites, and Hadley, who thought "how he could have got mixed up with Jews" while looking at Laura three hours earlier, is about to be drawn into their world. The chapter ends with the one person who knows him best giving him a warning in plain words, and Hadley is too disappointed about missing Beckheim to hear it.
Hadley and Dave, side by side
| Stuart Hadley | Dave Gold | |
|---|---|---|
| Looks | Shaved, perfumed, well dressed, "vacant-eyed Nordic" | Unshaven, no tie, dirty shirt, needs resoling |
| Father | Wealthy New York doctor, LaSalle, AMA; killed in a car crash | Wood finisher, Wobbly, beaten and jailed |
| Politics in school | YPSL as "an academic lecture" | YPSL as inheritance |
| After 1948 | Left the IPP when Wallace lost | Civil Rights Congress; Russian at the California Labor School |
| Work | TV salesman, six days a week | Labour journalist with "a national reputation" |
| On the war | Cheered, then sickened by a newsreel; will "wait for the bomb" | Sees propaganda as method: "Now it's the Russians" |
| On religion | Wants poverty, celibacy, a prophet | "Holy-roller" stuff, "nut stuff" |
| On wealth | Condemns it and longs for it ("A princess") | Sees class, misses the longing |
| Prejudice | Antisemitic thoughts about the Golds | Minstrel mockery of Black worshippers |
| Car | None mentioned (the store's truck) | A rusting Cadillac he cannot drive at night |
| What he wants tonight | To see Beckheim | To keep Hadley away from Beckheim and Marsha |
Three answers to the same unrest
| Group | Where we meet them | What they offer Hadley | What the chapter shows |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Golds (Old Left) | The couch, the Cadillac, the grimy flat | Union, class analysis, "quit your job" | Truthful, warm, clumsy; their own working class has gone to the prophet |
| The Watchmen (Beckheim) | The yellow firetrap hall | Judgment, Armageddon, a prophet set apart | Silence, attention, working people; a crowd moving as one body |
| Succubus (aesthetic right) | The Golds' floor, uninvited | Taste, mysticism, Marsha's curiosity | Charmed by the sermon as spectacle; "Fascists... Anti-Semites" |
How the dinner is built. The chapter is a chain of exits. Each time Hadley says something true, a woman deflects it (Ellen's Maria Montez, Ellen's "get some music on the radio") or a contradiction undoes it ("A princess"). Each deflection leaves him angrier, and each leg of the night takes him further from the apartment: couch, kitchen, sidewalk, car, hall, a stranger's party, a dark street. The structure repeats Chapter 1 (bar, cell, home, store) on a political and spiritual plane: a man who cannot stay in any room.
A CLOSER LOOK. Facts checked: Wallace and Taylor's 1948 ticket and its roughly 2.4 percent of the vote; YPSL, IPP, Civil Rights Congress and California Labor School (both on the Attorney General's list); Roosevelt-Truman 1944; the Wobblies (1905); the LaSalle (GM, 1927 to 1940); Arrid; the Retail Clerks (AF of L); Korea (June 1950 to July 1953); paternity deferment (Class III-A, new ones ended August 1953); December 7, 1941 a Sunday; Okinawa (April to June 1945) and the Tokyo firebombing (March 9 to 10, 1945); "The Crucible" (January 1953); C. Wright Mills's "White Collar" (1951); quietism and Molinos (1675, condemned 1687); Pound at St Elizabeths and the 1949 Bollingen Prize; "The Nation," "People's World," Robeson's passport (1950); "Los cuatro generales." Contradictions flagged: Ellen's "two a.m." against the 5:45 cell and her own "next morning"; Friday versus Chapter 1's Thursday date; Sally "never met" versus "always around"; Dave's night vision against his driving at the end. OCR: "tall, thin women." Prejudice in the text: Hadley's antisemitism, the narrator's misogyny, Dave's minstrel mockery, Laura's homophobia; all shown, none endorsed by plot. Unsourced in the text: who told Ellen about the fight.
IN PRACTICE. Hadley's money talk with Dave is a textbook household liquidity map, and every line maps to something a bank sees or misses. The savings are earmarked and their balance unknown even to the owner. The life policy has a loan against it that he cannot quantify ("now he wondered if it had really been hit for all it was worth"), the kind of hidden encumbrance a lender only finds with full data on the policy. The employer has already been a lender ($100 at the wedding, repaid out of salary), the oldest form of payroll credit, and one that deepens dependence on a single job. The family (mother back east, sister in Berkeley) is a contingent credit line that pride keeps closed. And the household cash has been drained by one bad night. An AI assistant asked "can I afford to quit?" would need exactly the questions Dave asks, in that order, and the honesty to say that the customer does not know his own balance.
What the chapter sets up. Beckheim, seen for a moment and heard as fragments about Jonah; Marsha Frazier, met across a room; Dave's warning, "the less you see of those people the better"; Fergesson's "chain of stores"; the boy who "had to be" a boy; the guilt that wants punishment. By eleven on Friday night Hadley has missed his prophet, alienated his wife, and been noticed by the woman who will take him into the Watchmen from the side. Everything after grows from this evening.
Grow or Shrink
When and where. An evening in June 1952, almost certainly Friday, June 6, the same night as the dinner with the Golds. The clues: Ellen says Stuart "went off with some friends of his...for a beer and talk," which matches his late exit with Dave and Laura Gold in Chapter 3; the next chapter opens "the following night" and a waitress there calls it "Saturday night"; Fergesson says it is "Damn cold for June"; Alice says "School's almost out for the summer"; and Ellen's baby is due in "three weeks," which fits the late-June birth given later. The evening runs from after dinner to late at night. Places: the Fergessons' living room (couch, rocking chair, radio, an abalone-shell ashtray, a hardwood floor Fergesson laid himself) and their dark kitchen; the garage and the Pontiac; the deserted business section; Modern TV after hours, lit only by a blue night-light over the safe; Cedar Street on the drive to the Hadleys'. In talk and memory: O'Neill Appliance on Bayshore Highway south of Cedar Groves; Richmond, California during and after the war; the San Mateo branch of the Bank of America; Lake Country, where Fergesson's cousin lives; the Bel-Rex towns (Oakland, Berkeley, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose); Utah, where his father bought a silver ring; Modern in the Depression.
People in this chapter. Jim Fergesson, 42, "sound of health," owner of Modern TV Sales and Service: small, plump and muscular, a round red-wrinkled face, a fringe of gray-black hair, burn scars on his wrists from reaching into the backs of radios. Alice Fergesson, eleven years younger, "Plump, black-haired, with competent hands," gray eyes, a woman who manages "every part of her home"; she hooks a rug all evening. Ellen Hadley, "immense and grotesquely pregnant" in a blue maternity dress and heavy overcoat. Talked about: Bud O'Neill, owner of O'Neill Appliance, "a fat squashy man" with a "dirty wad of a mustache," an ex-ham radio operator; his wife, who stitched BUD on his shirt, and her family, who staked him; Stuart Hadley, "Stumblebum," whom Fergesson cannot bring himself to trust; Olsen, the repairman, whose empty bench sits in the basement; Fergesson's father, a lawyer and failed oil speculator who died in their house; Fergesson's mother; Alice's canasta ladies; Fergesson's cousin in Lake Country; Hadley's dead father, a doctor; Dean Acheson; singers Rudy Vallee, John Charles Thomas and Nelson Eddy; bandleader Morton Gould; "That Man," Franklin Roosevelt, never named.
The couch, the cigar and the gross take
The chapter's first sentence is a portrait in one breath: "Jim Fergesson, forty-two, sound of health, owner of Modern TV Sales and Service, lay in his living room and contemplated gain." Everything after it fills in the room. His shoes are heaped beside the couch, his newspaper is crumpled on the floor, and in the corner Alice rocks in her chair and hooks a rug. The radio, "quietly to itself," describes a new lawn seed that will "revolutionize outdoor patios." Dick likes these murmuring radios. Chapter 1 had the bright sky with "two hours to live"; here the domestic background is a machine selling to nobody in particular.
Fergesson takes the smoking stub of his cigar from an abalone-shell ashtray, "Meditatively, he belched," and shouts that he is going to call Bud O'Neill and close the deal tonight. Alice suggests he look at the place once more. He has seen it "enough to find my way through it in the dark," and if he does not close, "somebody else'll grab it."
Then Dick lets us into his thinking, and the thinking is half business school and half hymn. He reflects "Greedily" on the gross take and "The high percentage of net profits," then corrects himself: profits "misstated it." A man does not go into business "to see his name on the state tax certificate pasted over the till." Profits are "to a business what roaring down the track was to a train," "the quotient, the juice squeezed from the press." They "announced that the business worked." And then the turn that explains the whole chapter: profits mean something "only when put to work, when reinvested." "The driveshaft of a motor attached to nothing merely turned around and around, a useless child's toy."
Profit as a train, not a pile. Fergesson is not a miser. He does not want money; he wants motion. Profit for him is evidence that the machine is running, and it is useless unless it drives something. This is the honest centre of his character, and it is also his trap. A man who believes an idle business is "a useless child's toy" cannot hear his wife's sensible case for leaving the money in the bank. He is temperamentally committed to growth before the chapter tells us he is also cornered into it.
A tiled Elysium on Bayshore Highway
The next paragraph is one of the best in the novel, and it is a joke that turns into a confession. O'Neill Appliance is "the flashy, classy, shiny-bright, new highway-located appliance emporium, with its gleaming neon signs, overhead spots, white refrigerators, stoves, washers, dryers, a vast bathroom of porcelain and chrome, a tiled Elysium of bosom-white baked enamel that was closer to God than cleanliness." The proverb "cleanliness is next to godliness" has been bent so that the appliances outrank it.
Dick pushes the religious language as far as it will go. "Buying O'Neill Appliance was a spiritual act, almost a mystical rapport with the Almighty." If God lurks anywhere on earth, He is present "when a massive crate was torn open and a gleaming Bendix spin dryer was slid from its packing frame onto the display floor." The holiest spot is "the fifty-foot display window of O'Neill Appliance, spread out like a beacon along Bayshore Highway." And the paragraph that follows is a single, deadpan sentence: "In buying O'Neill Appliance, Fergesson demonstrated the essential spirituality of his soul."
The satire is gentle because the worship is real. Fergesson "really loved" the physical work of the trade. He loves "easing the black-metal pry bar between the slats of soft fresh pine, snipping the twisted wires, yanking the alfalfa and brown gummy paper from the towering smooth-white slab of metal." He gets "fierce satisfaction" squatting on the floor to struggle castors into a heavy washer. He is "ecstatic, involved in the act of ultimate adoration," when he unboxes the trays and chromium shelves of a nine-foot refrigerator and fits them in place ("they always fitted exactly right"). And O'Neill's warehouse is "bulging with still-crated refrigerators, never touched or pawed or examined," which to Fergesson is like a church full of unopened Bibles.
The handyman's sacrament. Chapter 1 showed Fergesson opening Modern each morning like a god making light. This chapter shows what he worships when he gets there: the fit. Shelves that slide in "exactly right" are the one place in his life where the world does what it was designed to do. That is why Hadley, who fiddles with the same set all day and wanders off in his head, offends him so deeply, and why O'Neill, who could not make a Webster changer stop on the last record, is a figure of horror. For Fergesson, competence is a form of grace, and the novel will spend three hundred pages testing whether it is enough.
Alice's arithmetic
Alice punctures the hymn with facts. "Nobody else will grab it," she says gently. "It's been up for sale a year and a half." Dick pauses on her: "The wife Jim Fergesson had selected was eleven years younger than he," plump, black-haired, competent, alert. She notices that he is not acting like himself: "You're not usually this way... Anything happen to make you incautious this way?" "No," he says shortly. "I've waited a year and a half; how cautious can you get?"
Her case against the deal is short and sound:
- Work. "If you buy O'Neill Appliance you'll have to work twice as hard as you do now... And you've got plenty to do as it is."
- Return. "Why don't you leave the money in the bank? You're getting two and a half percent interest, probably as much as you'll make out of O'Neill's place."
- Cost. "There's too much overhead there."
Fergesson's answer is the chapter's title. "We've discussed it before... I want to expand. I want to grow." When she smiles he takes umbrage: "Stop laughing at me, you old bat. If I just sit still the damn business will shrink. Turn your back and it gets smaller." Alice laughs: "That's because when you're away from it you build it up in your mind until it's as big as Macy's." "I have dreams," he says. "You have a big tongue," she answers, and gives the history that made the tongue. "You were a salesman during the depression; your tongue kept us alive. Remember how long you talked for a nine-dollar sale? Longer than you talk now for a three-hundred-dollar combination."
He remembers: "Those nine-dollar Emersons kept us in potatoes." And he tells, with a roar, the one story of his own weakness he enjoys. One winter day he turned on the heater in the back of the store while Alice was up in the office typing bills; a man came in to look at sets; "I was sound asleep in front of the heater." "The only time in your life you missed a sale," Alice says. "That sure taught me something," he cackles. "That heater never went on again; too much comfort is bad."
2.5% The interest Alice says their savings earn at the bank, her benchmark for whether O'Neill's store is worth buying.
A year and a half How long O'Neill Appliance has been up for sale, and also how long O'Neill's first shop in Richmond lasted.
$9 A Depression-era Emerson radio, the sale Fergesson used to talk longest for.
$300 A modern television combination, sold now with less talk.
Eleven years The age gap between Fergesson, 42, and Alice, about 31.
Almost fifteen years How long Alice packed his lunch (an apple, a peanut butter sandwich, a pint of milk) in a paper sack.
Fact check: was 2.5 percent a fair figure? Roughly, yes. In 1952 commercial-bank passbook accounts generally paid about 2 percent, and insured savings and loan associations paid about 2.75 to 3 percent on average (Federal Reserve and historical statistics series). Alice's "two and a half percent" sits between the two, which is about what a careful saver could get. Her point stands: a low-risk return with no overhead and no extra work, against a store that has already ruined one owner.
The creed of a simple man
From the heater story Fergesson slides into a sermon, and Dick lets it run. It is worth taking line by line, because each article of the creed will be tested later in the book.
Luxury. "Maybe that's what's wrong with the young people today: too much luxury. They're soft. All they have to do is push a button, turn a knob." Alice's reply is the sharpest line in the chapter: "You're selling them the machines, aren't you?" He has an answer ready: "A machine isn't good or bad; it's how you use it... If a man gets a machine so he can lie in the shade and sleep, that's bad. If he gets a machine so he can do more work, that's fine." His "small, well-muscled body stiffened pridefully."
Hard selling. "Remember how hard we worked back in the old days? You did the bookkeeping and kept the place clean while I sold people radios and vacuum cleaners. Boy, we really had to sell; people didn't walk in and buy, like they do now. Anybody can sell something to a man that wants to buy; that's not selling." He winks: "It didn't hurt us any, did it? We had fun." "Kept my weight down; I'll say that much," Alice says.
Waste. "We never threw anything away; remember the old trash cartons down in the basement? Remember me jumping up and down, flattening those boxes and baling them up with packing wire?" And the example that brings Hadley in: "I've seen Hadley use a piece of carbon paper and toss it away... use it once and throw it in the basket."
Standards. Alice warns him that two stores means handing one to someone else, "and you know how you fret when you're not there to boss everybody around." "Everybody does things wrong," he says. "By your standards. But different people have different standards." "I hire them! I pay them good money! If they want to work for me they're going to have to meet my standards... The thing that's wrong with these young kids is they don't know how to work. They expect the customer to walk up and hand them the money... They're soft. "I know," Alice says gently. "You've mentioned it before, from time to time."
Manliness. Padding toward the kitchen he goes on: "There's such a thing as too much of a good thing. A man gets effeminate with all the stuff they're selling these days. Perfume for men, aftershave, they call it, but it's perfume. Hadley uses it; I can smell it." (Chapter 3 had Hadley "delicately perfumed" and Dave Gold sniffing at his Arrid.)
Simple tastes. He halts at the kitchen door with the stump of his cigar. "Alice, I'm a simple man. I have simple tastes. I like a good meal, I like to read the paper after dinner and smoke this... I like a little fun, once in a while. A ball game or a drive out in the country. How long's it been since we've seen a movie?" "God knows," says Alice, and the reply says more about their life than his speech.
Music. "I like a little music, not that longhair stuff: something simple and sweet, with a melody I can follow." People who listen to classical music "must be crazy. Or maybe they're pretending... Maybe they know darn well it's just a lot of crazy sounds." Then the slur: "Of course, I don't go for this hot jazz all the kids like. It's nigger music; that's what it is, pure and simple." He wants "the old-fashioned stuff... you could walk home humming to yourself. It was easy to dance to." He names Rudy Vallee, then John Charles Thomas: "There's a great artist... I heard him sing, once. You know, when he sings he closes his eyes. He stands there with his eyes shut and his hands clasped; he's a simple man, Alice. He's sincere." From the dark kitchen: "Nelson Eddy was another. Whatever happened to him?" "He's still around."
A CLOSER LOOK: the slur, and an irony Fergesson misses. The racial slur about jazz is Fergesson's, quoted here because Dick uses it to show how casually a "simple," churchgoing, decent man of 1952 could say it in his own living room. Alice does not react, which is part of the portrait. The irony is in his heroes. John Charles Thomas (1891 to 1960) was a trained opera baritone who sang at the Metropolitan Opera from 1934 to 1943, as well as on Broadway and on popular radio shows. Nelson Eddy (1901 to 1967) was also classically trained and sang opera before Hollywood. The man who calls classical music "crazy sounds" loves two opera singers; what he wants is not simplicity of music but sincerity of manner, a singer who "closes his eyes." Alice is right that Eddy was "still around": he appeared on television in 1952 and opened a nightclub act with Gale Sherwood in January 1953 that ran for years.
He roots in the dark kitchen for beer: "What happened to all the beer I brought home last week? You and your canasta ladies drank it all up, did you?" It is at the bottom of the refrigerator with the vegetables. He comes back with a glass, and the creed gives way to the problem it was covering.
The Hadley problem
"Alice, what the hell am I going to do? I can't turn Modern over to Hadley; he can't tell his ass from a hole in the ground." There is "an intense frown of concentration on his round, red-wrinkled face" and he paws "fretfully at the fringe of gray-black hair above his left ear." Then the complaint widens to everyone: "But they're all that way! He's the least of them, I suppose... They're all a bunch of WPA leaf rakers... Christ, they just stand there with their hands in their pockets. Watching TV while people swarm by outside." The WPA jibe is a stock insult of the period: the Depression work-relief program as a byword for men paid to lean on rakes.
"Hooks have gone out of style," Alice says, meaning the hard-sell "hook." "I don't want high pressure! I just want somebody who likes his work, who likes to sell. If I turn Modern over to Hadley he'll put it out of business in a week."
Alice has a plan, and the narrator notes "they had gone over it many times." He can still do the buying; she will go down and keep the books; "You can get some high school kid to dust the television sets. School's almost out for the summer." He admits it reluctantly, and then gives the evidence against Hadley, which turns, as he speaks, into evidence of how much he watches him:
- The hangover. "I damn near fired Hadley the other day. He showed up with a hangover, again; he could hardly drag one foot after another and he was shaking like a leaf." (This is Chapter 1's Thursday.)
- The pity. "But how the hell can I? He's got that wife of his knocked up, and all those unpaid bills..."
- The till. "Around the end of the month he's into the till for ten or fifteen bucks. It's pathetic." Fergesson knows, and has said nothing.
- The clothes. "Every time he goes by a clothing shop he buys himself a new bunch of socks and ties, or maybe an imported cashmere sweater. What's he want with all those clothes? I thought only women bought a lot of clothes!"
Alice defends Hadley ("He's a good-looking young man... You ought to go along with him") and plucks at her husband's frayed cuff: "You've been wearing that same blue serge suit for years." "This is a good suit... I got this suit before the last war. They don't make them this way, not anymore." "You're the only man I know who still wears a vest. And carries a pocket watch." "My dad gave me this watch," he says, flipping it open expertly. "You know how many jewels it has?" "I know," says Alice, eyes twinkling. "None. It cost your dad a dollar and a half back in the French and Indian War." "Not that far back... You're trying to make a monkey out of me. You, too, kid." And he remembers the paper sack lunches, "an apple and a peanut butter sandwich and a pint of milk," carried to the store "Every goddamn day" for "Almost fifteen years."
Alice proposes a trial: let Hadley run Modern for a while, and take a vacation, "Go up and stay in Lake Country at your cousin's a week or so. It's summer; business is slow. Hadley can't do much harm... Maybe the responsibility will set well on him." Fergesson's answer is absurd and revealing: "I won't have anybody running my store who swills celery phosphates."
"Now you're being silly," Alice says sharply. "Are you going to tell your employees what to eat and drink? Give them some life of their own." He holds his ground: "It's not that, not the stuff he swills, in itself. It's what it means... A man who drinks that stuff is unbalanced." "Is a man who drinks beer unbalanced?" And then he says the thing that the rest of the novel will bear out in the worst way:
"There's something wrong with Stumblebum... You can see it in the goofy things he does. He gets mad in the wrong way, not like other people. He's mad all the time. It's always down there inside him... Things bring it to the surface. Someday he's going to bust loose. He's going to go out on a wingding and wind up in jail. Or worse."
Right about the man, wrong about the reasons. Fergesson's reasons are mostly prejudice: the celery phosphate, the aftershave, the clothes, "dresses up like you damn women." But his conclusion is sharp. He has seen what Ellen will describe later in this chapter and what the reader saw in Chapter 1 (the bar fight, the cell, the money taken from the teapot): a rage "always down there," brought to the surface by small things. He even predicts "jail," which has already happened, two nights earlier, without his knowing. The novel's last part will prove him right in a way he could not imagine. Dick gives his least sympathetic speaker the most accurate diagnosis, and has the kindest speaker, Alice, dismiss it.
The secret: Bel-Rex
Fergesson falls silent. The radio mutters "the symphonic syrup of Morton Gould's orchestra." Alice hooks, glances up, raises an eyebrow, gets no answer, shrugs. And the narrator tells us what he is not telling her:
The threat has a name. "The Bel-Rex drugstore chain, with branches in Oakland, Berkeley, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, was considering buying O'Neill Appliance. Once the chain got hold of it, Jim Fergesson was finished."
Two arguments, one man. The whole first half of the chapter is a decoy. Fergesson argues growth as philosophy (profits must be reinvested), as virtue (idle men go soft) and as taste (the shining showroom is holy). Alice answers each one reasonably. None of it is the real argument, which is defensive: buy the site before the chain does. The reader learns this only after the creed, so every proud line about hard work and simple tastes is reread as the talk of a frightened man. "Grow or shrink" is not ambition. It is the only exit he can see from a room that is closing.
Fact check: Morton Gould and Bel-Rex. Morton Gould (1913 to 1996) led one of the best-known light orchestras on American radio and records in the 1940s and early 1950s, with Columbia albums of lush arrangements of popular songs ("Soft Lights and Sweet Music," 1948); "symphonic syrup" is a fair if unkind description. "Bel-Rex" is fictional. The pattern behind it is true to the period: chains and discounters were moving into appliances and television, and the fight over "fair trade" minimum prices (below) was at its height in exactly these months.
Bud O'Neill, a life in a few pages
Then comes a set piece that has nothing to do with plot and everything to do with Fergesson. "He had never been a big-time operator. Neither was Bud O'Neill: in fact O'Neill was no good at all." O'Neill "was so pitiful an operator that he was selling out...with one of the best fronts, inventories, and locations in the business. O'Neill was a natural-born bad businessman." In Fergesson's mind "the life and history of his competitor lay like a stone; he couldn't dislodge it." The way of Bud O'Neill was "always there, the open road of mediocrity and final failure."
The biography moves fast, in stages.
The ham. O'Neill was "that special type of idiot who opens a little hole-in-the-wall radio repair shop with nothing more than the ability to check tubes, replace filter condensers, and wire in phonograph inputs to old radios." He "had taken enthusiastically to radio in high school," built "a shortwave transmitter," got a license and went on the air, "a ham." "This was back in the thirties, toward the end of the depression."
Richmond. "In the early forties O'Neill got himself a job in a defense plant in Richmond, California, wiring bomber turrets. He made plenty of money; everybody in Richmond was wealthy, including the Okies and Negroes." After the war "block after block of property became worthless; Richmond shut down its plants and shipyards and became a town of federally operated multiple-housing-unit slums and flashy supermarkets. One by one the businesses set up to supply the wartime labor force dwindled and failed. About this time O'Neill opened his first store."
Fact check: Richmond's boom and bust. Accurate in outline. The Kaiser shipyards opened in Richmond in 1941; the city grew from about 23,600 people in 1940 to roughly 100,000 by 1943, and the four yards built 747 ships (National Park Service, Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park). Many of the new workers, white and Black, came from the South and Southwest, and more than 60,000 people lived in public housing, much of it "temporary." After the war the yards closed and the population fell, from about 101,500 in 1947 to 71,900 by 1960. O'Neill's job "wiring bomber turrets" is a fictional detail. The narrator's "including the Okies and Negroes" carries the period's sneer at exactly those migrants.
Richmond One-Day Radio Service. The shop had been a shoe shop: "a barren single room with a filthy bathroom in the back and two flyspecked window ledges for display," water-soaked walls, "aging nude-girl calendars" sagging among cobwebs. O'Neill moved in "test equipment (built by hand), a pair of secondhand counters, a stool and a rubber floor mat to keep himself from being electrocuted, a fluorescent lamp," had a sign painted, and became the Richmond One-Day Radio Service. In front he piled "rusty old radio chassis, dead portable radio batteries"; he set up a record player and sold stacks of "ex-jukebox records" for twenty-five cents. In the window went tall cardboard posters from Sylvania and Tungsol tubes, and later "a few tiny personal radios, the kind that operate from 67½-volt cells, the kind that can't be plugged in the wall and are eternally damned by Consumers Union."
The trade. "The old ladies started coming in with their Atwater Kents and decrepit Philcos, the like of which are built no more, the like of which will never be equaled." O'Neill was "a fat squashy man in his thirties," in "a faded dirt-spotted quasi uniform that made him look like a filling-station mechanic. A Coke bottle at the end of the bench; "From upturned radio chassis shrieked and howled metallic cowboy music." Pimple-faced youths brought paper bags of dusty tubes to be checked free; girls came in for phonograph needles, so he got "a display board of RCA chromium needles and Recoton twenty-five for a quarter." "He was really in business."
The failure. "O'Neill was stupid, slow, and hardworking. The combination got him nowhere; he made nothing." The list of his miseries is a repairman's nightmare:
- Most of his sets "broke down within the thirty-day guarantee period."
- He spent hours "arguing with some penniless kid over GE variable-reluctance cartridges."
- He spent weeks "smoothing out crumpled old invoices, trying to find out where fifty 35Z5 tubes had come from, and why."
- He sat at his bench "until four in the morning, trying to use up consignments of parts that bulged around him in quarter-pint bottles."
- "All day he studied Rider's Serviceman's Manual, trying to discover the secret of keeping Webster 56 record changers from turning off in the middle of the last record."
"After a year and a half he folded."
Fact check: the radio-shop details. Dick knew this trade from the inside (he worked in Berkeley radio and record shops in the 1940s), and the details hold up. Atwater Kent stopped making radios and closed its plant in 1936, so "built no more" is literal. Consumers Union was founded in 1936. John F. Rider's "Perpetual Troubleshooter's Manual," the repairman's bible of schematics, ran in volumes from 1931 to 1954 (Dick's "Rider's Serviceman's Manual" is a loose name for it). The Webster-Chicago Model 56 was a changer of about 1945 to 1946, just right for a postwar Richmond shop, and service guides of the period note that some early Webster changers misbehaved on the last record. The 35Z5 was a common rectifier tube in cheap AC/DC table radios. Sylvania and Tung-Sol (Dick writes "Tungsol") were major tube makers; Recoton made replacement needles.
The showroom. The expensive store "south of Cedar Groves along Bayshore Highway was not bought with funds earned wiring bomber turrets...and it was not bought with the proceeds from the sale of Richmond One-Day. It was handled by his wife's family, who had money to invest." O'Neill had "talked to enough old ladies, checked enough tubes, argued with enough pimple-faced kids, to spout a good line." He "sold his wife's family a bill of goods, got himself staked to thirty thousand dollars, and set up O'Neill Appliance." New stores were going up along Bayshore "like fruit stands in summer." A hundred yards to his right was a piano shop that lit on and off all night, seven nights a week. Across from him, a dime store as large as a movie theater. "Even the bar down the road looked like a Spanish mansion." And three outsiders chose the pieces: "He had a good location, selected by the San Mateo branch of the Bank of America. He had a good front, designed by a San Francisco architect picked out by his father-in-law. His inventory was a housewife's dream, a bulging cavern stuffed to bursting by the enterprising salesmen of the San Francisco supply houses."
"In three years O'Neill was up to his neck. In five, he was dead. Drowned."
The epitaph is merciless: "an ex-ham, with a meager ability to handle a soldering iron and oscillator, no organizational ability, no sense of how to spend money, and when it came down to it, too honest to be a good salesman." Even his advertising was a joke: "he forgot to trim off the instructions, left words like your store where his own plate should have appeared." So O'Neill never cut into Fergesson's gross. Instead his shop worked as a free "come-on" for Modern, "drawing cars to a stop, getting people out on their feet, failing to close them, sending them finally into Cedar Groves at ten miles an hour, wanting to be sold, money hanging out, ready to take any obsolete dog pushed on them by somebody with a carnation in his neatly pressed suit, a sales book and fountain pen in his hands."
$30,000 The stake O'Neill's in-laws put into O'Neill Appliance.
18 months The life of Richmond One-Day Radio Service.
3 years / 5 years "Up to his neck" / "dead. Drowned."
50 feet O'Neill's display window on Bayshore Highway.
25 cents A stack of ex-jukebox records in Richmond; also 25 Recoton needles.
67½ volts The battery in the little personal radios Consumers Union "eternally damned."
Fifty The 35Z5 tubes O'Neill spent weeks trying to trace.
30 days His repair guarantee, which most sets did not outlast.
Everything bought, nothing grown. O'Neill's showroom is the perfect counter-image of Modern. Every advantage was purchased from an expert: the site from the bank, the front from an architect, the stock from supply-house salesmen, the money from in-laws. The one thing nobody could sell him was judgment. Dick's details make the point without saying it: a man who cannot trim "your store" off an ad cannot run a fifty-foot window. Fergesson built from the bench up and owns every inch; O'Neill was built from the outside in and owns nothing, which is why a chain can buy him. "Dead. Drowned" is, of course, financial: O'Neill is alive and selling.
What the chain would do
Fergesson, by contrast, "had got the town's sidewalk trade, its old families, and its highway traffic. He had handled it well: bought close to the belt, not got himself stuck with obsolete radio-phonographs and ten-inch TV sets. Everything was fine; he was well ahead of the game. Except, simply, that if Bel-Rex came in, Fergesson was finished. In six months, by Christmas, Bel-Rex would have O'Neill Appliance high-powered, drawing from a statewide inventory, with unlimited funds for investment and advertising."
"Sitting in his pleasant living room, listening to the radio mutter Morton Gould, Jim Fergesson was scared. Inside his plump, muscular body, he was trembling." He "couldn't compete against Bel-Rex; he was finished." Dick then writes the chain's advertising campaign as Fergesson's nightmare, in the clipped voice of the ads themselves:
Fact check: "fifty bucks under fair trade." "Fair trade" laws let manufacturers set minimum retail prices for branded goods. The Miller-Tydings Act of 1937 exempted such agreements from federal antitrust law, but on May 21, 1951 the Supreme Court ruled in Schwegmann Bros. v. Calvert Distillers that they could not bind retailers who had not signed. Discounters rushed in. Congress answered with the McGuire Act, signed by Truman on July 14, 1952, about five weeks after this evening, which restored minimum prices against non-signers. So in June 1952 a chain selling "fifty bucks under fair trade" was exactly what independent dealers feared, and exactly what their lobby was fighting in Washington. The ad's coy "(we can't tell you what it is but you'd recognize it instantly)" fits too: a discounter undercutting a fair-trade brand had reason not to name it.
"I'm no hotshot"
"I'm no hotshot," Fergesson croaks aloud. Alice looks up. Gazing at him intently, Alice says: "I know that, dear."
Then he argues with the chain out loud, in fragments:
- Lines. "I can't carry all lines! Christ, I have Emerson and GE and Westinghouse and Philco and Zenith, isn't that enough? What more do they want? A man can stock only so much." Bel-Rex, "he knew bitterly," carried everything, "Right down the line, to Sentinel and Crosley and Trav-Ler. The works. And complete lines, not just leaders."
- Giveaways. "Price cutting... Buy a TV, get a free toaster. Free twin-lead and rabbit ears. Christ, I couldn't give away a ten-amp fuse!"
- Who they serve. Alice, "eyeing him uneasily," asks if he has been reading the ads of "those big San Francisco department stores." "They're not so bad; they have class. It's these hotshot chains that get me. These lit-up joints that cater to Okies and coons."
- How they buy. "Christ, they're wholesalers doing retail! They buy direct from the factory, it's true. They buy more in a day than I buy in a year. When stuff gets obsolete they dump it in the river..."
- His own stock. "I've got some old Hoffmans down in the basement, the first they made. By God, I'll sell them yet."
A CLOSER LOOK: a second slur, and a fact. "Okies and coons" puts Fergesson's class contempt and his racism in the same breath: the chain's sin is that it sells to poor white migrants and Black customers. Compare the narrator's earlier "including the Okies and Negroes" about Richmond's wartime wages. Dick shows the prejudice as part of the small dealer's identity (the "class" of the department store against the "lit-up joints"); the book does not endorse it, and the next chapter puts a Black preacher at the centre of the novel. The fact: Hoffman Radio of Los Angeles, founded in 1941, began making television sets around 1948 to 1949 (its early "Easy-Vision" sets had a tinted screen), so "the first they made" were three or four years old in 1952, an age in early television. The joke is that the man who "bought close to the belt" is still sitting on them.
A business that changed under him
He paces. "You either get bigger or get smaller. He didn't have a choice; if he wanted to stay alive he had to buy O'Neill Appliance. Goddamn O'Neill, why had he built the place? Why hadn't he left it a grassy lot of beer cans and moldy newspapers?"
Then a different fear surfaces, not of the chain but of the trade itself. "You know, maybe I shouldn't have gone in the radio business. Look how it's changed, it isn't anything like it used to be. Now it's TV, nothing but big screen and color, black tube, ultrahigh frequency... Back in the old days we had five-tube superhets and that was all. And this hi-fi stuff, these custom-built things. Fifteen thousand cycles, music for the birds. Reluctance cartridges, tape recorders, it's a madhouse. FM tuners, nothing but grief."
"It'll level off," Alice says patiently. "Be glad you're not in the record business; you'd have those different speeds, those long plays and those little RCA forty-five doughnuts with the big hole."
Fact check: the madhouse of 1952. Fergesson's list is a precise snapshot of that spring. The FCC's Sixth Report and Order, adopted April 11 and released April 14, 1952, ended the 1948 freeze on new TV stations and opened seventy UHF channels (14 to 83); existing sets would need converters to receive them. Color was in limbo: CBS's incompatible color service began in June 1951 and was suspended that October, and a compatible color standard was not approved until December 17, 1953. In records, Columbia launched the 33⅓ rpm LP in 1948 and RCA answered in 1949 with the 7-inch 45, whose large centre hole suited its fast changer; the "war of the speeds" ran from 1948 to 1950. A dealer in June 1952 really was stocking for three record speeds, two TV bands and a color system nobody could yet buy. "Fifteen thousand cycles" was the hi-fi advertiser's boast of frequency range, near the top of adult hearing, hence "music for the birds."
He gets a second beer. His hands are shaking, "his knobby, stubby, calloused hands, with their grimy burn-scars up and down the wrists, from reaching into backs of radios..." "That fool O'Neill... He'll sell out and get his money. Probably open up a big neon-sign tilted-glass-front whorehouse." "What did you say, dear?" Alice calls. He grunts. And the narrator states the grievance underneath: "He hadn't anybody's family to stake him; he had gone up the hard way, hand over hand, on his own power. He had worked every inch of it...and overnight Bel-Rex could slaughter him."
The father in the vest pocket
"My dad was right," he says wretchedly. "He said I was making a mistake." "Your father didn't approve of any kind of business," Alice reminds him. "Sure, he was a lawyer. A professional man. He was an educated man."
Alice's reply is the one moment her voice rises:
"He was right." In his vest pocket his fingers close around "the ancient gold watch, elaborately engraved, with its fine, thin, black hands and spidery numbers. That was all the tall, dignified old man had left, that and a heavy silver ring bought from an Indian in Utah. And an old leather briefcase full of worthless drilling-rights certificates."
Contradiction: which watch? Earlier the same evening Alice teases that the watch has "None" jewels and "cost your dad a dollar and a half," and Fergesson only protests "Not that far back," not the price. Here it is "the ancient gold watch, elaborately engraved." A dollar-fifty watch would be a cheap "dollar watch" in base metal, not gold. Either Alice's joke is a fond exaggeration he lets pass, or Dick changed his mind about the watch within a few pages. The tension is telling either way: to Alice it is a trinket, to Fergesson an heirloom. Flagged, not resolved.
The father who never approved. This is the first full appearance of the book's central pattern: sons measured against absent or disapproving fathers. Fergesson's father despised trade from a sickbed paid for by trade; Hadley's father, a doctor, is dead and idealised (Chapter 3); Beckheim will be the father Hadley chooses. Fergesson's whole success is an argument with a dead man who owned only a watch, a ring and a briefcase of worthless paper, and the argument has not ended. When he says "He was right," he means he still has not won it. The oil certificates also make a quiet point about money: the "educated man" who looked down on shopkeeping lost everything speculating, while the shopkeeper son supported him.
Hadley as a mirror
Then Fergesson says something generous, almost against his will. "In a way I can understand how Hadley feels. I wandered into the radio business by accident, like he did. I wasn't going to be a businessman; I was going to be a lawyer, like my father. Maybe that's all that's wrong with Hadley; maybe he wants to be something better than a TV salesman. I sure as hell wouldn't want to be a TV salesman; I'd rather wash dishes. If he had any sense he'd wander back out again."
The sympathy curdles into politics. "Hadley was raised by women. He's like those fellows in the State Department, like that Dean Acheson. A whole generation of them. Sissy-kissers...no spine." His voice sinks "into baffled gloom." "No wonder America's prestige is going down. No wonder the Commies are winning, with mama's boys running the show. It isn't like the old days." "It never is," Alice says realistically.
Fact check and A CLOSER LOOK: Acheson. Dean Acheson was Secretary of State from January 21, 1949 to January 20, 1953, educated at Groton, Yale and Harvard Law. Senator Joseph McCarthy and his allies attacked him as the "Red Dean" and accused his department of harbouring Communists; the attacks sharpened after the Communist victory in China in 1949 and Acheson's refusal to "turn his back" on Alger Hiss. Acheson, the son of an Episcopal bishop, was hardly "raised by women." Fergesson's line is the stock smear of 1952, which tied the polished diplomat to softness and softness to treason (the same years saw the "lavender scare" purge of gay men from government). Dick gives it to him straight because it is the newspaper talking through the man. Note also the mirror logic: Fergesson's own father failed him, and he wants Hadley to have a father's voice he can quote.
From the couch, gazing at the heap of rug his wife is "tirelessly hooking," he goes on: "The trouble with Hadley is he doesn't have any moral standards. He doesn't know right from wrong; nobody taught him the things to live by." "Such as?" "Such as going to church. Such as faith in God and faith in his country. This is a wonderful country, Alice. Don't ever forget that. If a man works hard he can go a long way. Look at me, when I started out I didn't have a thing. I built it all up with my own hands." He points at the hardwood floor: "I put in that floor, remember?" "Of course I remember," Alice says tartly. "I helped you."
He goes on regardless: "The foundation, I hauled out all that dirt and sank the foundation myself. And the tile in the kitchen. The whole damn sink. This house, the store, everything... I built it all up from nothing. I never pulled a dumb deal in my life; if I'd owned Richmond One-Day I'd have made a go of it. If I bought out O'Neill right this minute I'd have that place of his humming!" "Please don't shout at me," Alice says apprehensively. "What on earth is the matter with you?" "Nothing," he mutters. "Nothing at all."
"I helped you." Three words of Alice's dismantle the self-made myth more neatly than any argument. She typed the bills in the Depression, kept the books, cleaned the store, packed fifteen years of lunches, nursed his father for eight years and helped lay the floor. Every "I" in his speech is a "we," and he cannot hear it. The chapter's sympathy is with her; its pathos is that he needs the myth more than the truth. Note too the faith he names, "God and... country," set beside a store he calls holy: the next chapter will show a rival faith that rejects both country and machine.
The night drive
"Later in the evening he did something that he only partly understood. He put on his coat, went out to the garage, and started up the Pontiac. A few moments later he was gliding down the dark night streets, toward the deserted business section and Modern TV."
It is a habit, and he knows it: "It was when he was worried; he knew that. When he was bothered and uncertain: that was when he left his home late at night and came alone to the store. The dark, silent, cold store, with its ghostly shapes. All its lights turned off, except the flickering blue night-light over the safe. Down in the damp concrete vault that was the basement, an occasional beetle fluttered and squeaked and flopped across Olsen's deserted bench: that was the only sound."
As he drives, O'Neill returns: "The failure. The incompetent, without talent of any kind. Harmless, good-natured, full of talk and easy plans. Dazed by the collapse of his gaudy store, not really understanding why it had folded." Fergesson imagines O'Neill's excuse: "Probably constructing an elaborate mythology: ruined because of secret conspiracies. Combines of his competitors." He does not notice that he himself has spent the evening blaming a chain, a combine of exactly that kind.
Then the doubt. He examines his hands on the wheel. "Competent hands; he wasn't anything like Bud O'Neill. Or was he? Modern TV had once been a place like Richmond One-Day; behind the counter he had hunched much like Bud O'Neill. The old ladies had crept in with their Atwater Kents; he had put in new filters, checked tubes, wired the old sets for phono jacks." In the thirties, "when he had taken the store over, there were dead batteries stacked in his windows, too. Tubes and tube displays, secondhand counters, test equipment. The yowl of sets upturned on the bench, protesting against investigation."
How Fergesson got Modern. This is the founding story of the store, and it matters for the rest of the book. Fergesson did not buy Modern; he took it over in 1932 in lieu of about two and a quarter years of unpaid wages. He was the employee who stayed when the owner could not pay, and the business was his back pay. Now he is the owner, and his employee is Hadley, who takes his own "back pay" from the till at the end of each month. The symmetry returns when Hadley is later promoted and the question of who will run Modern becomes the plot. The night drive also shows the habit that will matter later: the boss who comes to the dark store alone when he is afraid.
Ellen in the dark store
He parks, snaps off the lights and motor, and walks down the dark sidewalk. Old crumpled newspapers have blown into the entrance; he stoops to gather them, and while carrying them to the gutter he sees a light on in the shop, "coming from the back television display room."
"He got the door opened and entered. Ellen Hadley, immense and grotesquely pregnant in her blue maternity dress and heavy overcoat, sat gazing at an elaborate RCA television combination." She does not notice him until he has closed the front door and come into the display room. "Hello," she says.
Dick's description in the blue light is unsettling. "The store was chill, dismal in its barrenness. In the pallid blue flicker of the night-light the girl's face seemed not round: a hollow pointed bonelike thing, a rigid frame supporting her features. Her eyes were deep-sunk, far down in her skull. Her hair appeared transparent, a sheet of dry spidery material, a brown cap through which her scalp and ears were visible. She wore no makeup; her lips were pale, thin." The pregnant woman, in this light, looks like a skull: birth and death in one image, in front of a television set.
"What are you doing?" Fergesson demands, "in fright." "Don't you have a TV at home?" After a time she nods. "I was walking around. I got tired." She indicates "the vast tumor of her belly." "So I came in to sit down... Stuart went off with some friends of his...for a beer and talk." "I'll take you home." "What are you doing?" she asks back. "I come down here," he says, leaning on the counter, "hands knotted into a stubby massed-fist." The reader, who has just been told why he really comes, knows it is a cover.
A question the text leaves open: how did she get in? Fergesson has to get "the door opened," and when they leave he unlocks it and the narrator speaks of "the locked front door," so the store was locked with Ellen inside. She must have used Stuart's key, which suggests either that he left it at home when he went out with the Golds or that she took it. Dick never says, and Fergesson, whose store this is, never asks, which shows how strongly the sight of her affects him. Note also Ellen's "for a beer and talk": in Chapter 3, Stuart left with the Golds for the Watchmen lecture. She may not know, or may be covering for him.
The talk is short, hesitant and full of small courtesies. "You and Stumblebum have a quarrel?" "No, not really. I'm cross these days, I guess." "How long will it be?" "Oh, they say three weeks. Give or take a few days." "You startled me. I didn't expect to find anybody here." "I'm sorry." "Are you warm enough? Want my coat?" "I'm fine. Thanks."
Then Dick turns Fergesson's gaze into a religious image. He "marveled at the miracle of this bloated creature who sat before the television screen, hands folded in her lap, eyes fixed dutifully on the pale-lit shapes."
"Everything meaningful was contained in her body, like the wads and layers of fat a hibernating animal stores up to make it self-sufficient." The man who has spent the evening insisting that a business must grow or die is looking at the one kind of growth he cannot buy.
Pete. The name carries a small sadness. Stuart wanted an easy, friendly nickname and got "Stumblebum" from his boss instead. The son will carry the name the father could not earn. The baby, born later in the novel, is a boy, and he is Pete. Ellen's "millions of years" also matters: she speaks of herself in geological time, which the next chapter's prophet will use for the whole of history.
"What did you quarrel about?" "I don't really know. Something to do with war and God. I'll tell you someday. Not now." "Ellen, what's wrong with Stuart?" "Do you care?" "I know there's something wrong." And then, "Very simply":
Fact check: "That Man." "That man in the White House" was the hostile name Roosevelt's opponents, especially wealthy conservatives, used rather than say his name; Robert H. Jackson's memoir of FDR takes its title, "That Man," from it. Fergesson uses the phrase with the old grudge in it; Ellen repeats it with a different weight. Her point is that Hadley's generation grew up inside the "attempt" (the New Deal, the war, the promise of a remade world), and the man who embodied it died in April 1945. Fergesson's generation, she implies, offered the young that one large hope and nothing since. "I didn't create the world" echoes Chapter 1, where Fergesson opened his store like a creator; Ellen takes him at his own image.
"Doesn't Stuart like me?" Fergesson asks unhappily. Ellen considers.
"I don't think he even sees you. I'm afraid he's never learned to see anybody. What he wants, what he's looking for, is much too vague, too remote and abstract. It has no name. A hundred years ago it was called grace. It's a search for someone he can have faith in. Someone who won't let him down."
"If he could see me, he'd know I want him to trust me." "If he could do that, I think he'd be well. But he doesn't know how. So he can only keep on searching for something invisible. Something that nobody has ever seen on this earth and nobody ever will."
Ellen's diagnosis. This is the thesis of the novel, given to its quietest character. Hadley's trouble is not drink or temper or laziness, though he has all three; it is a hunger for a person who will not fail him, something earlier ages called grace and his own age has no word for. Fergesson offers himself ("He can trust me") and is told he already failed, not personally but as the representative of a world. Ellen is also describing her own position: she is the person Stuart could trust and does not see. And her last sentence is a prophecy of failure: whatever he finds will be a man, seen on this earth, and so not the thing he wants. The next chapter sends Hadley to the man who seems to offer exactly what she describes.
"My little flock"
Fergesson comes around the end of the counter. "Outside the store, beyond the locked front door, a man and woman walked past, heels echoing mournfully in the total night stillness." "I'll take you home. I have the car out front." He snaps off the set; the sound had been so low that only when he bends over it does "the faint tinny blare of it" reach his ears. "Were you actually looking at that?" "Not exactly. Just thinking." Following her out he checks, "in his automatic way," whether Hadley turned off all the sets before leaving. Even now, the inspector in him is at work.
"No." He does not elaborate; "he had been kidded and sympathized with often enough." Then: "My fault. According to the doctors." "Would you like to have children?" "Well," Fergesson says tightly, "I have my store. And my little flock to watch over."
"They drove the rest of the way in silence."
The flock and the shepherd. The last line ties the evening together. "Flock" is a pastor's word, and Fergesson uses it for his employees with no irony at all. He cannot father a child, so he fathers a store, and his anxieties about Hadley (the clothes, the drink, the softness, the missing moral standards) are the anxieties of a father about a son. This is why he can neither let Hadley go nor let him run the store. It also explains the envy in the dark showroom: Ellen carries what his store can never be. Read with Chapter 1's creation scene, the chapter turns Fergesson from a comic tyrant into the novel's other searcher for grace, a man who has found it in fitted refrigerator shelves and knows, alone at night in his store, that it is not enough.
Two shopkeepers, two shops
| Jim Fergesson (Modern TV) | Bud O'Neill (O'Neill Appliance) | |
|---|---|---|
| Start | Employee in the Depression, took over the store in 1932 for unpaid wages | Ex-ham, fired from a Richmond defense plant after the war |
| First shop | Modern in its early form: dead batteries, tubes, secondhand counters | Richmond One-Day Radio Service in an old shoe shop, folded after a year and a half |
| Key move | Got in merchandise to sell: "repair wasn't enough" | Talked his wife's family into staking him |
| Money | His own, "hand over hand, on his own power" | Thirty thousand dollars from in-laws |
| Choices made by others | None he admits (Alice's share goes unspoken) | Location by the Bank of America, front by his father-in-law's architect, stock by supply-house salesmen |
| Selling | "I can only sell what I believe in" | "Too honest to be a good salesman"; ads still reading "your store" |
| Fate | "Well ahead of the game," but finished "by Christmas" if Bel-Rex comes | "In three years... up to his neck. In five, he was dead. Drowned." |
| Fergesson's verdict | "I never pulled a dumb deal in my life" | "The failure. The incompetent." Then: "Or was he?" |
| Modern TV | Bel-Rex (as Fergesson imagines it) | |
|---|---|---|
| Lines | Emerson, GE, Westinghouse, Philco, Zenith, leaders only | Everything, "Right down the line, to Sentinel and Crosley and Trav-Ler" |
| Buying | "Close to the belt," a frugal line | "Carload lots," "direct from the factory," more in a day than Modern in a year |
| Price | Fair trade | "Fifty bucks under fair trade" |
| Selling | The owner, no pressure, sidewalk trade and old families | "Twenty-five salesmen, all on commission and draw, sharp as starving ferrets" |
| Promotion | A window and a reputation | Throwaways, radio, newspapers, searchlights, free gardenias, free TV lamps, free toasters |
| Service | Olsen's bench in the basement | "Immediate repair service," delivery anywhere in the state free |
| Obsolete stock | The first Hoffmans, still in the basement | "They dump it in the river" |
| Timetable | Twenty years of building | "In six months, by Christmas" |
How the chapter is built. Chapter 4 is the first chapter told wholly from Fergesson's side, and Dick builds it out of mirrors. The first is Hadley: the employee Fergesson cannot trust, who turns out to have "wandered into the radio business by accident," just as Fergesson did. The second is O'Neill: the failure whose first shop looked exactly like Fergesson's first shop, so that "to almost anyone who entered the store, there was no fundamental difference." The third is Ellen: the self-contained woman in the dark showroom who has what Fergesson's store cannot give him, and who tells him what his employee is actually looking for. Behind all three stands a fourth, the father in the vest pocket, the man who said business was beneath him. The chapter moves from noise to silence: from the radio muttering in the living room and Fergesson shouting about tile, to the night drive, to a set so quiet he must bend over it, to "They drove the rest of the way in silence."
A CLOSER LOOK: what the chapter gets wrong, leaves open, or shares with its man.
Facts checked. Bank savings in 1952 paid roughly 2 percent at commercial banks and about 2.75 to 3 percent at savings and loans, so Alice's 2.5 percent is realistic. Fair trade (Miller-Tydings 1937, Schwegmann May 21, 1951, McGuire Act July 14, 1952) fits "fifty bucks under fair trade" exactly. Richmond's wartime shipyard boom and postwar fall, Consumers Union (1936), Rider's manuals (1931 to 1954), the Webster-Chicago 56 changer, Hoffman's early sets, the Atwater Kent end of production (1936), the UHF order of April 1952, the color standoff, the speeds war, Morton Gould, John Charles Thomas, Nelson Eddy, Dean Acheson and the "That Man" epithet are all confirmed. Bel-Rex is fictional.
Contradictions. (1) The watch: "None" jewels and "a dollar and a half" against "the ancient gold watch, elaborately engraved." (2) Service: here Fergesson says "I was in the National Guard"; in Chapter 6 and again later he claims to have volunteered for the Marines in the First World War and fought at Belleau Wood and the Second Marne. At forty-two in 1952 he was born about 1910 and would have been eight in 1918. One of these is a lie, a boast or an authorial slip. (3) The locked store: Ellen is inside a locked shop with no explanation. (4) "For a beer and talk": Ellen's account of Stuart's evening leaves out the Watchmen Hall, where he arrived with the Golds as the lecture ended in Chapter 3, and keeps only the party afterwards. It is an omission, perhaps Stuart's own, rather than a flat contradiction. (5) "The other day": Fergesson's "damn near fired Hadley the other day" refers to Chapter 1's Thursday, only a day earlier. (6) "Lake Country" is almost certainly Lake County, the Clear Lake resort area north of the Bay, a common family holiday spot in the 1950s; the text's form may be a slip or a regional usage.
Prejudice. The narrator's "Okies and Negroes" and Fergesson's "Okies and coons" and earlier slur; his contempt for "WPA leaf rakers"; his "Sissy-kissers" and "mama's boys" (the gendered, lavender-scare logic that ties softness to Communism); and his reading of celery tonic and cashmere as signs of a weak character. Dick records these as Fergesson's world and gives Alice and Ellen the sharper judgments, but the narrator's own "Okies and Negroes" and the "grotesquely pregnant" description of Ellen belong to the text as well as to the man.
Text. The book reads "His soul was weak with' sweat," a stray apostrophe from the scan; quoted here without it.
Modern TV depends on one man: he buys, sells, inspects, decides and even polices the lights at midnight. He has no second line, because the only candidate is a man he will not trust and will not test (Alice's proposed one-week trial is the classic, cheap way to find out, and he refuses it). His margin depends on a regulatory prop, fair trade, which a court has just knocked over and Congress is about to rebuild. And the acquisition he is talking himself into is defensive: not "this store will earn more than 2.5 percent," which is Alice's sound hurdle rate, but "if I do not buy it, someone bigger will use it to kill me." Lenders see this pattern often. The useful questions are the ones Alice asks: what does the asset earn on its own, what is the alternative return, and who runs the existing business while the owner runs the new one. O'Neill's story is the other half of the lesson: a showroom whose location was chosen by a bank, whose front was chosen by an in-law and whose stock was chosen by salesmen is a set of purchased advantages with no management behind them, and a credit file that rated the location and the façade instead of the operator would have missed it. Banks answer key-person risk with succession plans, mandatory leave and dual control, partly so that no single person is indispensable and partly so that hidden habits (Hadley's month-end dip into the till) surface. The same reasoning applies to an AI platform that one engineer understands: if the system works only because one person checks it at midnight, it is not a system yet.
What the chapter sets up. The O'Neill deal, which Fergesson will close, and with it the question of who runs Modern while he runs the highway store; the Hadley problem, now named from both sides ("not trustworthy" from the boss, "He doesn't know anybody he can trust" from the wife); the son named Pete, three weeks away; Ellen's definition of what Stuart is looking for, grace in the form of a person who will not let him down, which Chapter 5 hands at once to Theodore Beckheim; the father-and-son pattern that will run through every relationship in the book; and Fergesson's "little flock," the employer as shepherd, which the next chapter answers with a preacher who has a flock of his own.
The Watchmen
When and where. Saturday, June 7, 1952. The chapter opens "the following night," after the Friday of Chapters 3 and 4; Wakefield cries "End of the week!" and the drugstore waitress tells Hadley, "This is Saturday night." Six o'clock (the flower shop closes) to about nine (the lecture begins at eight; Hadley tells Ellen it will be over "Around eleven"). Places: Wakefield's flower shop; the Health Food Store across the street, locked, shade down, with its counter, tables and back room behind "dusty yellow curtains"; a drugstore counter across from the Health Food Store; the downtown business section and El Camino Real; the Southern Pacific tracks and the old slum beyond them; a bar with a phone booth; and the Watchmen Hall.
People in this chapter. Horace Wakefield, manager of the flower shop for fourteen years, vegetarian, with a hernia belt, a gold tooth, steel-rimmed glasses, a private box of Kleenex and his own knife and fork in a leather and velvet case. Jackie Perkins, his "child-eyed" assistant, in black skirt, gray turtleneck, sandals and copper bracelets, going to the symphony with Bill. Betty, who runs the Health Food Store, weary and wheezing. Mrs. Krafft, tall, white-haired, mid-fifties, a stenographer who takes dictation at conferences, fierce Watchman. Lulu, the Health Food Store's cook and dishwasher, "tall brown-eyed colored woman." Stuart Hadley. A drugstore waitress, "pretty little dark-haired." Ellen Hadley, on the phone. Harry, the bartender, and his regulars. An usher at the hall. Theodore Beckheim, leader of the Watchmen Society. Mentioned: Bill, Jackie's escort; Stalin; Hitler; Napoleon; Disraeli and Queen Victoria; a Finnish janitor; a little girl Hadley hit with a hoe at five.
Six o'clock at the flower shop
Dick gives us Wakefield's closing ritual like a list of symptoms. "'Time to go home!' Wakefield began to cry thinly, rushing about the store in a travesty of efficiency." He fetches his "beaver-style coat," halts at the mirror "to hold up his lower gum and examine the white sores on the soft underside," blows his nose "in a Kleenex from his special box under the counter," touches "his hernia belt to be sure it hadn't crept up," and claps his hands. "Let's go!" he bleats. "End of the day! End of the week! Time to go home, kiddies!"
The shop "lay in a thick, heavy, sweetly scented fog steamed up by endless hot moist flowers." Jackie carries certain flowers to the refrigerator, "a weak smile on her immature face, long thin fingers carefully gripped around her burden, yellow-red nails digging in like claws." "You go ahead, Mister Wakefield," she says faintly. "I'll lock up." Wakefield "accepted the tribute to his position with grave dignity." She will put the money in the safe; "Bill is coming by at half past to drive me up to the City."
"Ah," Wakefield jokes, "grinning a knowing gold-toothed grin. 'Going out tonight? Big doings?'" "A lofty, superior look swept Jackie's face into a sneer of derision. 'Big doings, but not the way you mean.' She made it sound as if Wakefield's words had dripped coarse innuendo. 'We're going to the symphony.'"
Fact check and text. "Ferry seeds" are Ferry-Morse seeds: D. M. Ferry and Company of Detroit and C. C. Morse and Company of San Francisco merged in 1930 as the Ferry-Morse Seed Company, whose packets sat on racks in shops and stores everywhere. "Wrapping ported plants" is a scanning or typesetting error for "potted plants." Jackie, with her turtleneck, sandals and copper bracelets and her contempt for innuendo, is an early sketch of the Bay Area bohemian; "the City" is the local name for San Francisco.
He "Ha-haing to himself" bustles out, waves gaily, crosses with the lights. At the mailbox he drops in "a handful of bills and cards," then "straightened his coat, lost his jolly leer, and continued, with an expression of dignity on his face, toward the Health Food Store." The change of face as he crosses the street is the whole man: a jolly boss for the shop, a solemn initiate for the Movement.
The locked store and the tea
The Health Food Store "was closed, and the shade was pulled down. He rapped twice on the door, then a third quick tap with his knuckles." The coded knock, the light under the door, the key turned "just a crack": the scene is shaped like a speakeasy or a secret society. "Good evening, Betty," he says solemnly. "Come in, Horace," says Betty wearily. "Sit down anywhere. Do you want some tea?"
The tea is poured "from a glittering Chinese pot into a fragile cup so tiny that Wakefield had trouble getting hold of the handle. The tea was dark amber; rich vapors drifted up and tickled his nose. A thick, exotic, Oriental tea." "Sugar?" Betty groans. "Lemon?" "Just right, Betty."
But tonight he is not alone. "There were others sitting at the counter and at the tables, with their fragile teacups. Mostly women; he was almost the only man. Eight or nine of them, smartly dressed, chatting quietly among themselves. Tension crackled in the air: they were waiting expectantly for eight o'clock, the lecture hour." Beckheim is everywhere: "Posters of Theodore Beckheim hung above the counter. Society books and tracts were on display by the cash register. Free pamphlets, copies of the People's Watchman... The central poster in the window had been reinforced by small informational displays. Theodore Beckheim seemed to be all around the store, in every corner and alcove."
Wakefield does not object to "the looming, dark features of Beckheim gazing significantly at him from every part of the store," but "he could not bear the unending excited mutter from dry female throats." Normally the store is vacant at this hour, open only to "the employees and a privileged few." "Tonight, a horde perched around him, spoiling his dinner, turning what was customarily a personal ritual into a public spectacle. He resented it. He wished they would leave; hadn't he come here every night for ten years, eaten his dinner in the dark quiet of the locked-up store?"
A private religion going public. Wakefield's grievance is the chapter's first theme. For ten years his faith has been a set of private rituals: the locked store, the coded knock, the tiny cup, the meatless dinner, his own cutlery. The Watchmen Society is turning it into a mass movement with posters, tracts and a newspaper, and the mass movement is full of the people he joined it to escape. Hadley will feel the same pull and the same revulsion an hour later from the other side of the street.
Mrs. Krafft
"Good evening," says the woman next to him, "in a harsh, dry rasp." Wakefield winces. "She was tall, white-haired, a stern woman in her middle fifties. Her feverish eyes snapped; her thin lips twisted. She raised her cup of tea as if in toast." Embarrassed, he stares at "the marzipan display above his head." "Evening," he mutters.
Then Betty makes the introduction that changes his mood. "Mrs. Krafft eats no meat. You and Mister Wakefield should get to know each other." His annoyance vanishes. "Is that right? You don't care for meat?"
"I care for meat," she cries. "But I can't eat the flesh of higher creatures who have as much right to live as any human being. In certain respects I admire higher animals more than man. Their ability to bear suffering without complaint and their natural dignity, their nobility and freedom from carnal vulgarity..."
Wakefield flushes, twitches, coughs, removes and polishes his steel-rimmed glasses. "Yes, I know what you mean. It's a moral issue. Fat's unclean. Unhealthy. Every time I see a meat market I think of the city dump, decaying meat and tin cans and rotting garbage... I can't stand the sight of meat."
"Have you ever looked in their eyes?" "Beg pardon?" "When I was a child on the farm my father killed cattle. He hit them on the head with an ax and cut their throats. I had to hold the bowl. As they died I saw into their eyes." "Yes," Wakefield agrees vaguely. "Their eyes. Terrible thing."
Her voice rises. "When I see some of the people walking around, worse than any jungle beast... Pigs! Obscene creatures that ought to be put away. No dumb animal could sink to the depths of viciousness and brutality of man. Man is the cruelest animal, the wickedest animal. The only really disgusting animal. You see them with their big cigars, spitting and laughing and slapping each other on the back. Telling dirty jokes and belching and swilling down their beer and fried oysters." She controls herself. "When I'm taking dictation at conferences sometimes they start laughing and joking with each other. Coarse, bestial creatures..."
"On her thin, feverish face gleamed a lifetime of resentment. Mrs. Krafft had dearly suffered at the hands of men, degraded to a second-class citizen, forced to creep about in the shadows."
The bowl and the cigar. Mrs. Krafft's portrait is two things at once. Her rage has a real source: a farm girl made to hold the bowl for the blood, then a woman taking dictation for men who joke in front of her as if she were furniture. Dick gives her that history and the phrase "second-class citizen," which in 1952 was a sharp one to apply to a woman. But her compassion for animals has curdled into contempt for people ("ought to be put away"), and the next pages show where that contempt leads. Note the cigar: the "big cigars" she hates recall Fergesson's on his couch the night before, so the reader hears her verdict on a man she has never met.
Wakefield's lower parts
Wakefield thinks it through, and the passage is one of Dick's funniest. Mrs. Krafft, he realises, "was reacting to the vulgarity of the world as was he; both had come to the Watchmen Society to escape cruelty and viciousness, to enter into an environment of spirituality. He thought of it as a venal, corrupt society; but being a woman, Mrs. Krafft identified it with men. He wondered which of them was right. If it was men, then Horace Wakefield carried the taint."
He follows the thought further than he means to. "Suppose a man did revolt at vulgarity and coarseness, at animal passions...and saw those not in society around him, but in his own masculine nature. What then? The revulsion would be for one's self; the struggle would be internal. Where would a man go? What would become of him? Driven across the face of the world, wandering restlessly, tormented, hating his own nature; his lower parts, as it were."
Then the joke: "Wakefield considered his own lower parts and saw nothing there but pale pink skin, the same as the rest of him. He had no lower parts: it was all right. He relaxed and sighed. Horace Wakefield had but one nature, and that nature was pure."
The man who hates his own nature. The figure Wakefield imagines and then dismisses ("Driven across the face of the world... hating his own nature") is a portrait of Stuart Hadley, who will spend this same evening fantasising violence against Wakefield, his wife and himself. Dick hands Wakefield the diagnosis and lets him escape it by a comic act of denial. The man who is too sexless to be troubled is spared; the handsome young salesman across the street is not.
The Los Angeles days
He finishes his tea ("Very tasty"), and Mrs. Krafft asks fiercely, "How long have you been in the Movement?" "I heard Theodore Beckheim speak late last fall, when I was down in Los Angeles," he says, examining his manicured nails. "I believe the Movement originated in that area."
She catches her breath. "Los Angeles! You heard the Los Angeles speech? I'd give ten years off my life to have been there." Her voice rises "to transcendental levels." "That was when he cured the girl of paralysis. He had her up on the stage. That was when he was just beginning to understand his power of healing."
A CLOSER LOOK: the timeline does not add up, and the quackery is real. Wakefield says he first heard Beckheim "late last fall," that is, in the autumn of 1951, yet speaks of "the early days" when "it was just healing" as if he had been there; Mrs. Krafft remembers "just the one building, and only a few thousand followers" and now "every country in the world." A movement cannot go from a healer's stage show to a worldwide church with branches and publications in seven or eight months, and Mrs. Krafft talks to him as if he remembers those days ("You remember that"). Either Wakefield has followed Beckheim longer than he says, or Dick compressed the Movement's history. The cures themselves are drawn from real American quackery. Magnetic belts were sold for a century as cure-alls, and "radioactive" spring waters and radium tonics were marketed as health products in the 1910s and 1920s, until the death of the radium-tonic user Eben Byers in 1932 helped end the fashion. Beckheim's history runs the familiar path from faith healer to prophet.
Diet or mind
"Exactly," says Mrs. Krafft. "Disease is a manifestation of improper mental attitudes." Wakefield, "grudgingly," disagrees, and their quarrel is a small comedy of two cranks with two systems:
| Wakefield | Mrs. Krafft | |
|---|---|---|
| Cause of disease | "improper diet" | "improper mental attitudes" |
| Theory | "You are what you eat... states of consciousness are the result of diet" | "I don't recall having had any coarse thoughts in my childhood, when I still ate meat" |
| Why no meat | "Eating meat causes bestial attitudes; eating fruit and clean vegetables purifies the mind" | "It's the killing of animals; nobody with a pure mind could destroy a helpless animal" |
| The goal | A clean stomach | "Murder, hate, disease, will be wiped from the earth. They're all the same thing, anyhow" |
| Manner | "of course I might be wrong, but it seems to me" | Certain, shrill, rising |
A contradiction between believers. Both are Watchmen, both are vegetarians, and they hold opposite theories of why. Wakefield thinks the body makes the mind; Mrs. Krafft thinks the mind makes the body. Wakefield has just said "Now we know the body is nothing... It's the soul that counts," and then argues that the soul is made by the stomach. Dick is showing that the Movement holds together people whose beliefs do not fit, because what unites them is not doctrine but revulsion.
The Communist world and the vegetarian dictator
"That's what I mean... The Communist world. It's a big world...there're a lot of people who believe in that stuff." "They deny God!" "Yes... They deny the soul, they deny God and everything spiritual. Don't you think it's the same old thing? God against Mammon... They're meat eaters, Mrs. Krafft."
Then Wakefield's private theology of politics. "Every time I see a picture of Stalin I look him square in the eye and I say: You're a meat eater, Joseph. You're big and heavy and you're full of rotting meat. Now, that was one thing I'll say for Adolf Hitler. He was a vegetarian, Mrs. Krafft; did you know that? I have to say that about him; give the devil his dues, I always say."
Fact check: Hitler's diet. Hitler did avoid meat for much of his later life, at least from the early 1930s, and Nazi propaganda made a point of his vegetarianism and abstinence; but witnesses and historians record that he still ate some meat dishes on occasion, so the strict "never touched meat or liquor" is the propaganda image, not the record. The joke is grim: Wakefield measures the century's tyrants by their dinners, and "too wild and excitable" is his whole judgment of the man who ran the death camps. Dick lets the line stand without comment, which is the comment.
England, Disraeli and the "clean new world"
Mrs. Krafft "learned close" (the text's misprint for "leaned") to Wakefield. "Do you know why they all set on Germany and destroyed her?" "Well," Wakefield begins. "Because she was going to set up a clean new world. England saw the handwriting on the wall; it was England, you know. Shopkeepers, that's what Napoleon called them. And he was right! Money, trade..." She leans even closer. "I don't know if you know this, but there's Jewish blood in the royal family." "Eh?"
"I'll tell you how it got there. Disraeli. He and Queen Victoria." She nods. "And it's been since then; they used to have a soul. Back in the days of William Shakespeare. But not anymore. Now they're shopkeepers, Mister Wakefield. And you know why."
A CLOSER LOOK: Mrs. Krafft's antisemitism, and the facts she garbles. This is open Nazi apologetics, seven years after the liberation of the camps: Germany was building "a clean new world," England destroyed it out of commercial envy, and England's commercialism is the fault of Jewish blood. Every factual piece is false or bent. "A nation of shopkeepers" is usually attributed to Napoleon, but the phrase appears earlier in Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" (1776), which calls empire-building for customers "a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers," and Napoleon's use of it rests on later reports. Benjamin Disraeli, prime minister in 1868 and from 1874 to 1880, was born to a Jewish family but baptised an Anglican at twelve; he was Queen Victoria's favourite minister and flattered her outrageously, but there was never any marriage or liaison, and no "blood" of his entered the royal family. The rumour Mrs. Krafft repeats is the kind of fantasy that circulated in antisemitic pamphlets. Dick puts it in the mouth of a woman who weeps for the eyes of slaughtered cattle, and the juxtaposition is deliberate: tenderness for animals and contempt for people, a vegetarian dictator and a "clean" world built on murder.
The Finnish janitor
Wakefield, "unconvinced," draws back: "I don't see how I can approve of all that violence. I don't think people should go out and kill other people." Dick notes, "Down in the little man's core was a positive horror of violence." But his reason is its own prejudice. "Those Northern people sometimes do that. I remember a Finn, a janitor living down in the basement of an apartment building I once lived in, although I'm certainly not living there, now. One day he went completely out of his mind... he took that wife of his and just cut her up terribly... They called the police and ambulance, but it was too late. Why, he just cut open that woman like you would butcher a hog. That's the way those Northerners are. Berserkers, they call them."
"Underneath their nice blue eyes and blond hair there's something ugly. Something that frightens me. They look so pleasant, but sooner or later it comes out... It boils over and destroys and breaks and tears down."
Fact check and A CLOSER LOOK: berserkers. Berserkers were warriors of Old Norse saga and poetry who fought in a trance-like fury; the word is Old Norse and belongs to Scandinavian (Norwegian, Icelandic) tradition. Finnish is not a Norse language and the Finns are not the people of the sagas. Wakefield's "Northerners" lumps them together, and his rule, that blue-eyed blond people hide a murderous fury, is a racial stereotype turned upside down from Mrs. Krafft's. Dick plants it for a reason. "Underneath their nice blue eyes and blond hair there's something ugly" is an exact description of Stuart Hadley, "a young blond-haired man in a clean-cut blue suit," whose fury will boil over in the next scene and whose childhood attack Dick is about to reveal.
"When Germany died, a light went out"
Mrs. Krafft is not listening. "Germany had spirituality! Her music, Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, we have nothing like that here. Great painters, artists, poets, scholars. Germany was the soul of Europe, Mister Wakefield. And they killed her, the way they always kill those with souls. They can't stand those with souls; it reminds them of their own bestiality. When Germany died, a light went out. And the darkness has been creeping in since."
She broods, then turns to mission. "We must reach all mankind. We must bring them warning, so they can save themselves. When the Great Battle begins, we're going to need all the help we can get. It's going to be a terrible ordeal."
Wakefield asks the doctrinal question that divides the Movement. "Do you think the struggle between the free world and Communism is, the Great Battle? I mean, are we seeing Armageddon already? There's some difference of opinion about this in the Movement. I know some feel we're fighting it now, when we fight Asiatic Communistic atheism. But there're others who feel that we're just as materialistic and guilty as the Russians."
She jerks "savagely" at Beckheim's picture. "It will be through him that we'll be saved. And the world will be scorched clean and pure by the sacred holy fire of God. And all the pestholes of iniquity, all the marketplaces, the slaughterhouses, the cities, the buildings, all the works that vain man has built up, his puny attempts to govern himself..."
Fact check: Korea in June 1952. "The way they're falling now in Korea" fits the moment. By mid-1952 the ceasefire talks at Panmunjom had stalled, and United Nations air forces had turned to "air pressure" against the North: on June 19 Washington lifted the restriction on hitting the Yalu hydroelectric plants, and on June 23 to 24 American aircraft struck Sui-ho and other power stations, blacking out most of North Korea; the mass raids on Pyongyang (Operation Pressure Pump) followed on July 11. Those raids came two to five weeks after this Saturday, but the bombing of North Korean towns and cities had been continuous since 1950. "Bacteriological warfare" also had a 1952 edge: that spring China and North Korea accused the United States of germ warfare, a charge the United States denied, and the controversy filled the newspapers. Mrs. Krafft's wish that "America has got to go, too" is the Movement's most radical position, and it is the one Beckheim will preach.
Purity and the bomb. Mrs. Krafft's sermon ends in the same place as the scientists she hates. She wants the cities "leveled," the walls falling, the marketplaces and slaughterhouses "scorched clean," and she is "looking forward to this war." The woman who could not bear the cattle's eyes longs for a fire that would kill millions. Dick sees that the hunger for purity and the hunger for destruction can be one hunger, and that people who feel "contaminated" by the world will welcome its end. The same hunger runs, in other forms, through Hadley.
Wakefield tries to leave
Wakefield "winced at the shower of saliva and words" and edges away. "It was easy to sense the deep forces rumbling inside the white-haired woman, and they made him uneasy. All the women in the Health Food Store were that way, all except Betty, who never got excited about anything, except the time the toilet drain leaked all over the drums of dried apricots down in the basement." To him the room is "like twenty radios dinning in his ear at once," a phrase that belongs to the radio dealer's chapter next door.
He thinks of home: "his quiet little combination bedroom and living room. His piano, his books, and his easy chair. His old-fashioned lamp and slippers. In his microscopic kitchen he could fix himself a bowl of soup and some soy fritters. Potatoes and fresh string beans. Perhaps some stewed prunes for dessert." "Good evening," he mutters, and gets up. "Thanks for the tea, Betty." "You're going?" "Home. Things to do. Fix dinner. Company coming later. Glad to have met you."
"You have to wait," says Mrs. Krafft authoritatively. "You can't go." "You sit down and wait," Betty wheezes. "We're all going over to the hall together in Mrs. Krafft's car." "But I'm hungry," Wakefield complains peevishly, "feeling caught and helpless." "We'll fix your dinner right now," says Betty. "Lulu! Come out here and find out what Mister Wakefield wants for his dinner."
Small lies. "Company coming later" is an invention to escape, and nobody believes it; a man who eats every night for ten years in a locked shop has no company. It sets the tone for the second half of the chapter, where Hadley tells two small lies of his own within half an hour.
Knife, fork and Lulu
He paws his coat pocket. "Did he have his knife and fork with him? He pulled the little leather and velvet case out and snapped it open. There they were, the two gleaming-clean shafts of silver." "Could I eat in the back? I hate to eat out here with everybody."
"Fix up the back table for Mister Wakefield," Betty tells "the tall brown-eyed colored woman who had emerged dutifully from the back, hands dripping with dishwater." Lulu recites the menu like a waiter: "There's rice and cheese sauce with egg and tomato, macaroni salad and sliced bananas with cream." "With a swirl of her heavy skirt she again disappeared into the back through the dusty yellow curtains." Wakefield follows anxiously.
He has hardly set out his knife and fork at the big wood table when Mrs. Krafft appears. "I'll sit with you while you eat." As Lulu gets out the food, Mrs. Krafft "sucked in deep lungfuls of baked oven air. 'Ah... This place radiates peace.'" Wakefield nods, "too dazed by misfortune to speak." "It radiates peace," she repeats, gazing at "a display of pills for diabetes, high blood pressure, bottles of dark liquid for ulcers, varicose veins, special sugar-free cookies and pale dried honey, vitamin capsules, packages of cracked wheat and bran." "There's a fullness about it. A completeness. There is no out-of-balance here. This store is wholly realized."
Two shops called holy. Mrs. Krafft's praise of the Health Food Store ("A completeness... wholly realized") repeats, almost word for word, what Fergesson felt the night before about Ellen ("a kind of balance, a completeness, an entirety") and what he feels about a white refrigerator in a showroom. Dick sets the two churches of Cedar Groves side by side. One worships the gleaming appliance; the other worships cracked wheat and pills for varicose veins. Both find peace in a well-stocked shop. And the shelf she gazes at is, read plainly, a pharmacy for the sick and old, which is what the Movement's "purity" looks like from the inside.
A CLOSER LOOK: Lulu. Lulu is the only person in the scene who works. She appears "dutifully," "hands dripping with dishwater," recites the menu, cooks and serves, and is described by her colour, her eyes and her skirt, while the white customers talk about purity and the coming judgment. The narrator does not give her a thought or a line of her own. Dick may intend the irony (the Movement's leader is a Black man, while its white followers are served by a Black cook), but the text does not draw it; the reader has to.
The slide from Wakefield to Hadley
Wakefield "waited miserably for his cheese and rice and wished she'd leave." And then, in the middle of a paragraph, the point of view changes hands without warning:
"He had seen them in there. He had gone past the door, caught the blur of female motion, heard the sharp shrill sounds, and continued on past. Behind the fruit and date display he saw a brief glimpse of Horace Wakefield sitting in the middle of them, teacup in his diffident fingers, dabbing daintily at his lips with a paper napkin."
"Now Stuart Hadley sat at the drug counter across the street..."
The POV slide. The "He" who "had seen them in there" is Hadley, not Wakefield, but nothing marks the change; for a sentence the reader assumes Wakefield is watching himself. Then the next paragraph names Hadley and sets him at the drugstore counter. It is either a deliberate cinematic cut (camera through the window, from the man inside to the man outside) or a seam where Dick joined two drafts. It also creates a small timing problem: Hadley glimpsed Wakefield with "teacup in his diffident fingers," which places his walk past the window before Wakefield moved to the back room, and Hadley's own sense of time later (two hours to kill, forty-five minutes at the bar) is loose. Either way the effect is right: Hadley sees himself in Wakefield before he admits it.
A crank at the drug counter
"Stuart Hadley brooded. How could he go there? Into a place like that, among people like that... The word came up in his mouth like sickness from his stomach. Cranks. All of them, cranks and crackpots, nuts. He couldn't play games with himself: that was what they were, and if he went in there and sat and listened to the lecture, he would be a crank, too."
Then he builds himself, item by item, against the word:
"A young blond-haired man in a clean-cut blue suit: that was Stuart Hadley. Personable, likable, friendly, social, a good mixer. A good salesman. A good husband. A man who kept his shoes shined, his trousers pressed, his chin shaved, his armpits rubbed with aluminum sulfate. A man who looked good and smelled good, a man who could walk into the Top of the Mark and be speedily served."
"Not a wild-eyed madman with a flowing beard, sandals, straw in his hair, and a sign grasped, reading: JESUS SAVES."
Fact check: the toiletries of a good salesman. Arrid, the cream deodorant whose active ingredient was an aluminum salt (Dick's "aluminum sulfate"), was one of the best-selling American deodorants of the period; Wildroot Cream-Oil was a heavily advertised men's hair tonic (its jingle "Get Wildroot Cream-Oil, Charlie" ran on radio); Dyanshine was a liquid shoe polish. The Top of the Mark is the glass-walled cocktail lounge on the nineteenth floor of the Mark Hopkins Hotel on Nob Hill, opened in 1939 and famous in the war as the last stop for servicemen shipping out. Hadley's self is a shopping list of brand names, and he knows it: the question of the chapter is whether anything lies under it.
"Could that core, the inner Stuart Hadley, be as crazy as Horace Wakefield? Inside the shell of affability, was there a demented, unstable entity, aching to come creeping out, a furious wailing larva struggling to emerge and crawl around, slimy and odd, not human, not ordinary, not pretty?"
Varnished with offal
The shell and the larva. Hadley's two images of the self fit together. Outside is the shell: suit, shoes, Arrid, the smile of a good mixer. Inside, he fears, is the larva, "slimy and odd, not human." Wakefield is a man whose shell is "varnished" with the filth of years and who is "proud" of the polish. Hadley's urge to crack Wakefield open is an urge to crack himself open, and what he imagines inside is seed: "A race of Wakefields... like mushrooms." The puffball, which bursts into a cloud of spores when stepped on, is the precise image: a thing you destroy by spreading it.
The hoe
"Shame touched him, and collapsed his fantasy. Without meaning to, he had recalled an event of his early childhood; now he sought to return it to the hidden parts of his mind, where he would not have to think of it or entertain its existence."
"Halfway there (the memory of it refused to depart) he savagely brought the hoe down on the child's head. The child, with a shriek, fell face-forward on the frozen gravel; at that, Stuart Hadley turned and scampered back the way he had come, drained of hostility."
A CLOSER LOOK: the memory and the excuse. This is the darkest fact about Hadley in the book so far, and Dick handles it with care. The memory "refused to depart"; Hadley "sought to return it to the hidden parts of his mind"; he doubts it ("It seemed doubtful"), then supplies a motive he admits is guesswork ("Something, perhaps"), then a verdict ("she deserved what she got"). The narrator does not endorse the verdict; the six months in a school for problem children are the adult world's verdict. The detail "drained of hostility" matters most: violence relieved him, as it will again. The stutter has an echo later tonight, in the catch of his "How... are you?" on the phone to Ellen. Note too that the attack was on a girl, and it surfaces minutes before he fantasises about smashing his pregnant wife's face. The novel's violence against women starts here, in a five-year-old, and Dick does not soften it. The setting, "a child in Washington" with "an eastern winter," most likely places his childhood in Washington, D.C., rather than the state, though Dick does not say.
"She's sick tonight"
"Say, you're asleep." The counter girl, "laughing and amused," pushes his plate across. "Here's your sandwich and Coke... Wake up." "Thanks," Hadley says, coming "gratefully back to the present." "Thanks a lot."
She lingers, "coy, innocent, cheeks warm with joking intimacy." "What's your wife say about you sitting here? Don't she fix your dinner?" He rubs the gold band on his left hand "self-consciously." "She's sick tonight." "I bet... Don't kid me... I'll bet you're going out. This is Saturday night."
The first lie. Ellen is not sick; she is at home, pregnant and angry, after a quarrel about "war and God." "She's sick tonight" is the reflex of a man who flirts with waitresses and has been caught before (Marsha the previous night). The second lie comes within the hour.
Who joins
He eats "his sandwich, Coke, plate of greasy potato chips... listlessly, eyes blank with thought." "Here he was, passing away the time until the lecture started. Wandering around aimlessly by himself, without Ellen, killing two hours until time to head for the Watchmen Hall with the rest of them, the Wakefields and the shrill overdressed women."
Then a sociologist's question. "Why did the wealthy middle-aged women appear? What interested them? Wherever a movement of this kind arose, there came the fat old women with their money and leisure. Didn't they have anything else in their lives? With their big homes, Chryslers, clothes, money, were they still unsatisfied? It was a mystery."
Fact check: Youth for Christ. Youth for Christ grew out of evangelical youth rallies in the early 1940s and was organised as Youth for Christ International in 1944 to 1945; Billy Graham was its first full-time evangelist. By 1952 it was the best-known evangelical youth movement in the country, so "overflow from Youth for Christ" is an exact period touch. The sentence about "solemn Negro faces row after row" and "sturdy Negro shapes" reduces Black congregants to faces and shapes; Hadley sees the Movement's Black members as a puzzle in a list, not as people with reasons of their own.
"Anything more?" the girl asks. "Dessert? Ice cream? I bet your wife fixes you your dinner every night and darns your socks and tucks you into bed at night. You're so helpless... You spilled your water all over the counter." Wistfully: "That's sixty-five cents. You can have more coffee if you want; refills are free." He pays and leaves.
Across the tracks
"The evening streets were cool and dim. Lonely. Hands in his pockets, he headed toward the hall, past the bright, modern stores of the downtown business section. He continued on, toward the Southern Pacific tracks that neatly divided the newer, more prosperous town from the older slums that had been Cedar Groves fifty years ago."
Fact check and A CLOSER LOOK: the other side of the tracks. The Southern Pacific's Peninsula commuter line from San Francisco to San Jose (today's Caltrain route) did run through the towns along El Camino Real, the old mission road, and in many of them the tracks divided newer and older districts. The "earthquake" is the San Francisco earthquake of April 18, 1906, which also damaged Peninsula towns. The passage is vivid and hostile. Black residents appear only as "toughs," "Fat Negro women" and "Slick-haired Negro girls" who "swayed and minced"; white ethnics as "tired-faced Irishmen and Italians and Poles" in buildings that reek "of cabbage and urine." It is Hadley's eye, the eye of a clean salesman from the "more prosperous town," and Dick uses it to set up the shock of the next hour, when this young white man will find his prophet in a Black preacher. But the narration supplies the stereotypes without irony, and the modern reader should see them for what they are. The real Peninsula of 1952 was also shaped by redlining and restrictive covenants that kept Black families in exactly such districts.
"Stuart Hadley wandered through the thickening night gloom, dully aware of neon signs flickering on here and there, the push and jostle of tired people. He still had an hour to go. His stomach turned over queasily from the potato chips. His head ached. The thought of going home entered his mind. For a time he worried the thought, chewed at it, turned it around; finally he rejected it."
The phone call
"The feeble glimmer of a red neon attracted him. A bar. He plunged into its somber darkness and felt his way by touch, past the bar, to the phone booth in the back. With the door pulled shut after him, he dialed his home."
"Hello," Ellen says expressionlessly. Hadley licks his lips. "How... are you?" "Fine." "Still mad at me?" "I wasn't mad at you." She seems "a long way off: remote, detached, tired." "Wait a minute while I go turn down the TV." A thump. "Where are you calling from?" "A drugstore," Hadley answers.
"Hadley was silent. There was little he could say; a continuation of the old argument lay ahead, nothing more." "Well, I'll see you later." No answer. "I mean, I'll be home, soon. After the lecture. Is there anything you want? Something I can pick up?" "Ellen laughed metallically, and hung up the phone."
The second lie, and a contradiction to watch. He calls from a bar and says "A drugstore": he was in a drugstore twenty minutes ago, so the lie has the alibi's half-truth. Ellen's two answers ("Of course I want!" and "Go ahead, go to it") are not a contradiction in her but the shape of the marriage: she wants him home and will not ask him to choose her. Remember this when, in Chapter 6, she tells Fergesson she did not want him to go. Her "You always seem to be able to find somebody" knows about Marsha without naming her. And "Something I can pick up?" turns the call into a chore at the end; her metallic laugh answers the whole evening.
Rage in the booth
"Turn her smart, disrespectful features into a pudding of mashed bone and shredded flesh. He wanted to leap on her, up and down, crush her bones like boxwood. He wanted to kick her skull from wall to wall of the apartment."
A CLOSER LOOK: the fantasy. This is the third violent image of the evening, and the worst: after Wakefield's head split "like a dried seedpod" and the hoe on the little girl's head comes a wish to beat his pregnant wife to death because she hung up on him. The verbs repeat the puffball memory ("leap on her, up and down"; "stamping and jumping"). Dick presents it as fantasy, not act, and Hadley does nothing; but the novel never lets the reader forget that the charming salesman carries this. Read beside Wakefield's "Underneath their nice blue eyes and blond hair there's something ugly... It boils over and destroys," the chapter makes its case with unusual bluntness. A reader should also register how the narration's language about Ellen's body ("immense," "bloated," "vast tumor," "big bulging heap") has been preparing this contempt for two chapters.
Harry and the dice
"What'll it be, Mac?" He orders bourbon and water. "There were other men at the bar, most of them dull-eyed workmen." He sits "gripping the glass and gazing straight ahead, aware of the quiver of his mouth and the fog of constriction in his bronchial tubes." He does not notice that he has gulped the drink until the bartender comes back with his dice cup.
"Shake you for the next one," the bartender says, "tensely waving off a fly that crept in the pool of spilled water." The dice bounce out on "the wet, corroded wood." "Six," he grates, and swears at the dice. He rattles and throws again. "Four!" "Flushing beet red, his hands shaking," he collects the dice and curses louder, his voice rising "with hysteria," ending in a string of obscenities the book prints only as a row of blanks.
"In spite of himself Hadley roared. A couple of workmen laughed, too. Instantly, the bartender froze, body rigid, and glared up at Hadley with demoniac hostility. 'What's the matter with you?'" "Sorry," Hadley says, still laughing. "You take it so seriously."
A mirror on a bar stool. Harry is Hadley seen from outside, five minutes after the phone booth: a man whose face goes scarlet, whose hands shake, whose fury at a trivial defeat is out of all proportion, and who then sags "gray and defeated." Hadley finds him absurd and laughs, and the laugh is the first relief of the night. "You take it so seriously" is what Hadley cannot say to himself. Harry's rage at losing a free drink to a stranger is the rage of a man who cannot control his dice, which is to say his life.
"Hadley's bourbon and water came, his free drink. One of the workmen raised his beer, and Hadley tilted his glass toward him." He drinks more slowly. "Behind the bar, the bartender crouched in a sullen, brooding heap, mulling over his loss, his inability to control the dice."
"It made him wonder about himself." His thoughts go back to the lecture, "But it was not the same as before: he was sipping a free drink. Something about getting a free drink in a strange bar made him feel comfortable, as if the regular laws of the universe could be suspended. Things weren't completely bad...not with such exceptions." He checks his watch. "Forty-five minutes." He gulps, paws for his cigarettes, and waits it out.
The suspended law. The free drink sets up the sermon. Hadley takes comfort from a small exception to "the regular laws of the universe"; within the hour Beckheim will tell him that God never suspends natural law, that "suspension of a natural law would be a denial of God," and that no hand will burst through the sky. The salesman who lives on exceptions (the waitress's attention, the free bourbon, Marsha, the till at month's end) is about to hear a prophet who denies them.
The hall
"He arrived at the hall early. The lecture hadn't begun; only a quarter of the seats were filled. Quiet, unmoving shapes sat here and there, murmuring together in low voices."
A CLOSER LOOK: the usher, and the second night. The usher gets the chapter's kindest description of a Black character, but it is still built from objects ("a chunk of dark wood," "rough-cut head") and her one line is written in dialect ("You early"), while every white speaker's grammar is left standard. "Friend Watcher" is the Movement's form of address. The note that "the curious had come and gone" confirms that this is the second night of Beckheim's visit. In Chapter 3 Hadley reached the hall with the Golds on the Friday only as the lecture ended; this Saturday he comes early, alone, and hears it all.
The throwaway
He studies the square of coarse paper: "A throwaway, the kind handed out on street corners." He reads it, crumples it, and drops it on the floor. Its text, as Dick prints it:
"ARE YOU READY FOR ARMAGEDDON? Bible tells end of the world soon to come. Prophecies to be fulfilled. Fire and flood to cleanse world. 'For he is like a refiner's fire.' .... .... 'For the first heaven and the first earth were passed away.' Subscribe to the PEOPLE'S WATCHMAN two dollars a year 425 Berry Avenue Chicago, Ill."
"The cheap, blatant notice filled him with disgust. He looked around; nobody seemed to be reading literature of any kind. The notices had been accepted and then discarded like a commercial announcement. That cheered him, and he lit a cigarette."
Fact check: the verses, and the real Watchmen. "For he is like a refiner's fire" is Malachi 3:2 in the King James Version ("for he is like a refiner's fire, and like fullers' soap"); "for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away" is Revelation 21:1. The People's Watchman and its Chicago address are fictional. Dick's Watchmen Society, with its Armageddon, its paper, its "Watchers" and its refusal of weapons, plainly echoes the Jehovah's Witnesses and their magazine The Watchtower, whose members were the largest group of conscientious objectors imprisoned in the United States in the Second World War (about 4,400). The Witnesses were headquartered in Brooklyn, not Chicago, and had no single charismatic Black leader; Beckheim is Dick's invention. The salesman's relief that the faithful throw away the tract "like a commercial announcement" is a salesman's measure: he judges a church by whether its advertising works.
The hall fills. "A family, with much noise and scraping of chairs, sat down in front of him. To his right a handful of powerfully built Negroes sat in a stern bunch, eyes fixed directly ahead of them. Old women were scattered here and there, by ones and by twos." A thin-faced, nervous young woman takes the seat to his left, sets down her purse, shakes off her coat. "The hall was becoming stuffy and hot. Fans worked creakily in the depths." He loosens his collar. "It was an ordeal, waiting. It seemed as if he had been waiting all his life."
The emblem
He glares about, "at the many people, at the doors behind him, at the rafters above, at the platform. American flags fluttered heavily at each end of it. Behind, nailed to the wall, was an emblem he didn't recognize."
"A sphere, half white and half black: the black curled up into the white at one side and the white groped into the black at the other. The effect was of motion, as if the sphere were a turning wheel. It was dynamic, but complete. There was a certain satisfying quality to it. He gazed at it for a while and some of his tension drained out and vanished."
Fact check and irony: yin and yang. The emblem is the Chinese taijitu, the yin-yang symbol, in which each half curls into the other and (in the usual form) each contains a dot of the other's colour, meaning that each side holds the seed of its opposite and neither can exist alone. Dick's description omits the dots but keeps the interpenetration ("the black curled up into the white... the white groped into the black"). The irony is large. Under a symbol of opposites that need and contain each other, Beckheim will preach total polarization: every atom moving "to one of the two sides," two hosts drawn up "in clear and unmistakable fashion," and salvation for those who leave, "And no one else!" Two American flags flank an emblem from Chinese thought while the speaker condemns all nations, including America. And the symbol works on Hadley exactly as the "completeness" of Ellen worked on Fergesson the night before: "dynamic, but complete," it calms him. A white and black wheel above a Black prophet speaking to a mostly white crowd also carries a racial meaning Dick leaves implicit.
A presence
"While he was gazing sleepily at the emblem, Theodore Beckheim came into the hall."
"The hall lights dimmed. An ominous black mist drifted over everything, a chilling cloud from some distant place, beyond the world, beyond the universe itself. The lights turned from yellow to a sickly red and then died entirely."
"The effect was magical. The terror drained out of Hadley and he was left limp. He trembled from head to foot as the giant figure stepped up to the microphone. All around the hall people were shuddering as Hadley shuddered; a collective gasp, almost a wail, cut through the silence."
Staging. Dick shows exactly how the effect is produced, even as Hadley feels it as magic. The lights are on a dimmer (yellow, then red, then dark); the entrance is timed for eight; the speaker appears only after an "electric instant" of total darkness, at the moment the audience's anxiety peaks, so that his appearance is felt as rescue. It is the theatre's oldest trick. It is a showman's entrance, and the chapter will say, a few pages later, that "Beckheim was not trying to convince." The reader is given both the experience and the mechanism; Hadley gets only the experience.
"He was definitely a Negro"
He surveys the rows "with a thoughtful, almost unhappy expression. There was wise understanding in his face, and at the same time an unspoken reprimand. Each person, sitting there in the hall, felt small and a little unclean and strangely uncertain of himself and his habits." As his eyes touch them the rows "drew back guiltily"; "They were glad when the eyes had passed; but their confidence did not wholly return."
A CLOSER LOOK: the inventory of a Black face. The description is a feature-by-feature catalogue (lips, skin, ears, hair, chin) ending in a verdict, "He was definitely a Negro," as though the white observer had needed to inspect the evidence. In 1952 a Black religious leader preaching to a largely white middle-class audience on the Peninsula would have been startling, and Dick wants the shock. The passage also gives Beckheim real grandeur ("a face like ancient metal"), more than any white character in the book receives. Both are true at once: the novel makes its Black prophet the most powerful presence in it and describes him in the language of racial classification. Later chapters complicate him (Marsha lives with him; his ushers turn Hadley away), and that arc deserves scrutiny when it comes.
"A unique time"
"I am glad," Beckheim says "in a low, tense voice," "of the chance to talk to you people. If you will sit quietly and listen, I have some things to tell you that will be of importance in your lives."
The sermon is long and built like an argument. Its first movement is about time:
- The thesis. "You are living in a unique time. Often before it was believed this time had come... but always they were wrong. Finally a sense arose that the time was a myth. It had been predicted, it had failed, it would always fail."
- The old errors. The learned men of the past believed "the world was flat, that it occupied most of the universe, that the sun moved, that hairs left in water became worms, that lead could become gold, that a man could be healed if certain words were said over his injury." They were wrong about the world's size, shape, origin and age, believing "there were only a few years behind them and only a few miles around them."
- Two thousand years. Because "They knew only two thousand years behind them," they "could not conceive that much ahead"; "two thousand years was the largest unity they understood. It was virtually infinity." "Now we know that two thousand years is nothing, just as two thousand miles is nothing."
- The arithmetic of prophecy. "Just as we must divide the age of the prophets by twelve, because of a mistaken Hebrew noun, we must multiply the time units of the prophets by several thousand. Just as we know the universe was not made in seven days but in seven vast periods of perhaps billions of years in duration, so we must realize that the days of life anticipated by the prophets are really centuries."
Fact check: dividing by twelve. There was a popular rationalising theory that the great ages in Genesis (Methuselah's 969 years and the rest) were counted in lunar months rather than years, so that dividing by twelve or thirteen gives normal lifespans (969 divided by 12 is about 81). It does not survive its own arithmetic: Genesis also gives the ages at which the patriarchs fathered children (Enoch at 65, for example), and divided by twelve these become five or six years old. And the ages belong to the patriarchs of Genesis, not "the prophets." "A mistaken Hebrew noun" refers to the claim that the Hebrew word for year had been misread; no standard scholarship supports it. The "seven vast periods" is the day-age reading of Genesis, widely held by conservative Protestants who accepted geology. Beckheim mixes a crank theory with a respectable one, and delivers both in the same voice of authority. That is the point of the next paragraph.
The second movement is about miracles. "And the ancients believed in miracles... they believed that when a natural law was suspended, God was revealed. Now we know that suspension of a natural law would be a denial of God, a demonstration that the universe is chaotic, capricious, chance... It would not be a cosmos, and if there is to be a God there must be a cosmos." The ancients confused "things not explained... and things having no explanation" and imagined that God "could create this vast universe and then reach down into it, supersede its laws, ignore its elaborate fabric, push it aside in His impatience."
The third movement is God in everything. "The ancients did not understand that God was always among them... God is present in every physical object... In every man, God is present in His actual form: as a moving spirit. The physical object is an expression of God: the mind of man is God, a part, a unit, of the total Spirit." So the signs would not be "thrust magically into the framework of everyday life." "The momentum of the universe is itself the process anticipated by the prophets. Not a sudden cessation of this process, but the direction of the process itself is the hand of God at work." "We will see, from our present vantage point, unmistakable signs that the final events prophesied by the Bible are entering their last and most significant stages."
A modern prophet. This is not the street-corner tract Hadley threw on the floor. Beckheim's first half-hour is a rationalist's theology: no miracles, deep time, God as the order of nature, "the mind of man is God." It is close to the liberal and pantheist strands of 1950s religion, and close to Spinoza. It flatters the audience as moderns who know the earth is round and the universe vast, and so disarms the "crank" objection Hadley spent the evening rehearsing. Then, having established that God never breaks the laws of nature, Beckheim uses the same authority to announce that the end of the world is under way. The faith healer who cured a girl on a Los Angeles stage now preaches that there are no miracles. Dick does not comment; he lets the contradiction sit beside Wakefield's memory of the magnetic belt.
"Stuart Hadley, listening to the deep, intense voice, realized suddenly that everyone in the hall was as caught up in the tide of sound as he was. Not the words, but the sheer voice had taken them over. And yet, Beckheim was not speaking nonsense. He was speaking wisdom. Or did it only seem like wisdom because Beckheim was speaking it?"
Hadley's one clear question. The marked sentence is the most intelligent thing Hadley thinks in the book, and he does not follow it. He notices that the voice, not the argument, has captured the hall; he asks whether wisdom is in the words or in the speaker; and he knows the sense of being personally addressed is "an illusion." Then the next sentence ("Beckheim was not trying to convince") repeats the illusion as fact, a sentence after the lights were dimmed for effect. The reader can see that every technique of persuasion is in play; Hadley, who sells for a living, sees it for a moment and lets it go.
Heaven ahead, and the choice
The fourth movement relocates Heaven. "It was their insight that the earth was not permanent. In this sense, we must understand that Heaven, rather than being a place spatially removed from earth, is actually the universe which will follow when our earth has been destroyed." The dead "wait for the Last Judgment... in a state of suspension; that is, no time." "Heaven, rather than being above, is ahead. Heaven will be manifested here, not somewhere else... Hell itself, all regions which are not Heaven, will be swallowed up. It will not be meaningful to speak of Heaven's location, since there will be nothing else."
"The transition from our world to that which is coming will be marked by violent cataclysm... a time of torment and vast upheaval." The ancients "prepared themselves for that day; but in their lifetime, it did not come. In our lifetime the signs point to a more imminent appearance. We have entered the period in which preparation must be made... in which every man must make his choice."
"This choice, which once seemed abstract and theoretical, almost philosophical, is now vivid and pressing. It cannot be avoided. Every atom of our world is aligning itself for the great struggle ahead; every inanimate particle of matter, without wit or conscience, is moving to one of the two sides."
Then the image at the centre of the sermon. The "witless particles, blown here and there by forces which utterly control them, have no choice." And:
"A gun, in the gun rack of an armory, is totally helpless to prevent a soldier from grabbing it down and hurrying it out to battle. It is not free to complain, to prefer the other side, to change over, to swear allegiance to the foe. For it, the foe is whatever army faces it; for it, the friend is whoever grips its stock."
The gun and the salesman. The gun in the rack is the sermon's one memorable image and the reason Hadley joins. It speaks straight to a man who has spent Part One being picked up by whoever grips his stock: hired by Fergesson, steered by Ellen, taken to the Golds' flat, invited by Wakefield to this hall. "You allowed yourself to be carried into battle by whoever grabbed you from the rack" is a description of Hadley's life. Read against Chapter 4 it is also a reply to Fergesson, whose creed was that "a machine isn't good or bad." Beckheim agrees about the gun and denies it about the man. The trouble, which Dick will develop, is that the Movement offers Hadley a new rack: a man who joins because a voice "had taken them over" has not chosen in the sense Beckheim means.
Total war and the prophets
The fifth movement turns to history. "This struggle which forms now on all sides of us will be total. It will involve every atom in the universe... Total war was a concept unknown at the beginning of our lifetimes. Try to imagine what will be meant by the term a century from now, if there is still an earth a century from now." "If you doubt this, I ask you to consider with what accuracy an ordinary citizen living in 1852 could have imagined the napalm and A-bombs of the last world war."
He disclaims a date. "When I say that we may have a century before us, I do not mean that I predict one way or another how much time is left. I don't know; no one knows." Then his theory of prophecy: the prophets "were men gifted with this exceptional insight, this special sense, an ability to perceive future occurrences, to remember them as we remember events of the past." The events were "of such foreign and awesome nature that only by rendering them in elaborate poetic imagery could they translate them into the diction of the times."
"I ask you to picture a prophet of biblical days, a simple agrarian farmer, suddenly witness to the Korean War, with its planes and tanks, its huge guns, its battleships, its elaborate radar screens. How would he render this understandable to his own people?... Picture yourself, then, suddenly witness to a world two thousand years from this date."
"The final stages of the Great Battle may not arise for many centuries... it may be thousands, even millions of years... For us only one thing is important: the polarization into sides is, in our time, visible. That is sufficient... The two hosts are drawing themselves up in clear and unmistakable fashion."
Fact check: total war, napalm, 1852. The phrase "total war" was made current by the French journalist Léon Daudet, whose wartime articles were collected as La guerre totale in 1918, and by the German general Erich Ludendorff's Der totale Krieg (1935). A speaker of fifty or so in 1952 could fairly say the concept was unknown when he was born. Napalm was developed in 1942 by a Harvard team under the chemist Louis Fieser and used from 1944; the atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Napalm was also in heavy use in Korea in 1952, which Beckheim does not mention. His prophet as a man who "remembers" the future is a striking idea and an old one in a new dress; it is also, plainly, a theme Dick would return to for the rest of his career.
The two hosts
The sixth movement is the sorting. "No living man can hide his head and pretend the formations of these legions do not lie spread out on the plain before his eyes. No man can say I do not see them. It is a lie, and God cannot be deceived. No man can stand immobile on the sidelines, saying This battle does not concern me."
He quotes Revelation from memory, in the King James words:
"And no one else!"
The last movement is the catalogue and the call. "Many will perish: that is the writing that is written. But not all will be destroyed." Then a list that is the most modern thing in the chapter:
- "The cities will be leveled; the plain will become endless ash;"
- "radioactive particles will fall like hot rain;"
- "the crops will wither and die from poison clouds;"
- "deadly bacteria will be carried by hordes of insects;"
- "the earth will tremble and split open from vast bombs: the oceans will writhe with the impact;"
- "the air itself will become polluted and foul; the sun will disappear behind black clouds of dust."
"But some will live. Some will be saved. God will not allow all mankind to perish: those who forsake the armies of the plains, the cities of the plains, will sit with Him in paradise... God has seen all this; to God it has already happened."
"Those who forsake the accursed cities and machines of men, the factories and buildings, the streets and weapons, the bombs and air-raid shelters, the sirens and tin helmets, who flock out into the high mountains, will be saved."
"And no one else!" The chapter ends on the shout.
Where the sermon lands. The sermon's last two sentences contradict its first half-hour. It began by denying that God would ever break into history with a hand through the sky; it ends with the elect fleeing to the mountains while the cities burn, which is exactly the old apocalypse of the street-corner throwaway. It began with "even God cannot decide for you" and ends with a God for whom "it has already happened." It began with every man's spark of God and ends with "no one else." It also leaves things out. There is no word about love, neighbours, Christ, or how a man with a pregnant wife and a job in Cedar Groves should live tomorrow. What Hadley takes from the hall is a feeling of being addressed, a single image (the gun), and a command to leave "the accursed cities and machines of men": the city he loves and the machines he sells.
Fact check: the fallout catalogue. Beckheim's list is close to real 1950s fears. Radioactive fallout had been understood since the Bikini tests of 1946, and the first hydrogen bomb, Ivy Mike, would be tested on November 1, 1952, five months after this sermon (Truman had announced the H-bomb programme on January 31, 1950). Public alarm about fallout "rain" peaked later, after the Castle Bravo test of March 1954 poisoned the crew of the Japanese fishing boat Lucky Dragon. The image of dust blotting out the sun anticipates the "nuclear winter" studies of the 1980s. Dick's own later fiction (Dr. Bloodmoney, The Penultimate Truth, Deus Irae) is full of exactly this world of ash and fallout. Dick's 1952 Beckheim is slightly ahead of his audience.
| Mrs. Krafft's apocalypse | Beckheim's apocalypse | |
|---|---|---|
| Who destroys the world | "Bombs, radiation, germs, all scorched clean"; America "has got to go, too" | Every nation's "naked force"; the Devil's armies destroy themselves |
| Who is saved | The "pure," the vegetarian, the Nordic; Germany as the lost "light" | Those who throw down the gun and flee to the mountains |
| The enemy | England, Disraeli, the "money men," Communists | Hatred and armed force "on all sides," every nation alike |
| Tone | Joy: "a clean new world" | Grief and command: "even God cannot decide for you" |
| Who is excluded | Named peoples and races | Anyone who kills, "And no one else!" |
| Fergesson (Chapter 4) | Beckheim (Chapter 5) | |
|---|---|---|
| On machines | "A machine isn't good or bad"; he sells them | "The accursed cities and machines of men" must be forsaken |
| On the man who does not choose | Things are "out of our hands"; keep the store | No-choice is a choice; you "must answer" |
| Faith | The store as a "religion," work as worship | God in "every physical object," the mind of man as God |
| His flock | "My little flock" of salesmen and repairmen | The Watchers, rich women and laborers |
| What he offers Hadley | A job, a future store, a father's judgment | A location: a side to be on |
Model: the chapter's ladder of cranks. Read the chapter as a ladder. At the bottom, the flower shop: Wakefield's disgust with the body and Mrs. Krafft's purity politics, which ends in a wish for fire. One rung up, the drug counter: Hadley's own mild crankiness ("hair oil... shoe polish") and his rage, coming out in the hoe memory and the booth. Next, Harry and the dice: a man ruled by a game he cannot control. At the top, Beckheim: the best-argued, most moral and most seductive version of the same longing for a clean break from a dirty world. The reader is meant to notice that every rung promises Hadley what Fergesson's store cannot: purity, an enemy, and an end to waiting.
A CLOSER LOOK: the chapter as a whole.
Prejudice in the characters. Mrs. Krafft's antisemitism (the "money men," Disraeli), her Hitler nostalgia and her "Finnish berserkers" are hers, and the chapter frames them as crank talk. But the narration's own racial language is not framed: the slum catalogue ("Negro toughs," "Fat Negro women"), the usher in dialect, "solemn Negro faces row after row," Beckheim's feature-by-feature inventory ending "He was definitely a Negro." Lulu the waitress is described with contempt for her body and class. The fantasies of violence against Ellen and the child in the hoe memory come from inside Hadley and are not punished or judged by the narration at this point.
Contradictions and slips. (1) Wakefield's "late last fall" and his memory of Beckheim's early Los Angeles days do not agree on how long he has followed him. (2) Wakefield's faith (mind over diet) and Mrs. Krafft's (diet over mind) contradict each other inside the same shop. (3) The narration slides from Wakefield's point of view to Hadley's in mid-scene. (4) Beckheim's sermon denies miracles, while Mrs. Krafft reveres the Los Angeles night when he "cured the girl of paralysis" on stage; and it begins with free choice and ends with a God for whom all "has already happened." (5) "Divide the age of the prophets by twelve" confuses the patriarchs with the prophets. (7) Ellen's "Go ahead, go to it" sets up Chapter 6's "I didn't want him to go."
History in the mouths of cranks. Disraeli was baptised an Anglican at twelve, served twice as Prime Minister (1868 and 1874 to 1880), and had nothing to do with "money men" running England; "a nation of shopkeepers" is Adam Smith's phrase (1776), later linked with Napoleon. The berserkers were Norse, not Finnish. Hitler's vegetarianism was real but partial and propagandised. The Watchmen echo the Jehovah's Witnesses without being them.
IN PRACTICE: the default is a decision. Beckheim's best line has a direct use in any organisation that builds automated systems. "It will not suffice to plead that you made no choice": in a bank or a software platform, the person who accepts a vendor's default setting, lets an AI model's output pass without review, or leaves an alert threshold untouched has made a decision and owns its consequences. Model-risk and AI governance frameworks (the US Federal Reserve's SR 11-7 guidance on model risk, and the EU AI Act's human-oversight duties for high-risk systems) are built on exactly this idea: a named human owner answers for the tool, because the tool, like the gun in the rack, will serve "whoever grips its stock." The chapter adds a second lesson that is easy to miss. Hadley notices that "not the words, but the sheer voice" had taken the hall over, and he asks whether it only "seemed like wisdom" because of who was speaking. Fluent, confident delivery from a large language model or a senior executive produces the same effect; review processes should check the claim (the twelve-month year, the "mistaken Hebrew noun") separately from the confidence of the speaker.
What the chapter sets up. Hadley has heard Beckheim in full and has been moved by a voice he half suspects. He has lied to Ellen twice, fantasised about killing her, remembered nearly killing a child, and found himself comfortable only when a stranger gave him a free drink. The chapter leaves him in the dark hall on the shout "And no one else!" and closes Part One's Saturday. When the book resumes, in Part Two, it is a warm Sunday morning in July: Pete has been born, Ellen is slim again and hulling strawberries, and Fergesson is leaning on her kitchen sink asking for a beer, about to learn from her what Beckheim has come to mean to her husband.
Strawberries on Sunday
When and where. A Sunday morning in July 1952, probably the middle of the month: Pete was born in late June, and Ellen thinks his teeth are coming through "so soon." Ellen calls Stuart's quarrel over Beckheim something that "happened before Pete came," and dates the minister incident to "this last June," which matches the Thursday of Chapter 1 (June 5). The scene is the Hadleys' apartment in Cedar Groves: kitchen with a little chrome table and rotting linoleum, a living room looking onto "the orderly street with its green lawns," a bedroom with the shades drawn. Outside, men wash their cars and listen to "the ball game." The section heading in the book is "Part Two: Afternoon," though the scene is set in the morning.
People in this chapter. Pete Hadley, a few weeks old. Ellen Hadley, 22, "again slim and light," in one of Stuart's white cotton shirts, sandals and "a polka-dot dirndl skirt." Jim Fergesson, 42, in Sunday clothes: "a colored shirt with short sleeves, an old pair of canvas work trousers, and garden shoes"; "getting bald and fat." Alice Fergesson, arriving late "in slacks and a red-checkered sports shirt, the car keys dangling from her hand." Absent but discussed: Stuart Hadley; his sister (Sally) and her husband, being driven down to see the baby; Dave Gold; Theodore Beckheim; Stuart's dead father and the mother and sister who raised him; Ellen's family and their church; the minister on the hill; Fergesson's two cousins in Korea and his mother.
Pete and the sunbeams
Part Two begins with a sentence that settles a question Part One left hanging: "The baby was a boy, and his name was Pete."
Dick gives Pete a paragraph of pure play before any adult speaks. "Pete lay in his bassinet and gobbled at sunbeams. He covered himself with bits of the sun, sneezed when they got into his nose, dribbled saliva down his chin when he tried to chew on them, and then became irritable and wet his diapers."
"The July morning was warm and friendly; all the windows of the apartment were wide open, curtains blowing drowsily as gusts of fresh air billowed inside and swirled from room to room."
Light after dark. Part One ended in two dark rooms: Fergesson's locked store at night, where Ellen sat waiting for "grace," and Beckheim's hall, where the lights died before the prophet appeared. Part Two opens with a baby eating sunlight in a house with every window open. The change of weather is deliberate. The chapter is set in the bright ordinary world that Hadley, according to his wife, now sees as already "gone." The sunbeams return at the end, when Pete lies "exhausted by his struggles with the sunbeams," and the chapter's last image is the opposite: Fergesson driving to a basement full of cardboard boxes.
A hard man with a beer
"In the kitchen Ellen Hadley sat at the little chrome table facing Jim Fergesson, a cigarette between her lips, a bowl of strawberries in her lap." Fergesson leans "against the sink, his arms folded." "Because it was Sunday he did not wear his double-breasted blue serge suit." His paunch rolls between the buttons of his shirt; "His round, wrinkled face was red and moist with summer perspiration."
"Do you think," he asks plaintively, "I could have a beer?" "Certainly," Ellen says, "hulling one last strawberry." "I'll get it... Tell me where the damn thing is: in the reefer?" "Always, in the girl's presence, he was gauche."
She ignores his protests, goes to the refrigerator, bends for the can opener. "Since she no longer carried the baby, Ellen was again slim and light." "Let me do it... I don't want you to go to any trouble." Pouring: "Maybe I'll have some, too. Can I have what doesn't go in the glass?" "Yeah," says Fergesson, "But you know, if you pour it against the side, there won't be so much left over."
"Ellen wrinkled her nose at him. 'I see what Stuart means about you.'"
Ellen sits back down with the bowl. "Mister Fergesson, you're a hard man." "At that, Fergesson blanched. It was the term mister that shook him; he remembered, all at once, where he was and what he was doing." He wipes his face. "By the way... where is he? That's what I came over for."
The boss in the employee's kitchen. Every move Fergesson makes in the first page is a move he makes in the store. He corrects how a beer is poured, prices the linoleum, prescribes tile and a mixer faucet, and diagnoses his salesman ("head in the clouds"). It is the creed of Chapter 4 (no waste, fix things, practical work) carried into a young woman's kitchen, where it is rude. Ellen's "I see what Stuart means about you" tells him he is discussed at home. Her "Mister Fergesson" puts him back in his place as employer and older man; his blanching at it shows how much he had forgotten that place, and why he came. A man who arrived on a Sunday "in garden shoes" to talk business with an absent husband is also, plainly, a man who came to see the wife.
Period detail: the reefer, the can opener and the mixer faucet. "Reefer" was common American slang for a refrigerator. Beer in 1952 still came largely in flat-topped steel cans that had to be punched with a "church key" opener (the pull tab did not arrive until the early 1960s), which is why Ellen hunts for "the can opener." A mixer faucet (a single spout mixing hot and cold) was a modern upgrade over the older two-tap sink. These details fit the date.
Where Stuart is
"Stuart?" Ellen shrugs. "Out buying junk for the baby, I suppose." "On Sunday?" "Well... Maybe he drove up the peninsula with Dave Gold. Some of the big highway toy shops are open on Sunday; he'll find one if he keeps looking long enough."
"Did he really drive up the highway looking..." "He went up to pick up his sister. He's bringing them down to see the baby." "His sister! I didn't know he had a sister." "He does," Ellen says drily. "He wants her to see the baby. He wants her to pass judgment... We're all waiting on that."
Two stories, and a thread picked up. Ellen gives two explanations of Stuart's absence in a single minute: first junk for the baby, perhaps with Dave Gold, then the real errand, a trip to fetch his sister. The first is evasive but half true: Chapter 7 shows that he did go with the Golds, in their dying Cadillac, to meet her in San Francisco. The sister is the Sally whom Chapter 1 had Hadley planning to collect that very Thursday, a thread Part One then dropped (Hadley told Dave Gold she was "married. Living up in Berkeley"). "Bringing them down" means Sally and her husband, Bob Sorrell, who arrive in Chapter 7. That Fergesson, who has employed Hadley since college and talks about him constantly, "didn't know he had a sister" says a good deal about how little he knows the man he means to promote. "He wants her to pass judgment" is the first hint that Sally stands in the place of the dead father.
Fergesson strolls into the living room. "The July heat made him irritable; he slapped at his neck, rubbed his hands together, peered out the window at the orderly street with its green lawns and quiet cars parked here and there, some of them getting their weekly washing." "Since the baby was born," he says, "Stumblebum's been different. More calmed down; I think he's finally growing up."
"It's not the baby."
"What, then? Of course it's the baby! He knows he's a father; he has responsibilities. He can't take off anytime he pleases."
"It happened before Pete came"
Still at the table with her bowl, Ellen says: "It happened before Pete came. Do you remember when that man was here, that Theodore Beckheim? There was a picture of him in the window of the Health Food Store... I saw it when I was having lunch with Stuart one day."
"Oh, that religious sea," Fergesson says vaguely.
"Stuart went to hear him speak. I remember because we had a terrible quarrel about it. I wouldn't go and I didn't want him to go. You see, I knew what was going to happen; I know how Stuart is about things like that. In some ways I know him better than he knows himself. He was so excited... He takes things like that so seriously."
"Too seriously," Fergesson puts in.
"Religious sea," and the quarrel remembered. "Religious sea" is almost certainly a misprint or mishearing of "sect" Part One never shows this "terrible quarrel" on stage, and Ellen's memory of it does not square with the phone call in Chapter 5, where her last words were "Go ahead, go to it." Both can be true (she said one thing and wanted another), but the reader who has just watched the phone call knows that "I didn't want him to go" is not what she told him that night. It is the same pattern as the call itself: she wants him and will not ask.
"Ellen jerkily stubbed out her cigarette and lit another. In the July sunlight her bare arms were brown and fuzzy, slightly damp with perspiration. 'No, not too seriously. Why? Who are you to say he takes things too seriously?'"
Abashed, Fergesson offers his remedy. "I mean, he should get out more and enjoy himself. Stop worrying; take in a few ball games, go bowling. Take you out, damn it... I'll bet you never get out to a nightclub or a show." "Stuart doesn't enjoy games," Ellen says shortly.
Two theories of the unhappy man. Fergesson's theory is behavioural: Hadley broods because he does not play ball, bowl or take his wife out, and a man with a wife, a child and an apartment has no reason for discontent. It is the theory of Chapter 4's creed (work, family, useful leisure) and of a whole decade's advice literature. Ellen's theory, which takes up the rest of the conversation, is historical and almost theological: Hadley broods because he was raised without God, lost his father, was taught to want health and nature instead of skill, and has now found a meaning. Neither of them suggests what the reader has seen in Part One: drink, a fight with McCarthy men, a night in jail, lies, and a violent temper. The chapter is a contest between two partial portraits.
"He sees all this gone"
"Ellen continued fixing the strawberries. Her fingers flew irritably: her husband had been attacked by somebody outside the family." "He sees something you don't see," she flares. "Something none of us sees." "What's that?"
"He sees all this gone. He's sensitive... Sometimes I think he's more of a woman than I am. He has premonitions, too. He's very... mystical. He used to devour all those astrology magazines I brought home; I stopped getting them because of him. He took them so seriously... He pored over them hour after hour. But he never went to church. He never had any religious training."
Then the school. "His family was very modern and scientific; he was raised in the thirties, in one of those progressive schools. I suppose they were all Communists... what we'd call Communists today. It was all very natural and expressive. He wove mats and baked little clay bowls; you know how he is, he likes to fool and tinker, he likes to express himself with his hands. They taught him to grow seeds and make ink. They taught him how bread is made and how cows give milk... trips out in the country to see the animals. Acquaint him with nature. That sort of thing... make him healthy. He ate it up."
"Christ," Fergesson cries, "he's the most unhealthy person I know, him and his bellyaches and his celery phosphate. He's always sick; he's a hypochondriac!"
Ellen nods. "Don't you see? They left him with such a terrible sense of needing to be healthy... of needing to be outdoors, out in the country. Out of the city, out where things are natural. They didn't teach him anything useful; they didn't teach him to live in this world... He doesn't know how to take care of himself."
Fact check: progressive schools and the red tinge. The Progressive Education Association, founded in 1919 and dissolved in 1955, championed child-centred schooling built on projects and hands-on work; its 1930s experiments included school gardens, weaving, clay modelling and visits to farms, very much the curriculum Ellen describes. Her "I suppose they were all Communists... what we'd call Communists today" reflects the early-1950s attack on progressive education as subversive: in November 1950 the Pasadena school board forced out its progressive superintendent, Willard Goslin, after a campaign that mixed complaints about teaching methods with charges of Communist influence. Ellen's sentence is not evidence about the schools; it is evidence about 1952, when "progressive" and "Communist" had become interchangeable insults.
Health food, explained. Ellen's account explains the whole of Chapter 5 without knowing it. A boy taught that bread, milk, seeds and the country are good, and the city is not, grows up to drink celery phosphate for his stomach, to feel at home among vegetarians in a Health Food Store, and to be moved by a prophet who tells him to flee "the accursed cities and machines of men" for the high mountains. "Out of the city, out where things are natural" is almost Beckheim's last sentence in Ellen's mouth. It is also a contradiction in Hadley that the novel will keep exploiting: the man raised for the country loves the city (and later says so), and the man taught to want health is "always sick."
The father, the artist, the empty place
"And then his father died." "I know," Fergesson says. "That was bad."
"If his father hadn't died Stuart might not have got this way. He was only eight. His mother and sister brought him up. They always had money; his father left them property and life insurance. Stuart always had it pretty easy." "I know. He never had to work for a living."
"Religion was just an empty void in his training. They sent him to Sunday school a few times... He learned a couple of psalms, heard about missionary work in China. You know, one day Stuart was brooding about God, the way he does. He asked me what church my family went to."
"I said the First Presbyterian. I was brought up very strictly. He brooded about that then. He wanted to know why the First Presbyterian." She carries the hulled strawberries to the refrigerator. "Well, I told him the truth. We joined the First Pres because it was the church closest to our house. It was just down the block." "Fergesson said nothing."
"You see, Stuart couldn't make anything out of that; it wasn't the answer he wanted. And it made him sick; he gets that dismal, moaning way, when he's worried or confused. He moped around the apartment for days after that. I was sorry." She turns to face Fergesson. "I knew it was my fault; but what else could I say? I don't know what to do about him; I can't be his father confessor." "He ought to go to a priest or something," Fergesson agrees.
"It was just down the block." This is the funniest and saddest exchange in the chapter, and it explains Hadley better than anything he says himself. He asks the question a seeker asks (why this church and not another, what is true) and gets the answer of the ordinary believer: proximity. For Ellen's family, religion was a neighbourhood habit and a strict upbringing, not a choice among truths. For Hadley, raised with no habit at all, a church chosen for being "just down the block" proves that nobody he knows has an answer. Beckheim, a few weeks later, will tell him that "even God cannot decide for you." The man for whom faith was never a habit can only take it as a decision, and that is what makes him vulnerable to a prophet. Fergesson's silence is the silence of a man who goes to church the same way.
Two portraits that do not quite match Part One. (1) Ellen says Stuart "never went to church" and had no religious training beyond "Sunday school a few times"; Part One gave his family as "some kind of Congregationalists," "modernists." The two fit loosely (nominal Protestants who did not practise), but the novel never reconciles them. (2) "His mother and sister brought him up" and "his father left them property and life insurance" sit oddly with the Hadley of Part One, who takes money from the household teapot and lives on a salesman's $250 plus commission. The money, it seems, went to the mother; Stuart had it "easy" as a boy, not as a man. (3) Ellen's "He was only eight" agrees with Hadley's own dim memory of his father in Chapter 3 ("as he dimly remembered him, big and deep-voiced").
The minister on the hill
"One day this last June, Stuart delivered a television set to a minister. He didn't know the man was a minister. He saw the big house, all the luxury, he saw the man's wife, he couldn't understand how the man could be a minister. It had a terrible effect on him. I think that was part of what brought this on." "You mean this Beckheim business?" She nods.
Ellen's version of Part One. The delivery is the one Hadley talked about at the Golds' dinner in Chapter 3: the Reverend Anderton's house on the hill, the rich minister and his "tall English ash-blonde" wife. Ellen tells it as a crisis of faith (a minister should not be rich), and that is how Hadley framed it too. But the reader of Part One remembers how much of his talk lingered on the house and the wife. Ellen says only that Stuart "saw the man's wife" and leaves it there; whether she hears more in it, the text does not say. Her dating, "this last June," fits: the delivery came in the first week of June, days before the lecture.
"But she didn't mean that. Tears came up and stung her eyes; she walked quickly away from Fergesson and stood with her back to him, gazing out the window. What was she doing? She was delivering him over to his enemies, to Fergesson. Talking about him, deriding him. And all she wanted to do was save him."
"His enemies, to Fergesson." The point of view slips here into Ellen's mind for the only time in the chapter, and what it shows is that she regards the man in her kitchen as Stuart's enemy. It is the same word Hadley uses for his invisible opponents, and the same perception the reader got in Chapter 4, where Fergesson weighed firing Hadley and selling out to Bel-Rex in the same evening. Ellen's insult ("a lot bigger than you'll ever be") is aimed at Fergesson's height and at his pride, and it lands on both. Her confession that she fears losing Stuart if he changes is the most honest sentence in the conversation: she wants him rescued and kept as he is, and knows she cannot have both.
"When dreams were popular"
"He had such dreams; he grew up when dreams were popular. Now it's only reality. And he can't face that. And it makes him angry."
A generation's diagnosis. Ellen's sentence is the best one-line account of Hadley in the book, and it is a historical claim. A boy raised in the 1930s in a progressive school, among parents who believed in planning, nature and a better world, the generation of the New Deal and the Popular Front, comes of age in 1952 into the Cold War, the Korean stalemate, McCarthy and the hydrogen bomb, and a job selling television sets. The "dreams" were the reforming hopes of his childhood; the "reality" is Modern TV. The sentence also names Sally for the first time in the chapter, as another woman who "wanted to take care of him," which explains why her verdict on the baby matters so much. Dick, born in 1928 and raised in Washington and Berkeley in the 1930s, was writing about his own generation.
Fact check: Dick's own childhood. Philip K. Dick was born in Chicago on December 16, 1928. After his parents divorced, his mother took him to Washington, D.C., in 1935, where he attended Quaker schools, and in 1938 they returned to Berkeley, where he grew up. Hadley, who was born in New York and grew up in Washington, shares the Washington years and the absent father, though Dick's father did not die. These parallels are well documented in the biographies; this guide does not claim that Hadley is a self-portrait.
The temper, and the night of the lecture
"For a little while," Ellen says tightly, "that's gone." "Gone! What do you mean?"
She ties on "a plastic apron" and begins "pouring soap dust and hot water into the sink." "When he came back from the lecture he was as quiet as a child. He was like a scared little boy; he just stood there, his eyes big and round, not saying anything. I knew it had happened... even though after a while he sort of snapped out of it. He came over to me (I was in bed, of course) and sat down on the edge without saying anything. I never saw him look like that before, and I asked him what happened. It was a long time before he'd say."
"What did he say?" Fergesson asks, "morbidly curious." "He said he'd learned something. He'd found out something he'd always suspected. Beckheim told him the world was coming to an end."
"Fergesson hesitated, then bellowed with laughter. 'The world's been coming to an end for five thousand years!'"
A CLOSER LOOK: what Ellen leaves out of the night. Ellen's version of the night of June 7 is a conversion story: a frightened, childlike husband, quiet and awed. The reader of Chapter 5 knows what came before he sat on the edge of her bed: two lies on the phone, a bar, a fantasy of crushing her skull, a free bourbon. Ellen does not know these things, and the narration does not tell Fergesson. The novel lets her version stand as true about Hadley's feeling while the reader holds the rest. Note also her "(I was in bed, of course)": she was nine months pregnant, and "of course" carries the weight of the evening she spent alone with the television.
Meaning as relief. Ellen describes exactly what Beckheim's sermon offered: not information (Fergesson is right that the end of the world is old news) but pattern. A man who saw the universe as "a big senseless mechanism" suddenly sees "everything... for a purpose," and the purpose is the war. It is one of the novel's sharpest observations, and it is uncomfortable: the apocalypse calms Hadley. The temper "is gone" because the world's end has made his own failures irrelevant. A reader may notice the similarity to Chapter 5's Mrs. Krafft, for whom destruction promised "a clean new world." Ellen does not draw the comparison; Dick leaves it to the reader.
"You mean it's for Sunday"
"All that Armageddon stuff? God against the Devil?" Fergesson paces. "Sure, that's what I was brought up on. But a man's a fool if he takes that seriously! I mean, you can't really go around spouting that stuff. I mean..."
"You mean it's for Sunday." "Yes."
Religion for Sunday. Two words of Ellen's and one of Fergesson's sum up the chapter's title and the faith of the respectable 1950s. Fergesson was raised on Armageddon, believes it in the sense of not disbelieving it, and regards anyone who acts on it as "a fool." Religion is a day of the week, like the garden shoes and the beer. Ellen, whose family chose its church for being "just down the block," shares his kind of faith and sees through it; the strawberries on Sunday and the men washing their cars are the sabbath Fergesson keeps. Hadley's offence, in his employer's eyes, is to have taken a Sunday doctrine into the weekdays.
"Stuart believes the war is going to destroy the whole world. He believes man-made civilization will end. He believes all the armies of the world, all the cities, the factories, the roads, will be demolished. He believes a new world will arise."
"Escapism!" Fergesson rages. "He's got a job to keep, he's got you and Pete to support! He can't turn his back on his responsibilities."
Fact check: comets and crackpots. Fergesson's comet is almost certainly a memory of Halley's Comet in 1910, when newspapers reported that the earth would pass through the comet's tail (it did, on May 18 to 19, 1910) and that its gases might poison the atmosphere; "comet pills" were sold, and some preachers declared the end. Fergesson, born about 1910 by his stated age, could not remember it himself, but he would have grown up on the stories. The pattern he describes (each war read as Armageddon) is also accurate: the First World War, in particular, produced a flood of prophecy literature, and the Jehovah's Witnesses' predecessors, the Bible Students, had named 1914 as a decisive year.
"Do you read the newspaper?"
"Ellen shut off the water and turned away from the sink. 'Do you read the newspaper?'" Fergesson blinks. "Sure." "Anything but the sports page and the comics?" "Sure! Everything, all the way through." "Do you read the front page? About the war?"
"The Korean War? Naturally. I've got two cousins fighting over there. And I was in the First World War myself. In the Marines; I volunteered."
"Do you think we'll be alive ten years from now? Do you think we'll live through a hydrogen-bomb war?"
"Fergesson's beefy face twisted. 'Look, Ellen, once you start worrying about that, there's no hope. You can't do anything about it; it either comes or it doesn't. It's like flood or famine... it's out of our hands, so why worry about it? We have to go about our living and just hope it never comes.'"
A CLOSER LOOK: the Marine who was eight. Here the chapter states plainly a claim that cannot be true as written. Chapter 4 gave Fergesson's age as forty-two in June 1952, which puts his birth around 1910; the United States was in the First World War from April 1917 to November 1918, when he would have been seven or eight. In Chapter 4 he also told Alice, "I was in the National Guard," with no mention of the Marines, and later in the novel he speaks of fighting at Belleau Wood and the Second Marne (both in summer 1918). The likeliest explanation is an authorial slip: Dick, revising an unsold manuscript, changed Fergesson's age or his war without reconciling them. A reader can also take it as a boast, an older man's borrowed war story told to a young woman he wants to impress. Either way, it should not be taken as a fact about him.
Fact check: the hydrogen bomb in July 1952. Ellen's "hydrogen-bomb war" is ahead of the calendar, but only just. President Truman announced on January 31, 1950, that the United States would build the hydrogen bomb; the first full-scale thermonuclear device, Ivy Mike, was exploded at Enewetak on November 1, 1952, some four months after this Sunday, and the Soviet Union tested its first hydrogen-type bomb in August 1953. In July 1952 the H-bomb was a known project and a public fear, not yet a weapon. "Ten years from now" lands, by chance, on October 1962 and the Cuban missile crisis, the closest the world came to the war she imagines. The Korean War, in which Fergesson's two cousins are fighting, was in its second year of stalemate; an armistice came on July 27, 1953.
"Out of our hands." Fergesson's answer is the chapter's central idea and the exact opposite of the sermon Hadley heard. Beckheim said "even God cannot decide for you" and that making no choice is a choice; Fergesson says the bomb "either comes or it doesn't," like "flood or famine," and the sane response is to "go about our living and just hope." It is the sensible, decent, mid-century answer, the one most of Dick's readers would have given, and it is also the answer of the gun in the rack. Ellen hears it as a refusal to think. The reader can see that both positions have something: Fergesson is right that a salesman cannot stop a war, and Ellen is right that a man who has stopped looking at the front page is living in a world that may not last.
"What's the matter?" Fergesson quavers.
"You don't understand, do you? You're exactly the way Stuart says; you just don't have any understanding. You live in a little dead stale old world of your own."
"Don't talk to me that way," Fergesson says sharply.
The farm boy and the mother's look. The memory is a small gift from Dick, and the only glimpse of Fergesson's childhood in the book: a boy on a farm, picking up filth from "the farmhands," and a mother whose look made him feel it. It adds a mother to the father of Chapter 4 (the bedridden man who despised trade) and places Fergesson's origins in the country, which makes his scorn for Hadley's nature-loving schooling the scorn of a man who knew real farms. Ellen's look makes him a child again, and her sentence, "You're exactly the way Stuart says," tells him that the young couple laugh at him together. "A little dead stale old world of your own" is cruel because it is half true; the old world in question is the store, the creed and the clean basement he will now flee to.
Alice in the doorway
"While they stood glaring at each other, the sound of footsteps came from the living room." Fergesson turns. "His wife, Alice, had come into the apartment; she stood quietly in the doorway, in slacks and a red-checkered sports shirt, the car keys dangling from her hand."
"I got tired of waiting," she says to her husband. "Hello, Ellen. Where's Stuart? Where's the man of the house?" "He isn't here," Ellen says briskly.
Who drove whom. Alice arrives with "the car keys dangling," saying she "got tired of waiting." The implication is that she had been waiting in the car outside, or at home, while Jim went in; yet at the end of the chapter Fergesson hops "into the car," starts it and drives home, "half hoping, half expecting, Alice to come out after him." Either they came in two cars (and Alice drove herself over when she tired of waiting at home), or Fergesson had a spare key and leaves his wife stranded. The text does not settle it. The more interesting fact is that Alice, the confidante of Chapter 4, reads the room in a glance and takes Ellen's side by going with her.
Two women and the baby
"Pete was awake. Exhausted by his struggles with the sunbeams drifting past the shade and over his blankets, he lay on his back, slack and inert, gazing blankly up. The two women stood over his bassinet for a long time, both of them deep in thought."
Alice pushes the door "a trifle shut" and watches. "What was going on when I came in? Was Jim trying to tell you how to run your life?" "No," Ellen answers indifferently. "We were just arguing about the war."
"If he tries to lecture you, pour a pan of boiling water over him. That's what I do." "The sight of the young mother and her baby made momentary envy stir in Alice. 'The little old goat,' she said, with surprising vehemence. 'Damn him.'"
A CLOSER LOOK: the joke and the envy. Alice's "pour a pan of boiling water over him. That's what I do" is a joke between women, and Ellen takes it as one; but it follows a chapter of violent images (Hadley's fantasy of crushing Ellen's skull in Chapter 5) and precedes a novel in which domestic violence is real, and a modern reader will hear it differently from a 1952 one. Her "little old goat" says she knows exactly why her husband came to see Ellen on a Sunday morning. The "momentary envy" at the sight of a young mother is the closest the text comes to telling us that the Fergessons have no child of their own; it does not say so outright. "His grandfather's teeth" is a nice touch: the baby whose first tooth is "so soon" already has an ancestor's mark, and the grandfather in question is the dead doctor or Ellen's father, the text does not say which. (A baby a few weeks old almost never cuts a tooth; Ellen is right that "it couldn't be.")
Fergesson at the door
"Shame touched Fergesson, embarrassment at having watched. And then a terrible sorrow so great that it was almost past bearing. Miserable, lonely, he turned bitterly away from the closed door, an acid pain cutting across his chest and into his lungs. Baffled, he plunged around the warm bright living room in an aimless circle. Outside, men were washing their cars and listening to the ball game."
"Empty, lost, Fergesson could no longer stand it; suddenly he had to go and wrestle with the shipment of television sets. He couldn't stay in the apartment a second longer. The hell with Hadley."
"I'm going!" he shouts at the closed door. "You can stay here and gab; I've got stuff to do!" "There was no answer from the bedroom."
A CLOSER LOOK: the watcher. Fergesson looks deliberately ("He moved over a little to see") at a young mother nursing, and Alice shuts the door on him. The narration is close to his eye and lingers on Ellen's body, as it has lingered on women's bodies throughout the book, and the reader is made to share the look before sharing the shame. Dick's interest is in what follows: not lust but "a terrible sorrow so great that it was almost past bearing." The sorrow is not explained. A reader can take it as grief at his own age and childlessness, at a marriage with no baby in it, or at being excluded from a world (the women's, the young couple's) that has just told him he lives in "a little dead stale old world." The scene should be read honestly as both: an intrusion on a woman's privacy, and a man's sudden sight of what his life lacks.
Back to the boxes. The chapter ends where Fergesson always goes when feeling arrives: to work. "The hell with Hadley" abandons the errand he "came over for"; "I've got stuff to do" is the creed of Chapter 4 as a door slammed on emotion; the "three-hundred-pound television combinations" are the heaviest, most solid things in his world. The last line answers Ellen's charge without his knowing it. She told him he lives in a dead old world of his own; he drives straight to it, past men washing their cars and listening to the game, the Sunday world Hadley "sees... gone."
| Fergesson | Ellen | |
|---|---|---|
| Why Stuart is calmer | "Of course it's the baby!"; "finally growing up" | "It's not the baby"; Beckheim's lecture |
| What is wrong with him | No games, no bowling, a "sorehead," a "hypochondriac" | "He sees all this gone"; "dreams were popular. Now it's only reality" |
| Religion | "That's what I was brought up on"; it is "for Sunday" | Her family's church "just down the block"; Stuart's "religious thing" |
| The end of the world | "Coming to an end for five thousand years!"; crackpots and comets | "I mean the war"; "Do you think we'll be alive ten years from now?" |
| The bomb | "Out of our hands... just hope it never comes" | Refusing to think about it is "a little dead stale old world" |
| What Stuart needs | The Army, discipline, to grow up | "Somebody has to take care of him, somebody who loves him" |
| Ellen's portrait of Stuart | What Part One showed | |
|---|---|---|
| The night of the lecture | "Quiet as a child," awed, calm | Two lies on the phone, a bar, a fantasy of crushing her skull |
| Religion | "Never went to church," no training | Family "some kind of Congregationalists," "modernists" |
| Money | "Always had it pretty easy"; property and insurance | $250 a month base; the household teapot raided |
| The minister | A crisis of faith at a rich man's house | Envy of the house, attention to the "ash-blonde" wife |
| The temper | "For a little while, that's gone" | The puffball, the hoe, the rage in the booth |
Model: the absent man. The chapter is built around a man who never appears. Each person in the apartment holds a piece of Hadley: Fergesson holds the employee (temper, tantrums, the color photograph shown to old ladies), Ellen holds the history (school, father, college, the church question, the night of the lecture), Alice holds the gossip ("Where's the man of the house?"), and the absent sister holds the judgment ("He wants her to pass judgment"). Pete, who has "Stuart's eyes," holds the future. None of them has the whole man, and the reader, who has seen Part One from inside Hadley's head, has more of him than any of them. The structure anticipates the rest of the book, in which people keep describing a Hadley they cannot see.
A CLOSER LOOK: the chapter as a whole.
Contradictions. (1) Fergesson's First World War service in the Marines is impossible at his stated age of forty-two, and contradicts his "National Guard" in Chapter 4. (2) Ellen "didn't want him to go" to the lecture, but told him on the phone "Go ahead, go to it" (Chapter 5). (3) Stuart "never went to church," against Part One's "some kind of Congregationalists." (4) Fergesson "didn't know he had a sister," though he has employed Hadley since college. (5) The section is headed "Afternoon" and set on a "July morning." (6) The car logistics at the end (Alice's keys, Jim's car) are unclear.
Edition quirks. "That religious sea" is almost certainly "sect." "He was so... awed.' she said" has a full stop for a comma.
Prejudice and gaze. The narration lingers on Ellen's body (her "bare arms... brown and fuzzy," the nursing scene) through Fergesson's eyes, and the chapter turns his voyeurism into pathos. Ellen's "more of a woman than I am" treats sensitivity as feminine, the period's common assumption. Her "I suppose they were all Communists" repeats a red-scare slur against progressive teachers. Alice's boiling-water joke is a period joke about domestic violence.
History. The H-bomb was not yet tested in July 1952 (Ivy Mike, November 1, 1952); the Korean War was a stalemate; the comet crackpots recall Halley's Comet in 1910. These are accurate to the date.
The principle is Ellen's, not Fergesson's: an event you cannot stop is still an event you can plan for. Ellen's opposite error is also instructive: the right answer to tail risk is not to let it take over your life, as Hadley's apocalypse has, but to size it, plan for it, and then go back to the shop.
What the chapter sets up. Part Two has begun with the baby born, the temper apparently "gone," and a husband who has found a meaning in the end of the world. Fergesson has been told he is the enemy and has fled to his cartons; Alice has taken Ellen's side; and the sister whose judgment Stuart is waiting for is on her way down the peninsula with her husband. Chapter 7, "Baby," follows Hadley himself on the same Sunday, coasting into San Francisco with the Golds to meet Sally and her husband, Bob Sorrell, at Fisherman's Wharf, where he will tell the sister he worships that the world is ending and test how calm the new Hadley really is.
Baby
When and where. The same Sunday in mid-July 1952 as Chapter 6 ("In summer, in the middle of July"), early to mid afternoon: Bob says "It's already two thirty!" while the party is still hunting for the restaurant. The route runs from Market and Third, where the Cadillac stalls, down Pine Street past the stock exchange to a parking lot on the Embarcadero, along the railroad tracks to Fisherman's Wharf, then in Bob's Nash up the hill, down Grant Avenue through Chinatown, onto Washington Street, round to Stockton to park, and back down to a cellar restaurant on Washington. Memory scenes take the reader to the ocean beach and Golden Gate Park in the 1940s and to the streetcars running "all the miles across San Francisco to the Third and Townsend station."
People in this chapter. Stuart Hadley, 25, in dark brown slacks, a T-shirt and crepe-soled shoes. Dave Gold, pipe in his teeth, coat flapping, "baggy tweed trousers." Laura Gold, at the wheel of the Cadillac, "in a sloppy wool skirt, wool jacket, and bobby socks." Sally Sorrell, Hadley's sister, 29 ("I was four when you were born"), in a light grey English suit with hooped copper earrings. Bob Sorrell, her husband: western hat, jeans, canvas shirt, riding boots, "hair shaved to a stain of coffee-black," driving "his vast shiny Nash." A Chinese waiter, unnamed, and the Chinese merchants and businessmen eating in the restaurant. Remembered: Hadley and Sally's father ("Daddy"), an usher who once helped find Hadley's lost shoe, "some of my girlfriends," the girl with the hoe from Chapter 5. Discussed: Pete, Ellen, Fergesson ("the old fart"), Theodore Beckheim.
The Cadillac gives out
The chapter opens in the middle of a breakdown. "When they got to San Francisco the ancient Cadillac showed signs of giving out. Steam poured from its radiator; the motor hesitated, roared, misfired, spilled torrents of foul black smoke from the exhaust pipe. At Market and Third it stalled." Horns honk and pedestrians surge "angrily on all sides of them: they were blocking the crosswalk."
Dave looks at the smoke and offers his verdict with a perfectly straight face: "She's burning a little oil."
Laura, "hands clenched helplessly around the steering wheel," says "Jesus... What'll I do? We can't leave it here." Dave and Hadley get out and push. A grocery delivery truck comes up behind, noses at them and honks, and "Dave and Hadley scrambled gratefully inside, and the truck bumped up against the Cadillac." The truck pushes the car the way the two men could not.
The Golds' car as the Golds. The Cadillac is a luxury car gone to ruin, the kind of thing two hard-up leftist intellectuals could afford only because nobody else wanted it. It stalls at the busiest crossing in the city and has to be shoved along by a commercial truck. Dave's dry joke is the Golds' whole style: they meet disaster with irony and keep going. Later Bob Sorrell will look at the same car and call it "that old tractor," and Dick lets the reader see both sides: the Golds are comic and shabby, and they are also the only people in the chapter who show Hadley any loyalty. They drove him across the Bay to meet his sister because he no longer has a car.
The city in July
Dick stops the plot for a long look at San Francisco, and it is one of the finest descriptive passages in his early work.
They get "stiffly out one by one." Gravel crunches; the nearby stores are "shut down, deserted flyspecked windows thick with dust." Behind them "the slope of the city rose, a solid cliff of white houses and buildings that kept going up. The city looked as if someday it might slide into the Bay and disappear. It looked as if it were already sliding."
Laura picks up the joke: "I'd worry if I lived up there. I'd want to go out every morning with a long pole and see how far the water level had risen during the night."
A sliding world. The image of the city "already sliding" into the water is the first thing Hadley's new faith would recognise. The previous chapter ended with Ellen telling Fergesson that her husband "sees all this gone"; here the narration itself, from Hadley's point of view, sees a whole city on the edge of the sea. Laura's pole for measuring the night's rise is a joke about the same fear that Beckheim preaches as doctrine. Dick gives the apocalyptic mood to the comic minor characters first, so that when Hadley states it plainly at lunch it comes as the end of a line of images rather than out of nowhere.
Fact check: the city in 1952. The San Francisco Stock Exchange stood at Pine and Sansome Streets, in a building opened in 1930, so a car going down Pine toward the waterfront would pass it, as Dick says. "Two bits" is American slang for a quarter dollar. The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, which the party sees arching to Yerba Buena Island, opened in November 1936. The waterfront was still a working port in 1952, which matches the steamers unloading bananas and hardwood, and the "deserted office buildings" of a Sunday afternoon in the financial district are accurate: the district emptied at weekends.
The waterfront walk
They walk toward "the wall of ponderous wooden piers. Ships were tied up here and there, Latin American steamers unloading bananas and hardwood." To the right the Bay Bridge arches off to Yerba Buena Island, "a thin wand of gray-blue metal that pierced the woolly-green wad of trees and earth." Across the water "Berkeley and Oakland lay like an uneven white paste, smeared on the long ridge of hills spread out as far as the eye could see."
Dave, "pipe between his teeth," asks: "You know exactly where she'll be?" Hadley answers "obliquely": "She'll be on the pier. I'll see her."
They walk a railroad track, "scuffing up dust with their shoes," among boxcars "parked in ragged clumps," "stepping from rail to rail like three children going for a hike." Dick dresses them precisely: "Dave in his impressed tweeds, Laura in a sloppy wool skirt, wool jacket, and bobby socks. Stuart Hadley wore dark brown slacks, a T-shirt, and crepe-soled shoes." Above them "tubby gray gulls screamed and wheeled."
To the left is "a wide flat plain, black with metallic dust and grit," and beyond it the hill of North Beach, "the perpendicular sprawl of the Italian stores and houses," with "flapping white laundry creeping up the side of the mountain" like "the washing of a Mediterranean city." Between the houses and the water "the ugly flat black strip of factories glowered like a legion of trolls: the tanks of oil refineries, the rusty steel scaffolds of soap and ink and dye plants."
"Presently the hot summer air reeked with the odor of dead fish."
Then the Wharf: "a row of gaudy neon signs mounted on square wooden buildings: restaurants and fish stalls," and below the railing "a fleet of inferior boats was pulled up helter-skelter, like driftwood washed onto a beach." "Couples in gay summer clothing strolled here and there," enjoying "the distant baked-brown hills of Marin, and the swath of ocean itself, beyond."
A walk with three registers. The walk moves through three kinds of city in a few hundred yards: the beautiful (the Bay, the bridge, the white paste of the East Bay towns), the industrial and grim (the black plain, the refinery tanks and dye plants as "trolls," the smell of dead fish), and the commercial and gaudy (neon over fish stalls). It is a small model of how Hadley sees the world in this book. He loves the city, as he will tell Marsha later, but he sees it as both splendid and threatening, and the threat lies close to the ground. The phrase "like three children going for a hike" also fixes the emotional age of the trip. Hadley is going to meet the sister who raised him, and he is already shrinking back into a boy.
Edition quirk: "impressed tweeds." "Dave in his impressed tweeds" is almost certainly a slip for "unpressed" tweeds. Everything else about Dave's dress in the novel is shabby (his coat flaps, his trousers are "baggy"), and later in the chapter Hadley sees the Golds in "dirty, food-stained garments." The printed word reverses the sense, so this guide reads it as "unpressed."
Sally on the pier
"'There she is,' Hadley said. Under his T-shirt his heart thudded heavily, painfully. It had been two years since he had seen Sally."
She stands with her husband at the railing, "not looking out across the water, but simply standing." He knows her at once and starts toward her; "Dave and Laura trailed warily after him; he got there well ahead of them."
Dick's description of her is long and close, and it is written from inside Hadley's longing. She wears "an expensively tailored suit, an imported light gray English weave, with plain, severe lines, cut in sharply at the waist. High heels, long expensive legs," a small fancy hat in "her swept-back blond hair, gloves, a square leather purse strapped over her arm... and from her ears, hooped copper earrings." "Perhaps she wore a little too much makeup for a languid July day; even on the sagging pier she was dressed for an exclusive nightclub." Her perfume brings back "all the tastes and textures that made up her world, her body and possessions, all the fabrics and powders and garments and colors of her room."
"Hello," Sally says, "in her throaty, husky whisper." She hugs him and kisses him "brushingly on the cheek," and "her lips left a trace of redness and moisture; he could feel it lingering there, slowly dwindling, evaporating in the hot summer air." The lace of her hat dances "between him and the familiar features that had lured, awed, hypnotized him all his life."
"Again, he saw his own self in her pale blue eyes. Her sweep of heavy hair, yellow and thick as corn syrup, was an ultimate extension, a breathless realization, of his own botched mop."
"It was all there: her mouth and chin, her cheekbones, her rising neck with its taut cords, her flaring nostrils that had thickened only a trifle since he had last seen her. She was mature now. Fully ripe. Twenty-nine, firm and at the peak of her physical powers... He tore himself away and shook hands with her husband."
The sister as the finished version of himself. Everything Hadley sees in Sally is a comparison with himself, and every comparison goes against him. Her hair is the "realization" of his "botched mop"; her teeth (later) are the "hard white teeth he had envied all his life"; her face is "the beautiful reflection of his own." She is the original and he is the draft. This explains much of what we have seen of him so far: the man who checks himself in the store glass, who dreams of being someone, and who cannot accept being an ordinary salesman, has carried this measuring stick since childhood. The description is also openly physical ("long expensive legs," "fully ripe," the lingering kiss). Dick is writing a brother's infatuation that edges toward the erotic, and the novel returns to it in the bracelet on her ankle, the angora sweater, the singsong "Baby," and the Wagner material about Siegmund and Sieglinde in Chapter 10.
Bob Sorrell
"'Hi,' Bob said briefly, crushing Hadley's hand in a vicious man-grip. 'How've you been, Stu?'"
Hadley introduces everyone. "Dave and Sally distantly remembered each other from high school. They greeted each other formally, dispassionately." Then Dick gives Bob in one sentence: "dour and menacing in his western-style hat, jeans, canvas shirt, riding boots, hair shaved to a stain of coffee-black over the hard convex slope of his skull, mean little eyes flitting from one to the next of his herd as he moved them toward his vast shiny Nash parked at the edge of the sidewalk."
"Where to?" he demands, climbing in. He eyes the Golds "coldly, cynically." "Let's shoot over to the highway and down the peninsula; we have to get back early."
Sally, sliding in beside him: "I'm hungry... Before we go down the coast let's grab something to eat." Bob scowls. "When we get down there Ellen'll throw something together for you. Can't you last that long, or is that asking too much?"
Bob Sorrell in brief. Tall, "fully developed," with a "harsh, bony face" and a "bullet-shaped head" (Sally's phrase). Dresses as a cowboy though he is a businessman. Developer of the Woodhaven tract; since May the owner of the rural holdings of Napa County Land and Investments, including "farms, little stores, and a country newspaper" in St. Helena. In Chapter 8 he turns out to be a deputy sheriff of Napa County too, with a red light and a siren in his car. He has "that damn workshop in the back, all those power grinders and tools." Does not want children "until we're settled." Calls Hadley "Stu" and "buddy," and later "buster."
"His herd." Dick's word for the people Bob moves toward his car is "herd," and it matches the costume: Bob dresses as a rancher and treats the others as cattle. The image runs through the chapter. He "dismissed" the Golds with one look, goes "through the routine of the brush-off" "like a cosmic engine," and "snatched the check" from Hadley's "lifeless hands." The novel has no doubt that this is a frightening man, and Hadley, who is "impressed, respectful, properly frightened," does not like him.
"Baby"
Sally begs for Chinatown: "Please, I want a Chinese meal. After all, we don't get over here every day in the week." She turns and waves her brother into the front seat beside her. "Baby, do you know a good Chinese restaurant? Bob's never had a Chinese dinner."
"Hadley trembled at the old name; it had been years, but the magic word leaped back full and alive. Again he became Baby, his sister's younger brother, gazing up at her, awed and idolizing."
"Yeah," he murmurs, getting in clumsily. "I know a place on Washington we can try."
The title word. The chapter is called "Baby," and the word works three ways. It is Sally's pet name for her brother, and when she uses it he becomes, by his own account, a child again. It is what Hadley now has, a baby son, whom Sally will call "My Baby's baby." And it is what Sally finally accuses him of being: "You're just a little boy, a little blond-haired baby." The chapter asks whether a man who goes back to being Baby at one word can ever be a father. Bob, who refuses both Chinese food and children ("Bob won't have children yet"), stands outside this whole family language.
The Golds in the mirror
In the back seat "Dave and Laura sat huddled up and mute, intimidated by the hulking man behind the wheel. Both Bob and Sally were tall, fully developed people beside whom the Golds dwindled to the stature of dwarfs." In the rear-view mirror "their dark, lumpy, ill-formed faces hung slack and limp, hands in their laps, reduced to dumb obedience." "Hadley wondered at their transformation; in the presence of his sister and her husband, these two Jews had become bewitched, turned back into primordial clay."
Then the most disturbing sentence in the chapter: "For the first time in his life Hadley believed he was witness to different races." "Dave and Laura accepted without struggle their servant status; mute and stupid, they gazed dully ahead." Meanwhile Bob spins the car "expertly through narrow intersections," and "There was no sound, only the whirr of air and the oily purr of the motor."
A CLOSER LOOK: race theory from the front seat. This passage is told from inside Hadley, and it shows him at his worst: in the presence of the tall blond pair he feels himself part of a superior "stock," and sees his oldest friends, who drove him here, as subhuman "clay," "dwarfs" and servants. Dick is not endorsing this. The narration presents it as a "transformation" that Hadley "wondered at," and the scene that follows shows the real cause of the Golds' silence: Bob's bullying and his racist joke at the table. Their silence is fear and disgust, not a racial nature. The passage connects to Hadley's antisemitism in Chapter 3 and looks ahead to Marsha Frazier's racial mysticism in Chapters 9 and 10, which offers Hadley a doctrine for exactly this feeling. It is ugly reading, and it is meant to be. The phrase "primordial clay" also carries a Jewish image, the golem, the clay figure of legend brought to life to serve a master; Hadley's fantasy turns his Jewish friends into golems obeying Bob.
Bob's business
"How's the television business?" Bob asks "sourly." "Still raking it in?" "Sure," Hadley answers. "He tried to ask about the real estate business, but his vocal cords refused to form the social formality. What did he care about the real estate business? He didn't like Bob Sorrell; he was impressed, respectful, properly frightened, but he did not enjoy the man's presence."
Bob tells him anyway, "without having been asked." "I guess you know the Woodhaven tract is ours." "Oh, yeah... That new tract down the highway."
In the middle of the speech "He forced a delivery truck to the side of the street so he could pass." "Fascinated, Hadley listened to the words roll from the man's tongue. Easy, confident, relaxed, utterly without emotion, Bob Sorrell showed neither shame nor pride. He was merely stating facts."
Sally adds, flushed with enthusiasm, "Bob's taken over a whole lot of rural real estate. Farms, little stores, and a country newspaper. Up in St. Helena; we're going up there next month for a week or so; we're going to stay and get to know the town. Our vacation!" Bob corrects the record: "most of that stuff was held by Napa County Land and Investments. We took them over last May." Then: "Where the hell is this joint? I see plenty of chop-houses; or you got a particular one in mind?"
A business model said out loud. Bob's speech is a complete account of how a tract developer made money in the early postwar boom, given by a man who sees nothing to hide. The buyers are veterans ("GI's") who put down "five bills" ($500). The down payment covers only the seller's commission, so the real return comes from the long loan. Many buyers will "default and lose their equities," which means losing whatever they have paid in, and the developer gets the house back to rebuild and sell again. The repossession is not a risk in this plan; it is part of the plan. Dick's line "neither shame nor pride... merely stating facts" is the moral centre of the passage. Bob is not a villain who gloats. He is a man for whom other people's ruin is an entry in a ledger, and the ease of his manner is what Hadley finds "fascinating."
Fact check: the forty-year loan. Bob's "forty-year loans" are longer than anything the federal veterans' programme of the day allowed. The Servicemen's Readjustment Act (the GI Bill) of 1944 guaranteed veterans' home loans with a maximum term of 20 years; the 1945 amendments raised it to 25 years, and the Housing Act of 1950 raised it to 30 years. So either Bob is exaggerating, or he means loans outside the VA programme, or Dick misremembered. The rest of the picture is accurate: low or no down payments for veterans, huge new tracts on the edge of every California city, and builders who sold houses that needed heavy repair within a decade. "Five bills" is slang for five hundred-dollar bills.
Through Chinatown
The Nash "was flowing rapidly down Grant Avenue; there was clearance for parked cars on one side, nothing more." Dick lists the shop windows at length, and the list is the point: "ivory chess sets, silk scrolls, mandarin pajamas, incense burners, letter openers, bamboo stamp trays, artificial birds, jade and silver jewelry, jars of dried herbs, twisted roots, sea kelp, almond cookies, preserved ginger, cages of ducks and rabbits, bins of yams and knobby potatoes," all of which "were of no interest to Bob Sorrell." At intersections the hills drop away so steeply "that if a pedestrian slipped and fell he could easily roll all the way to the Bay."
"Oh, lookie!" Sally cries. "There goes a cable car!" "Up the steep slope the tiny archaic box of passengers scuttled, tightly gripping its strand of wire," "a wood and iron package bouncing at the end of an underground string."
"Which way?" Bob demands, "angry at the time wasters on all sides of them." "Another couple of blocks. To the left."
On Washington Street "Vendors hawked Chinese-language newspapers. Wizened old men with long beards sold melon cakes: wads of sugar and fat with a core of dripping wet fruit." The balconies above "almost touched"; children "raced and scampered, screaming shrilly"; "Cellar entrances, sudden black squares in the sidewalk, opened onto dark flights of steps leading down." Music, "wails and sudden crashes," filters up; the alleys are "filthy paths of garbage cans, dried feathers in pools of blood."
"There it is." A small neon sign juts out over a cellar entrance; steps lead down past "a below-surface glass window behind which dead, stripped birds hung, feet tied together with cord," and beyond are "black tables, a glimpse of curtained booths, stubby white-coated waiters, an archaic cash register, Chinese merchants reading newspapers while they ate."
Bob will not park in an alley. "Let's shove it and head down the coast. It's already two thirty!" Hadley sends him to Stockton, "There're always places up there," and Sally spots a woman pulling out in front of a drugstore. Bob parks by tapping the car behind and the car ahead with his bumpers. "Come on. Let's get moving; we don't have all day."
Two ways of seeing a street. The long list of Chinatown goods is what Hadley sees, and its very length is a sign of his delight; the narrator's flat summary that all of it "was of no interest to Bob Sorrell" is the joke. Hadley is a salesman who notices merchandise and an artist who notices colour and texture; Bob notices only parking and the clock. Sally, between them, notices a cable car like a child ("Oh, lookie!"). Bob, who calls the place "this joint" and the restaurants "chop-houses," is the man of the highway, ham and eggs and getting back early. The city that Hadley loves is, for Bob, an obstacle between two points on a map.
A CLOSER LOOK: Chinatown as spectacle. Dick's Chinatown is seen as exotic and slightly sinister: "wizened" old men, a "doll-faced" waiter, "wails and sudden crashes," "dried feathers in pools of blood." These were the stock images of the period's tourist and pulp writing about San Francisco's Chinese quarter. The narration is curious and admiring where Bob is contemptuous, but it still treats Chinese people as scenery. The cable car detail is accurate: Grant Avenue lies between the Powell Street and California Street cable lines, both running in 1952, and the city had voted down a plan to scrap the cable cars in 1947. Grant Avenue was the main tourist street of Chinatown, and Washington Street had the older cellar restaurants Dick describes.
The ankle bracelet and the beer can
On the sidewalk Bob and Sally stride ahead. "Sally's high heels clicked sharply just ahead of him and involuntarily he found himself watching their thin points strike the cement. Around her trim, nylon-smooth ankle looped a tiny gold identification bracelet. In the sunlight it sparkled and danced as her legs moved." Hadley keeps "behind his sister, following her smart, expensive figure at a respectful distance, with a veneration that permeated him, that was automatic and total, that represented every part of him. It had never been otherwise."
Behind him "straggled Dave and Laura Gold, even more dwarflike than in the car. Two squat dark puddings of quasi-human flesh, in dirty, food-stained garments, shapeless and unwholesome, faces dour, bodies slumped." "A certain pride touched Hadley. He was a cut above them; he lagged behind his sister, but he was one of her kind." "The physical heritage was there; they were of the same race, the same blood and stock. Somehow, circumstances had kept him from measuring up to the standards of this stock, but the capability was there. Someday, when he was older..."
Then the regression completes itself. "Strange, that in the presence of his sister he should shrink back into his old pattern, think of himself as too young." Walking behind "the high-stepping woman with her chin up and out-jutting," "he was a stripling, a colt, a boy. Hands in his pockets, he kicked at a tin beer can, ran a few paces, leaped, became a towheaded boy in looks and actions."
He catches up, pointing down Washington. "That way!" he shouts, "and suddenly fell back in confusion. With a brief glance at him the two of them turned silently at the corner and plunged down the steep hill. Abashed, Hadley raced after them, and behind him the two Golds plodded gloomily along, taking up the rear."
The procession. The walk to the restaurant is a little parade of rank as Hadley feels it: the tall blond couple in front, Hadley "at a respectful distance" behind, and the Golds "taking up the rear." The "identification bracelet" on Sally's ankle is a neat touch. It is jewellery, and it is also a tag, the sort of thing that tells you who someone is; Hadley's eyes fix on it as he follows. The sentence "Someday, when he was older..." is the clearest statement in the book of Hadley's life plan: he will become Sally someday, later, when circumstances allow. He is twenty-five, married, and a father, and he still talks to himself like a boy. When he shouts "That way!" and they turn without a word, the boy is put in his place.
The order
In "the dim, boxlike booth, they sat around a stone-topped table, examining soup-stained menus." Beyond the curtain "Chinese businessmen hunched over bowls of boiled rice and steamed guppies."
"You order," Sally tells her brother. "You know more about Chinese food. Remember when we used to come over here?" "Hadley nodded. He scanned the menu excitedly; a rush of childish expansiveness overcame him, and in a flurry of wild recklessness he ordered everything in sight."
One by one the waiter sets the bowls down: "Egg flower soup. Sticky-hot fried wonton. Chicken with almonds. Beef cooked with asparagus. Chow yoke, slimy green vegetables served in thick sweet syrup. The fat, soft cakes, yellow and stuffed with meat and vegetables, that were egg foo yong." Hadley pours tea "from an old-fashioned baked-enamel teapot" into "white round handleless" cups.
Bob ignores the food. "You have any Seven-Up? Bring me a bottle of Seven-Up." "No Seven-Up," the waiter mutters. Bob's face darkens and he speaks in mock pidgin, "Enunciating each word elaborately": "You savvy Coca-Cola? You bling Coca-Cola chop-chop?" The waiter comes back with a Coke and a straw, "clinked it down on the table and was gone without a word."
"Don't give me any of that Chink food," Bob tells Sally. "I'll grab a sandwich on the highway. I can hold out; it won't be long."
"Dave and Laura gulped their food anxiously, afraid of not being allowed to finish." Hadley and Sally eat eagerly, "as always before, when they were teenagers and had come up to the City to visit the beach, the amusement park, the miles of green grass and flowers that were Golden Gate Park..."
Six dishes Hadley orders "everything in sight": egg flower soup, fried wonton, chicken with almonds, beef with asparagus, chow yoke, egg foo yong, for five people of whom one will not eat.
2:30 Bob's complaint about the time while still hunting the restaurant; that night the Sorrells must be "out of here by ten" (Chapter 8).
Two years since Hadley last saw Sally.
29 and 25 Sally's age and Hadley's: "I was four when you were born."
"Eight, nine, ten years" since Sally's girlfriends admired her brother: "You were fifteen years old." He says sixteen.
$250 against $350 Hadley's real monthly pay against Bob's guess.
The order as character. Hadley's "wild recklessness" at the menu is the same impulse that made him stand drinks and overspend in Part One: a sudden "childish expansiveness" when he feels loved. The waiter arrives with six dishes, and the only person at the table with real money refuses to touch any of them. Bob's refusal of "Chink food" and his mock pidgin are bigotry, and they are also a kind of control: he will not share a pleasure someone else chose. Note too who pays. Dave guessed in the parking lot that "Stuart'll pay"; at the end Bob "snatched the check" with a show of generosity, and then announces that Ellen "can blow us to a real meal." Even his gifts come with a bill.
The beach and the streetcar
The meal sends Hadley into memory, and Dick writes it as a long, lyrical flashback.
"The sight of Sally, the slender figure against the long miles of ocean and sand, buttocks pumping under her washed-pale jeans, body tanned and healthy, blond hair streaming out after her, face laughing soundlessly as she turned to wait for him, gasping for breath... that was one picture he kept of her, among the many others."
The second picture is the ride home: "the endless rides on the grinding, tortuous old streetcars, all the miles across San Francisco to the Third and Townsend station. Facing each other, exhausted, crowded in with the shoppers and commuters, the old women with their lumpy shopping bags, the tired-faced businessmen." "Hour after hour they rode, both of them sagging and expressionless." "And then suddenly he would find her smiling at him, a personal, covert quiver of her lips, a flicker of an eyelid. Across the aisle choked with people gripping straps, a brief glimpse of her unique, intimate face, the beautiful reflection of his own. A quick, meaningful twitch of her features intended for him only, and then the overcoated body of a middle-aged workman cut them off, and the passive exhaustion resumed."
The secret signal. The streetcar memory is the emotional heart of the chapter. In a crowd of tired strangers the sister sends the brother a signal meant "for him only," and the crowd closes over it again. That is the shape of everything Hadley wants: a private bond with someone who shares his face and his secret, set against a world of commuters and shopping bags. It is what he will seek in Beckheim's Society (a secret truth about where all the hurrying people are going) and in Marsha (who tells him he belongs to a chosen few). The image is a mirror again: her face is "the beautiful reflection of his own." What Hadley loves in his sister is partly himself made beautiful.
Fact check and a geography question. The Third and Townsend depot was the Southern Pacific's San Francisco terminal for the commuter trains down the peninsula; it opened in 1914 and was demolished in 1977. A ride there from the ocean beach, across the whole city by streetcar, would indeed take a long time. "The amusement park" beside the beach would be Playland at the Beach, which ran until 1972. The memory implies that the teenage Hadleys lived down the peninsula and came "up to the City" by train, and Dave and Sally remember each other "from high school." That sits awkwardly with the background given elsewhere in the novel, in which Hadley was born in New York and grew up in Washington, D.C. The two accounts can be reconciled if the family moved west during his teens, but the novel never says so.
"Tell the Army to go kiss its ass"
Bob breaks the spell. "Well," he says, "facing Hadley coldly, you can tell the Army to go kiss its ass." Hadley lowers his cup. "What?" "You've got a kid, a dependent! They're not drafting you, are they?" "I don't know... I don't think so... I have a liver condition; I've already been classified 4-F." "No," Bob says, "closing the subject." "They won't take you with a kid."
Then the questions about money. "You still working for that same shop?" "Yes." "What are you, floor manager now?" "No. Commission and draw." "Five percent?" Hadley nods. Bob makes computations. "What's that bring you, about three fifty a month net?" "More like two fifty."
"The two mean, narrow eyes half closed. Tiny eyes, as cold and wet as rocks." "Why, for that I'd tell the old fart to go jump in the creek. You can get that anywhere. You can get that breaking rocks with a coon railroad gang!"
"Dave Gold's dark face turned a sickly gray and he abruptly stopped eating." He and Laura "seemed suddenly like two cross, tired children kept up too late at night." "Bob glanced briefly at them and appraised them in one short instant. His eyes summed them up. The rigid square of his shoulders weighed them and rejected them. He dismissed them and turned back to Hadley."
Fact check: the draft in 1952. Bob is right about the law of the moment. During the Korean War, Selective Service generally deferred men with dependent children (Class III-A), and that deferment for new fathers was not ended until August 1953. Hadley's 4-F classification (unfit for service) would in any case exempt him; in Chapter 13 Ellen adds that he has "a certificate that says he's permanently ineligible." Bob's question shows that he has not been paying attention to his brother-in-law's life, and his guess at Hadley's pay ($350) is $100 too high, a measure of how small Hadley's income looks to him.
A CLOSER LOOK: why Dave stops eating. Bob's racist joke about a "coon railroad gang" is aimed at Black workers, but its effect lands on the Golds, leftists and Jews in a car with a man who talks this way. Dave's face going "a sickly gray" is the first plain sign that the Golds' silence is not stupidity, as Hadley imagined in the car, but horror held in check. The narration corrects Hadley's racial fantasy without comment: the "dwarfs" are two decent people being bullied, and Hadley does nothing.
"A swell joe, huh?"
"How long is this going to continue? Wake up, man; you can't support a wife and child on that kind of money. With the way this country is bursting wide open, how the hell long are you going to sit around on your can?"
Hadley paws at his fork. "I have a chance of taking over the store. If Fergesson buys this other place he's talking about... Maybe he'll turn Modern over to me. He said he would, once."
"He did? A swell joe, huh? Dangling the old bait in front of your eyes?" "I think he will," Hadley says "stubbornly, not able to meet the stone-hard face of his brother-in-law. I think he's really going to buy into O'Neill's place."
"And how much'll you be making?" Hadley studies his fingers. "One night after hours Fergesson and I sat around talking about it. He said he'd give me three fifty salary plus my five percent on what I sold. And an additional one-half percent on the gross take. That's pretty good."
Sally: "Say, that sounds like something! Doesn't that sound good?" Bob: "Is this a promise? You got it in writing?" "Of course not. The deal with O'Neill hasn't gone through."
Bob "made a disgusted noise, waved his big hand," checks his watch, and gets up. "Time to get going. Let's take off, folks." He eyes the Golds: "What's with you two? Coming along or what?" "We have our own car," Dave answers hoarsely. "In a parking lot," Laura adds. "Down on the Embarcadero."
| What Hadley earns now | Fergesson's after-hours promise | What Bob assumes | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base | "Commission and draw": a draw against commission | $350 salary | "Floor manager now?" |
| Commission | 5% of his own sales | 5% of his own sales kept | 5% |
| Store share | None | 0.5% of the gross take | None |
| Monthly total | "More like two fifty" | Not stated; well above $350 | "About three fifty a month net" |
| Status | Current | Not in writing; depends on the O'Neill purchase | "Dangling the old bait" |
Bob is right, and it does not matter. Bob's two questions ("Is this a promise? You got it in writing?") are exactly what a sensible person would ask, and the rest of the novel proves him right. When Fergesson does buy O'Neill's and makes Hadley manager in Chapter 13, the actual offer is $300 plus 1% of the gross on commissionable lines, with Hadley's 5% on his own sales dropped: less salary, no personal commission, a bigger share of a narrower base. The promise is the bait Bob says it is. But because Bob says it with contempt, Hadley cannot hear it. Good advice from a person we despise is easy to reject, and Hadley rejects it to protect his loyalty to Fergesson, the other father figure in his life.
Alone with Sally
"For a time neither of them said anything. Hadley picked listlessly at his cold, soggy food." Sally lights a cigarette from a silver case, slips off her coat and hangs it on Bob's chair. Underneath is "a pale blue angora sweater, long-sleeved, high-necked, stretched tight against her sharply outlined bra, her rigid, white, terribly expensive bra."
"It's been a long time," she says, and smiles, "blue-eyed, mouth rich and red, proud face tilted high. The old flicker of warm amusement had again touched her lips." "So now you have a son. My Baby has a little new baby boy..."
The waiter brings fresh tea, "grinning his pardon." "How's it feel?" "Fine." "You know, Bob won't have children yet. He wants to wait until we're settled. Whatever that might be." "Bob is a big man," Stuart says. "He's a hard worker. There's always something going on in that bullet-shaped head of his."
She teases him. "Why don't you get a butch? But you always liked your hair long." Her perfume and "the warm smell of her body underneath her sweater" drift round him. "I remember, you were always fussing in front of the mirror, combing it and rubbing Wildroot Cream Oil into it. You still use that stuff?" "Yes. I still do." "My kid brother. What a dandy you always were! Worse than a girl. What does Ellen say to all your primping and... and your clothes! I guess you got it from me."
Period detail: the butch and the Wildroot. A "butch" was the very short crew cut fashionable among American men and boys in the early 1950s, the opposite of Hadley's combed, oiled hair. Wildroot Cream-Oil was a popular non-alcoholic hair tonic of the 1940s and 1950s, sold with the jingle "Get Wildroot Cream-Oil, Charlie" and advertised for years through Al Capp's comic-strip detective Fearless Fosdick. Both details fit 1952 exactly, and the boy who "fussed in front of the mirror" is the man who admired himself in the store's glass in Chapter 1.
"Nothing of importance." The sentence about the "barren interlude of separation" is devastating once you notice what it covers. The two years since he last saw Sally include his marriage, his work at Modern, Ellen's pregnancy and the birth of his son. In Hadley's mind all of that was "a marking time." The only real life is with Sally. This is why he trembles when she reaches for his hand, and it explains Ellen's bitterness in Chapter 8, when she says she has heard about Sally for years.
"You seem so beaten"
"What's wrong, Baby?" she asks softly, "aware that something painful was happening to him." "Nothing." She takes his hand; "Her red shiny nails were like polished glass against his skin as she pressed harshly, convulsively." "I wish you'd tell me what it is. Has everything been going all right? Are you happy?" "Yes," he pretends.
"You know, Baby, I can read you like a book. Tell me the truth." "I'm fine." "Baby, I wish to Christ I could help you. Is it you and Ellen?" "No... we're getting along fine." He corrects himself: "The same as always. Quarrels now and then. Nothing new."
She sings: "My Baby's baby. My Baaaaby's baby." She ruffles his combed hair. "My little Peter's little Peter." "They both giggled, rocked close together, bumped heads and drew back, laughing aloud."
Then she hears something "far down, deep inside where it didn't show." "You seem so... oh, my God, Baby. You seem so beaten."
"I'm okay. What are you worried about?" "You're not okay, Baby. You're in bad shape... You make me want to cry. Damn you," she snarls, eyes swimming. "I wanted you to be something!" "Like Bob?" Hadley asks bitterly. "No. I don't know; anything. You used to have such a temper... You weren't always soft this way. Milky."
Edition note: the punctuation of Sally's speech. In the book, Sally's long speeches are broken by dashes wherever she stops and restarts. The words are the book's; only the break marks differ.
The smashed toys
"What sort of temper?" Hadley asks, "genuinely surprised."
"I still get mad." "Do you? Is it still there? Then why don't you stand up? Where's your backbone?" "It's there."
"Like it used to be? You used to smash your toys: you remember how you lined them up all of a sudden, and you just smashed them, one after another?" "He remembered it, now that she said it. But only now; a moment ago, he would have denied it."
"Yeah," Hadley admits. "It was something that even now, years later, he only vaguely understood." "I wonder why I did that. All of a sudden I just did it. I wanted to bust whatever meant the most to me."
"I think you broke just about everything you had, sooner or later. But that finally went away... Then you got into fights. Then you beat up kids. Remember that girl you hit with the hoe?" "Sure."
"You were a bastard. And I set out to change that. Now I wish it were back."
"It's back," Hadley says. "It's there somewhere. It's not gone. I can feel it still there." He grins at her. "A thing like that can be driven underground, but not away."
"Sally turned away, lips tight. For a time she sat, rigid and silent, not looking at her brother." Outside the booth voices shout in Cantonese; "Chairs scraped, the cash register clanged. Somewhere a man coughed, hawked, and spat loudly."
Model: the smashing cycle. Sally's memory describes a pattern with five stages, and the rest of the novel follows it on a larger scale. (1) Build: he works on something for hours or days. (2) Fall short: it does not "turn out the way you wanted." (3) Go limp and silent: he sits with it on his lap, face reddening, saying nothing. (4) Smash: he leaps up and destroys "whatever meant the most to me." (5) Punishment: Sally or Daddy spanks him. In childhood the objects were toys; later they were other children (the fights, the hoe). In the novel the things he builds are a marriage, a job, a place in Fergesson's store and a new self in Beckheim's Society. Each falls short of the dream; each time he goes quiet; and in Part Three he wrecks them all in a few days, ending with his own body thrown through the store's glass door. Sally's "Now I wish it were back" is the most dangerous wish in the book, and Hadley's reply ("driven underground, but not away") is its plain warning.
Who made Hadley weak. Sally's confession is a theory of her brother. She and their father "teased" his temper out of him and wanted "obedience," and now that she has it she despises it ("Milky"). In other words, she shaped him to be manageable and then blamed him for being managed. Hadley has never heard this account before and accepts it at once, which is typical of him: an explanation offered by someone he worships becomes true on the spot ("only now; a moment ago, he would have denied it"). The scene gives the novel's violence a source in the family, and it shows Sally doing to Hadley what Bob does to everyone: deciding who he is.
Pete, and "You can't turn it over to your child"
Sally recovers. "I'm sorry about your friends. I forgot to tell Bob they were coming. He hates people to turn up when he doesn't know them." She wishes he would "get a car again" so that he and Ellen could drive up. "And Pete. Golly... I'm so excited about him! Does he look like you?" "A little. It's too early to tell." "Like Daddy?" "Sure." "She was delighted. 'I'm so glad.'"
She looks at "the framed picture of a sleeping dog hung above the row of coat hooks." "What's he going to be? When he grows up. Have you thought about it?" "Yes... I've thought a lot about it. He's going to be something... He's going to get somewhere."
"Sure," Hadley says, "without emotion." "You don't want to be," she shudders. "You used to be so active, even when you were a kid. Remember the little electric motor you built? And all your mats and baskets, all the things you made. Your Erector set... You were always building something. And you loved to fix clocks!"
The father who stops. Sally sees what Fergesson and Ellen saw in Chapter 6 from other angles: Hadley has given up on himself and is moving his dreams onto his son. Her phrase "You can't turn it over to your child" names the pattern exactly. The list of what he used to build (a motor, mats and baskets, an Erector set, clocks) is a list of the skills Fergesson says Hadley wastes. And Sally's wish that the boy should look "like Daddy" shows that the family line she cares about runs through her father, not through Hadley. The baby is being claimed before he can sit up: by his father's dreams, by his aunt's family pride, and in Part Three by Hadley's plan to hand him to Beckheim.
Period detail: the Erector set. The Erector set, a construction toy of metal girders, nuts and bolts, often sold with a small electric motor, was made by the A. C. Gilbert Company from 1913 and was the classic American boy's engineering toy of the 1930s. It fits Hadley's boyhood in the mid-1930s and the electric motor Sally mentions in the same breath.
"I met somebody"
"After a moment Hadley said: 'Sally, something's happened to me.'" She clenches her fists. "Do you know what it is?" He laughs. "Of course! I don't mean it the way it sounds... like an evil spell or some kind of bone disease."
"I met somebody." "Don't tell me in bits; who did you meet? Are you and Ellen splitting up? Did you meet another girl?" "She looked delighted."
He tears a napkin to pieces and rolls the bits into a ball. "No, nothing like that. You and Ellen; that's the first thing you think of. You think maybe I'm playing around with some waitress over at the dime store."
"I never kidded you," Hadley says. "I mean, I never got away with it." "So don't ever accuse me of trying to make you toe the straight and narrow. You know how I feel about that."
A CLOSER LOOK: "an easy lay" begins here. Sally's dismissal of Ellen ("you can get that stuff anywhere... You don't have to get married just for that") is the source of the worst thing Hadley says in the novel so far. In Chapter 8, in the bedroom quarrel, he shouts that Ellen is "an easy lay," and he credits the judgment to his sister. The chain is plain: Sally plants the contempt, Hadley carries it home, and Ellen pays for it. The passage is also another of Dick's charged moments between brother and sister, with Sally's eyes clouding with "sex" as she recalls her girlfriends' interest in her fifteen-year-old brother. Her sexual liberalism ("I don't care if you're shacking up with the Virgin Mary") sits beside an equally firm snobbery about class and looks.
"What can she do for you?"
"I don't mean just that. But that's part of it. I mean, you're a unique person, Baby. There're depths to you. Layers. You go down a long way... You're complicated. Does Ellen really understand you? She wants to; I believe that." She laughs. "You're a damn fool, Baby; you shouldn't let me say that about your wife."
"Staring down at the table, Hadley said in a low voice: 'You can say anything you want. Or do anything you want. You never did anything wrong in your life.'"
"According to you." She sighs. "I wish Bob thought that way. According to him everything I do is wrong. He enjoys it; he gets sardonic humor out of mistakes I make. When I break a dish or drop a bottle in the bathroom, anything where I'm at fault. He's got that damn workshop in the back, all those power grinders and tools..." She breaks off.
Sally's marriage, in two sentences. For one moment the confident woman on the pier shows the other side. Bob finds "sardonic humor" in her mistakes and thinks "everything I do is wrong." The workshop "in the back," full of "power grinders and tools," is the unfinished sentence: a man's private kingdom, and perhaps a quiet threat. Ellen's later line, "She thinks he's wonderful," is only half true. Sally has married a man who treats her the way she treats her brother, as someone to be corrected. Hadley's "You never did anything wrong in your life" is the voice of a worshipper, and it is also an answer to Bob: here is one man who will never find fault with her.
"There're depths to you." Sally's praise of her brother is the praise Marsha Frazier will give him in Chapters 9 to 12: he is unique, complicated, too good for his life, held back by a dull wife. Both women flatter the part of Hadley that thinks he is meant for something greater, and both care more about what he could be than about what he is. Sally wants him to be a successful, aggressive man of the world; Marsha will want him as a member of a racial and spiritual elite. In both cases Ellen is the obstacle.
"That gang," and "Nature Boy"
"Who is it, then? Not a girl? That narrows it down." She eyes him "doubtfully, apprehensively." "Baby, in college you fooled around with that gang awhile, when you were painting. It was all right, then; I understood that. But if you're mixed up with them now..."
"No, this is something else. I... heard a man speak."
"You sound like that popular song, that 'Nature Boy.' God, that dreadful thing."
"Gazing intently at his sister, Hadley said: 'It's something I still don't completely understand. I don't know how it's going to affect me... it hasn't gone through me all the way. I feel there's more; it's still working on me.'"
"The amusement left his sister's face. 'What kind of a man?'" She sits back, "convinced by the tension of his voice. 'You really mean it.'"
Fact check: "Nature Boy." "Nature Boy," written by eden ahbez (who wrote his name in lower case and lived as a vegetarian wanderer in Los Angeles), was a number-one hit for Nat King Cole in 1948. Its singer meets "a very strange enchanted boy" who teaches him that "the greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return." Sally hears in "I heard a man speak" the same mystic-encounter story and finds it "dreadful," which tells us how far her taste is from Hadley's. The detail is apt in another way: ahbez was a health-food enthusiast of exactly the kind Hadley met at the Health Food Store.
"That gang." Sally does not say who "that gang" was, and the novel never says outright. Earlier chapters record Hadley's college past among radicals and socialists, the world Dave Gold still lives in, and Sally ties it to his painting years. The likeliest reading is the campus left and bohemian set; some readers also hear a hint of a homosexual circle in her guarded "It was all right, then; I understood that." This guide notes both readings and does not choose. Either way, her fear is that he has rejoined some fringe group, and in one sense she is right.
"Swarming like ants"
"I sure do. You know how so many things never made any sense to me. Things people were doing, all this activity... like your husband." Sally colours. "Baby... Well, what's sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose."
"I'm not going to knock him. I have a lot of respect for him. But I don't understand him; I don't understand what it's all for, all the running around. All the struggling. Sometimes I sit there in the Health Food Store, watching people going by on the sidewalk. They're nuts! Where the hell are they rushing to? Swarming like ants... It's senseless."
"You always did like lying around dreaming," Sally says softly. "You were always the big dreamer. Spinning big deals in your head, all the things you were going to do. Schemes... You're a natural-born salesman. I'll bet you really charm the old women."
"And now I understand it," Hadley goes on. "Now, when I see them, I'm not puzzled." "What do you understand, Baby?" "What they're doing. Where they're going. Why they're out there scrambling around." "Why are they out there?"
"There isn't any way I can tell you that you won't laugh. It sounds so damn silly when I say it." "Say it."
"The end of the world's coming."
A meaning for the crowd. This is the clearest statement anywhere in the novel of what Beckheim's message did for Hadley. The busy crowds outside the Health Food Store, which used to puzzle and irritate him, now make sense: they are rushing because the end is near, whether they know it or not. Hadley does not say it as a threat; he says it as relief from confusion. It is the same relief Ellen described to Fergesson in Chapter 6 ("He sees all this gone"). The faith gives Hadley a vantage point above the "ants," which Sally and Bob never give him, and it excuses him from the scramble: if the world is ending, there is no point in success. Sally's reply, "You always did like lying around dreaming," sees this exactly.
Her quip about charming "the old women" also recalls the old woman customer of Chapter 2, whose fussiness Hadley could not stand.
"A little timid old woman"
"There was silence. Sally's hands were shaking as she tapped her cigarette against the ashtray. 'What do you mean? You mean the war?'" He nods. "Yes, in a way. But beyond that. The war is only a part of it."
"But you do mean the war. You're worried about the war." She curses. "Goddamn them; are they still after you, trying to induct you? You with your kid..." "It's not that."
"There's no place that's safe."
"Sally's blue eyes blazed. 'And this is what you've figured out? That everybody's going to get killed, so all you have to do is just sit and wait for it? Is that what you're doing, just waiting for the A-bombs to start dropping? Who the hell is this man?'"
Two answers to the bomb. Sally's response is the practical one of her class and time: if you fear the bomb, move to the country, buy a farm, go to Mexico. Hadley's "There's no place that's safe" rejects escape altogether. For him the end is not a danger to dodge by moving house but a fact about the world. Sally hears cowardice ("a little timid old woman") because she cannot imagine fear that is not personal. The insult puts him in the same category as the fussy old customers he despises, and the Mexico suggestion echoes the escape daydreams of Part One.
Fact check: the A-bomb in mid-1952. By July 1952 the United States had used atomic bombs (1945) and tested more (Bikini, 1946), and the Soviet Union had tested its first in August 1949, so "waiting for the A-bombs to start dropping" was an ordinary fear of the day. Civil-defence drills were part of daily life, and the schools film Duck and Cover came out in 1952. The first hydrogen bomb was not tested until November 1952.
"Holy Rollers!"
"Hadley, staring hard at the table, said: 'Theodore Beckheim. You probably never heard of him.'" "No, I haven't." "He heads a religious group. The Society of the Watchmen of Jesus. They have a movement all over the world. A big following in Africa."
"Religious fanatics! Holy Rollers!"
"I guess so. Only, it doesn't seem fanatic. It just makes sense. As if I'd always believed it, but I hadn't quite got all the pieces together. When I heard him it just sort of locked into place."
"What are you going to do?" She gathers her coat and purse and "stuffed her lighter into a pocket." "Here's Bob; I can hear him yelling around." "Over here; this booth!"
"It just sort of locked into place." Hadley's description of conversion is precise and recognisable: not a new belief but the sense that scattered things he already felt have been assembled. William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), described conversion in much these terms, as ideas that were already present but scattered suddenly regrouping around a new centre. For Hadley the pieces were his resentment of the scramble, his feeling of being meant for more, the war, and a world that makes no sense. Beckheim's sermon gave them a frame. Sally's "Holy Rollers!" is a dismissal of class as much as religion: the phrase was a sneer at Pentecostal and revivalist worship, which respectable families associated with poor congregations, white and Black.
"A big following in Africa." Beckheim's Society is fictional, and Dick makes its leader Black (Chapter 5). The claim of a large African following matches the real spread, in the 1930s to 1950s, of American-founded movements with millennial teachings in Africa; the Watch Tower movement in central and southern Africa, for instance, was large enough to be banned by several colonial governments. The name "Watchmen" also echoes the watchman image of the prophets that Beckheim preaches from. These are resonances, not a claim that Dick modelled the Society on any one group.
Bob pays
"The curtains burst apart and Bob Sorrell stood there, feet planted apart, face dark and scowling. 'Why didn't you leave the damn curtains apart so I could see you?'" "We're all ready to go," Sally says "in a thin, clipped voice. Unless you want something." "Me? Come on; let's hit the highway."
He claps Hadley on the shoulder. "Those are sure some screwball friends of yours. Where'd you pick them up? Christ, when I got a load of that old tractor they call a car... They won't get two miles with that thing." He bellows as they leave the booth: "The loose screws aren't all down in the motor, either." "He snatched the check from Hadley's lifeless hands and started off with it. 'I'll pay for it, buddy.'"
"He strode on toward the cash register, digging silver change from his pocket. He grinned starkly back at Sally and Stuart, and gave them a broad wink."
"'This one's on me,' he shouted across the restaurant, past the silently eating Chinese. 'When we get down in Cedar Groves, Ellen can blow us to a real meal.'"
The last word. The chapter ends on Bob's generosity, which is really a claim. He pays loudly, in front of the whole restaurant, for a meal he refused to eat, and in the same breath books the next one at his brother-in-law's expense. "Blow us to a real meal" means "treat us," and the meal Ellen must cook on a hot July evening is the dinner whose wreckage opens Chapter 8. Hadley's "lifeless hands" give up the check as they gave up the Golds. Bob's wink at "Sally and Stuart" includes Hadley in a joke against his own friends, and he says nothing.
| Sally | Bob | Hadley | |
|---|---|---|---|
| On the city | "Oh, lookie! There goes a cable car!" | "I don't know this town; never come over here if I can help it" | Loves it; knows the restaurant on Washington |
| On food | Begs for Chinatown; eats eagerly | "No Chink dinners for me"; Coke and a highway sandwich | Orders "everything in sight" |
| On the Golds | "I forgot to tell Bob they were coming" | "Screwball friends"; drives them away | Sees them as "dwarfs," then lets them go |
| On money | "Say, that sounds like something!" | "You got it in writing?" | Trusts Fergesson's after-hours promise |
| On Hadley | "So beaten"; "I made you weak"; "a little timid old woman" | "Wake up, man" | "It's there"; "driven underground, but not away" |
| On the end of the world | The war; "go to Mexico"; "Holy Rollers!" | Not told | "There's no place that's safe"; "it just sort of locked into place" |
A CLOSER LOOK: the chapter as a whole.
Contradictions and gaps. (1) The teenage memories place the Hadley children near the peninsula train line, and Dave and Sally knew each other "from high school," against the novel's other statement that Hadley grew up in Washington, D.C. (2) "It had been two years since he had seen Sally," but in Chapter 8 Bob talks of "the blue Dodge we had last Christmas," while Sally dates the last visit to "That Christmas... two years, I guess." (3) Hadley tells Ellen in Chapter 8 that Sally just laughed at the Society; in this chapter she was frightened, angry and scornful, but she did not laugh. (4) Bob's forty-year loans exceed the federal veterans' maximum of the time.
Edition quirks. "Impressed tweeds" for "unpressed." The book's dashes in dialogue are rendered here with ellipses or commas.
Prejudice. Bob's slurs ("Chink," "coon," mock pidgin) are his and are meant to damn him. Hadley's racial fantasy about the Golds as "dwarfs," "clay" and a servant "race" is presented from inside his mind; the narration corrects it by showing the real cause of their silence. The Chinatown description uses the exotic stock images of period writing.
Gaze. The narration stays very close to Hadley's physical fascination with his sister (her legs, her bra, her ankle bracelet, the "cloudiness of sex" in her eyes). The novel plainly wants the reader to feel the unhealthy edge of this bond, and it comes back in Chapter 10's Wagner material.
IN PRACTICE: originate to repossess. Bob's Woodhaven tract is a lending model built to profit from failure: thin down payments, long terms, defaults expected, collateral taken back and resold. The 2000s subprime boom rebuilt the same machine on a larger scale, with brokers paid at origination and losses passed down the chain. Post-2008 rules were written to stop it. In the United States the ability-to-repay requirement (from the Dodd-Frank Act, put into force by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's rule of January 2014) obliges lenders to make a reasonable, good-faith judgment that a borrower can repay; the UK's Mortgage Market Review brought in affordability tests the same year. The test for a credit team is simple: if repossessions appear in the business plan as a source of profit rather than in the loss forecast as a cost, the team is looking at Bob Sorrell. The same reasoning applies to machine-learning credit models. A model can learn that some borrowers are profitable precisely because they pay fees and interest before they default, and nothing in a raw profit objective will stop it. That is why model-risk and fair-lending reviews ask what a model is optimising for, not only how accurate it is. Bob's other line ("You got it in writing?") is the chapter's second lesson: a promised pay deal that depends on an acquisition that has not closed is not a deal, and in Chapter 13 Hadley learns how far the final terms can drift from an after-hours conversation.
What the chapter sets up. Hadley has told the one person whose judgment he waited for, and she has rejected his new faith as cowardice and his wife as one of "a thousand" brown-haired girls. Bob has humiliated the Golds and invited himself to dinner at Ellen's expense. The temper that Sally wishes back has been named, and Hadley has promised it is still there, "driven underground." Chapter 8, "The Waring Blender," moves to the Hadleys' hot apartment that night, where Bob lectures on rents and condemned war housing, a deputy sheriff's red light and siren come up, and the buried temper surfaces in the worst quarrel of the marriage.
The Waring Blender
When and where. The same Sunday in mid-July 1952 as Chapters 6 and 7, from 8:30 p.m. ("It was eight thirty") until a little before ten, when the Sorrells "have to be out of here by ten." The setting is the Hadleys' rented apartment in Cedar Groves, the novel's fictional Bay Area town near the water: the living room, the kitchen, and the dark bedroom where Pete sleeps in his bassinet. Places talked about: the Sorrells' own house across the Bay; a twelve-story apartment block Bob built in East Oakland; condemned war-worker housing in San Jose; a small house in Mount Eden reached by the San Mateo toll bridge; weekend drives to Sonoma County; a movie theatre in Napa. The chapter ends on the front steps, in "fresh, clear" night air, with Hadley setting off on foot for the Golds'.
People in this chapter. Stuart Hadley, slumped in the big easy chair, "eyes shut, mouth open." Ellen Hadley, 22, still in what she wore in the afternoon, a "starched white shirt," with a gin sling. Sally Sorrell, now barefoot in Ellen's yellow drawstring blouse and a short summer skirt, hair "down and tossed back," makeup scrubbed off. Bob Sorrell, holding a ginger ale: "unless things were precisely to his liking he didn't drink." Pete, about three weeks old, asleep and sweating in his bassinet. Talked about: the tenants of the San Jose war housing, called by Bob "Okies and coons from the South"; the inspectors in East Oakland; the defaulting owners of the Mount Eden house; a group of pachucos outside a Napa movie theatre and the boy Bob hit; Dave and Laura Gold.
Eight thirty
The chapter opens on heat and mess. "The warm dense wind of night swirled peevishly into the apartment through the open windows. Flies, moths, beetles, buzzed and tapped against light-bulbs, fried themselves and dropped in tiny sizzling bits to the carpet. Around the living room everybody lounged inertly, facing one another with involuntary relentlessness. It was eight thirty."
In the kitchen "the dinner dishes were piled and heaped on the sink, stove, table, drainboard. A place had been cleared large enough to open gin and tonic bottles, and to assemble drinks. A tray of melting ice cubes lay oozing sluggishly, surrounded by corkscrews, bits of metal foil, puddles of Gilby's Deluxe, lemon rind."
"It's hot," Sally murmurs. "I think it's hotter now than it was this afternoon. It's so... sticky." Ellen, after a time: "I think there's more humidity here than on your side of the Bay." Bob: "You're pretty damn close to the water. Every once in a while you catch a whiff of the mudflats."
Sally: "Cedar Groves has certainly grown since I was down here last. When was that, at least a year ago, wasn't it? That Christmas we all got together... that was two years, I guess. Anyhow, the town was smaller then."
"Involuntary relentlessness." Dick's phrase for the way the four sit facing one another is exact. Nobody wants to be in this room, and nobody can leave it. The insects frying on the bulbs are a small picture of the evening: creatures drawn to a light that burns them. The dishes everywhere are Ellen's afternoon. At lunch Bob announced that "Ellen can blow us to a real meal," and here is the wreckage of that meal, with nobody offering to wash up. Bob's remark about "the mudflats" is a landlord's sniff at the Hadleys' address before he has even started on the rent.
Fact check: Gilby's and the gin sling. Gilbey's (spelled "Gilby's" in the text) was a leading London dry gin, made under licence in the United States after Prohibition and sold cheaply; "Deluxe" may be Dick's or the bottle's flourish. A gin sling, Ellen's drink, is gin with sugar, lemon and water or soda, an old American mixed drink. Sally's drink is gin and tonic with lemon, which she complains is "as weak as water."
Continuity: one year or two? Sally herself cannot settle when she last visited ("at least a year ago... two years, I guess"). Chapter 7 said firmly that "It had been two years since he had seen Sally," which fits her second guess. But a few minutes later Bob says "remember the blue Dodge we had last Christmas?" as if the Hadleys had seen it, which would make the visit about seven months ago. Either the Sorrells' memory is careless, which suits Sally's gin and Bob's indifference, or Dick's draft dates drifted. The novel has several such drifts.
The blender
Sally gazes into her glass, "at the bits of lemon floating in the gin." Then, eagerly, to Ellen: "Wait until you've used it a couple of times. It makes all the difference in the world. We'll get it into the mail tomorrow morning."
"What are you talking about?" Bob asks. "The Waring blender. When we were in the kitchen I told Ellen we'd give her the two-pint one; it's really too small for us. Then when we come down next time she can whip up a daiquiri for us... and you won't have to sit around moping over that?" She points at the glass her husband grips "between his two hands."
"Bob Sorrell sat moodily holding his glass of ginger ale; unless things were precisely to his liking he didn't drink."
Dick then sets the room like a stage. Sally "had slipped off her high-heeled shoes and nylons. The sweater, hat, and suit she had worn now hung in the closet in the bedroom; she had put on a yellow drawstring blouse of Ellen's and one of her short, light summer skirts. Her honey-colored hair was down and tossed back, and she had scrubbed off most of her makeup. Thoughtful, subdued, she sat curled up on the couch, her bare legs tucked under her," yawning, sipping, and listening "distantly to the low murmur of the TV set."
The title object. The blender is a gift, and every part of the gift carries a message. It is used ("the old one, the little one," as Ellen will say). It is too small for the Sorrells, which is why the Hadleys may have it. It is to arrive by post, at the Sorrells' convenience. And its purpose is to serve the Sorrells: "when we come down next time she can whip up a daiquiri for us." Sally means it kindly, and the kindness is the trouble. Ellen, who stands at the kitchen door in the clothes she cooked in, while Sally lounges in Ellen's own blouse, reads the gift exactly, and her reading becomes the speech that breaks the evening open. Note the costume detail: Sally has literally put on Ellen's clothes. The older woman has moved into the younger woman's house and wardrobe for the night.
Fact check: the Waring blender. The Waring Blendor (the company's own spelling) was launched in 1937 and promoted by the bandleader Fred Waring, who financed its development; it was sold to bars for mixing frozen drinks such as the daiquiri before it became a household appliance. By the early 1950s it was a fashionable, fairly expensive kitchen gadget, so a household owning two sizes was a household with money to spare. Hospitals also used it, and Jonas Salk's polio vaccine work in the 1950s relied on Waring blenders in the laboratory, which shows how standard the machine had become.
The rat-hole
Bob takes the cue. "The way I figure, in ten years of rent a person has paid the original gross cost of income property back to the owner. After that, the owner is getting sheer gravy. If you're going to rent, squawk like hell about everything: the paint, the plumbing, the thickness of the walls, the number of electrical input wires..."
"What's that?" Sally asks.
"Well, you should have three-wire input. Two isn't enough. Two means overload, danger of fire. A tenant should bellow like hell about that. Stick up for your rights or you won't get anywhere. In this world you gotta toot your own horn, buster; ain't nobody else going to toot it for you."
"Sally nodded obediently."
The landlord advises the tenant. Bob's lecture has a peculiar shape. He tells the Hadleys how landlords profit from them ("sheer gravy") and then urges them to fight landlords ("squawk like hell"), while he is himself a landlord who furnishes his units with other people's condemned furniture. He is not being hypocritical so much as showing that, to him, life is a contest in which everyone should push as hard as they can, and the weak deserve what they get. "Toot your own horn, buster" is his whole creed. "Sally nodded obediently" is Dick's quiet note on how that creed works inside the marriage. And Bob's complaint about the inspectors is telling: he resents the rules that forced him to rewire a twelve-story building, yet uses the same rules to sneer at the Hadleys' walls. Regulation is a nuisance when it applies to him and a weapon when it applies to others.
Fact check: Bob's building science. (1) Three-wire service. A three-wire supply (two hot conductors and a neutral) gives a home 120/240-volt service, enough for electric ranges, dryers and air conditioners; older two-wire 120-volt service was easily overloaded by postwar appliances, and overloaded circuits were a known fire risk. Bob is right on this. (2) "Sulfur gas." Many prewar refrigerators and some central systems used sulfur dioxide as a refrigerant, which is toxic and corrosive; it was being replaced by the Freon refrigerants from the 1930s on. A central piped system in an apartment house would indeed carry a leak risk through the walls, though a sulfur dioxide leak is a poisoning hazard more than a flood. (3) Fiberboard wall panels were cheap wartime and postwar building material, poor at stopping both sound and fire, which the bedroom scene will prove: Bob's voice comes straight through "cheap walls."
Fifty-two fifty
"How much rent do you pay?" Sally asks Ellen. Ellen stirs. "Fifty-two fifty."
$52.50 a month the Hadleys' rent; against Hadley's $250 a month it is about 21% of his pay.
18 to 20 units Bob's guess at the building; at $52.50 that is $945 to $1,050 a month, so "at least nine hundred" is a fair floor.
Ten years of rent to repay the owner's "original gross cost": a gross rental yield of about 10% a year, before vacancies, repairs, taxes or interest.
Five idle units Bob's point of ruin: on 18 units that is a vacancy rate of about 28%.
Five years since the Sorrells bought their own house.
The one sound idea Bob has. Under the bluster, Bob's second point is good property economics: an owner who raises rents too far loses tenants, and empty units cost more than the extra rent gains. Occupancy matters more than the headline rent. His first point (ten years of rent repays the building) is rougher: it ignores the costs he himself lists a moment later. Dick lets Bob be competent. The novel's case against him is not that he is a fool but that he understands money perfectly and people not at all.
San Jose
"Tell them about that place down in San Jose," Sally says. "That government housing business we got into."
"Bob's face responded with bleak intensity." "Well, the government leased that land from private investors. For a ten-year period, to build low-cost housing for war workers. Now the leases are dead; and the investors want the property back, to build something solid on. They've been squawking like hell."
"Those wartime units are just cardboard," Sally confides. "We went around, and the walls are cracking... You can push them over with your foot."
Bob goes on "inflexibly, his voice harsh and loud in the small living room." "I put a bid in for the furniture. All that stuff was government owned; the tenants, mostly Okies and coons from the South, brought nothing but their shoes, if they had shoes. Christ, every one of those buildings is six units: that means six reefers, six stoves, six couches, six double beds, six dressers, so on down the line. Six complete three-room apartments of furniture. The buildings had been condemned, of course. They gave everybody sixty days to get out; then they roped the works off and started ripping. There was one week to get out the furnishings. We put in a what-the-hell bid of seventy-five dollars."
"For how many buildings?" Sally murmurs. "Wasn't it something like fifty or sixty?"
57 buildings × 6 units = 342 flats. Bob's arithmetic is correct.
$75 for 342 flats about 22 cents a flat, for a refrigerator, stove, couch, double bed and dresser each.
"$20,000 worth" about $58 of furniture per flat by Bob's valuation, so he bought at roughly 0.4% of what he says it was worth; a return of over 26,000% on paper.
10-year leases on the land; 60 days for tenants to leave; one week to clear the furniture; one bidder.
How the sweet deal worked. Bob's profit did not come from skill at valuing furniture. It came from three conditions that he did not create and did not question. (1) A forced sale: the buildings were condemned and the furnishings had to be out in a week, so the seller (the government) had to take what it was offered. (2) No competition: "Nobody else bid," perhaps because few people could clear 342 flats in seven days, or perhaps because few knew of the sale. (3) A buyer with somewhere to put it: Bob owned rental units to furnish and a route into the used-furniture trade. The people with the least power in the story, the war workers who lived in these flats and had sixty days to leave, appear only in a slur. Bob's line that they "brought nothing but their shoes" is meant as contempt, and it is also an accidental admission: the furniture was what made those cardboard flats livable, and he now sells it back to people like them.
Fact check: war housing in San Jose. Bob's account matches real history. Under the Lanham Act of October 1940 the federal government built temporary housing for defence workers across the country, often on land leased from private owners for a fixed term, with the understanding that the "temporary" buildings would be removed after the emergency. California's shipyards, canneries and aircraft plants drew huge numbers of migrants from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas and the Deep South, white and Black, and the slur "Okies" for the Dust Bowl migrants of the 1930s was still common. By the early 1950s much of this housing was being condemned and demolished, and its furnishings sold off as federal surplus. The specific San Jose project and its numbers are Dick's invention; the pattern is not.
A CLOSER LOOK: the slur. Bob's "Okies and coons from the South" is the second time today he has used that racist word for Black people (at lunch it was a "coon railroad gang"). Nobody in the room objects. Dick puts it in Bob's mouth to damn him, and the silence of the others is part of the portrait: Sally prompts the story, Ellen is vacant, Hadley is slumped. The guide quotes it because the scene's meaning (contempt for the poor as a business method) depends on it.
Mount Eden
"No," Bob contradicts, "with finality. It wouldn't go. Sure, it looks okay, but when you get down into the foundations and see what's holding it up..." He makes "a disgusted writing-off squirting noise." "No, that's okay for a short-term investment, but what they want is something permanent."
Bob raises his voice. "I told you it isn't any good. It needs a whole new foundation. Shoot, the damn thing's just sitting there on concrete blocks!" "Well," Sally shouts back, "they could fix it up! Jack it off the blocks and lay a solid frame!"
The house nobody asked for. Nobody asks the Hadleys whether they want to move. Sally plans their commute, their bedrooms, their car and her own visits; Bob vetoes it; and then Bob tells Hadley to calm down, "as if Hadley had said anything." Hadley has not spoken a word since the chapter began. The scene shows exactly what Ellen will say a few minutes later: the Sorrells "run our lives, tell us what to do." The Mount Eden house is also the Woodhaven model from Chapter 7 in miniature: a family defaulted, the lender's company took the house, and now it can be passed to relatives "through the books" for "almost nothing." Bob's objection is not that this is improper but that the house is "a dog," a poor asset. The family whose home it was does not come up.
Fact check: Mount Eden and the bridge. Mount Eden was a small unincorporated farming community on the east side of the Bay, near Hayward, later absorbed into Hayward. The San Mateo-Hayward Bridge, opened in 1929 as a privately built toll bridge (the state bought it in 1951), ran from San Mateo on the peninsula to a landing just west of Mount Eden, so Sally's "shoot across the San Mateo toll bridge" is accurate geography for people living on the peninsula side. The Southern Pacific line through Hayward also fits her "isn't there a train that runs right through there?" A "first deed" is the first deed of trust, California's usual form of first mortgage; the holder can foreclose on default.
Fact check: the Nash. Bob's "vast shiny Nash," described in this chapter as "their huge green Nash," fits the big Nash Ambassador or Statesman of 1952, the year Nash restyled its line as the "Golden Airflyte" with help from the Italian design house Pinin Farina. A top speed in the mid-80s mph was about right for the Ambassador's six-cylinder engine, so "an easy eighty-five" is a boast at the edge of the car's ability. In 1952 most California highway speed limits were 55 mph, which makes the boast from a deputy sheriff a small joke.
The deputy
"Sally ducked her head, blond curls swirling in a covert shiver of delicious amusement. 'Bob's a deputy sheriff of Napa County. You saw the red light in the back of the car, and he's got a siren.'"
"After a moment Ellen said tightly: 'What gives you the most trouble, Bob... cattle thieves?'"
"Bob eyed her humorlessly. 'Smart kids hijacking cars,' he answered." He settles back and tells the story. "I caught a couple of pachucs fooling around with my Dodge. Remember the blue Dodge we had last Christmas? Sally and I were in the movie theater, up in Napa. We came out, it was about one thirty; here were these pachucs standing around."
"You know the way they do," Sally breaks in, hunching over "imitating an adolescent slouch." "Hands in their pockets. Bob had the Dodge all shined up... Oh, it was really beautiful. White sidewalls, outside spots... everything."
"I could spot those pachucs a mile off," Bob goes on "relentlessly." "Well, I had a roll of dimes in my hand... just happened to be carrying them." He grins "sarcastically, crudely." "One of the pachucs walked up to me; he says, 'How about a ride back into town?' They were going along with us whether we liked it or not."
"Bob hit him right between the eyes," Sally bursts in. "That kid went down like a load of coal. The others just stood there staring at him. None of them moved, they just stood there. We got in the car and Bob backed her around, and off we went."
"Bob laughed, loud, short, like a bark. 'Shoot, when we turned the corner they were dragging the son of a bitch off; his heels was dragging in the gravel; they had him under the armpits. Man, he was out cold. For a week!'"
"The room was silent for a time, except for the whirr of insects and the murmur of the TV."
Reading Bob's story against itself. Bob's account does not hold together as self-defence. The boys were "standing around" near his car; one asked for a ride. Bob's claim that "They were going along with us whether we liked it or not" is his interpretation, not anything they did. The "roll of dimes" that he "just happened to be carrying," with a sarcastic grin, is the giveaway: a roll of coins in a fist is an old street trick for hitting harder without a weapon, and Bob had it ready. He hit a teenager "right between the eyes," left him unconscious in the gravel, and drove away without calling anyone, though he is a deputy sheriff. And "out cold. For a week!" cannot be something he knows, since he never saw the boy again; it is a boast. Sally tells the story with "delicious amusement" and acts out the boys' slouch. Ellen's dry "cattle thieves?" is the only resistance anyone offers, and the silence afterwards is the room's verdict.
Fact check: pachucos. "Pachucs" is Bob's clipped form of pachucos, the name for young Mexican Americans of 1940s California and the Southwest who wore zoot suits and spoke a slang called caló. They were the targets of the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial (1942, convictions later reversed on appeal in 1944) and the Zoot Suit Riots of June 1943 in Los Angeles, when servicemen and civilians beat Mexican American youths in the streets while police largely stood by. By 1952 "pachuco" was a common police and newspaper word for Mexican American youths in general, usually with a suggestion of delinquency. Bob seeing them "a mile off" by their posture is the profiling of his day. Deputy sheriffs in rural California counties were often part-time or reserve appointments given to local businessmen, which explains how a developer could carry a red light and a siren.
Two kinds of violence. Bob's boast is the first act of violence told in this chapter, and Hadley's quarrel with Ellen will bring the second. Hadley will tell Ellen that Bob is "an ape... not human" for "beating up that Mexican kid," and within minutes he will crack his wife's ribs in an embrace and raise his elbow to strike her. The chapter sets the public, admired violence of the respectable man beside the private, shameful violence of the failed one, and lets the reader see that Hadley's disgust at Bob does not protect Ellen from him.
"See how Pete is"
"Stuart Hadley got to his feet slowly, supporting himself against the chair. He looked tired, completely dragged out by the dry heat of the July evening. He moved unsteadily across the room, shuffling with short, uneven stops, his body stiff and unwieldy. Ellen watched him, perturbed."
"Stu, where are you going?" He halts at the bedroom door. "His face was pale and puffy, his eyes half closed." He blinks, coughs. "See how Pete is," he murmurs. "He's asleep," Ellen says. "I just looked." Hadley doesn't answer, goes in, and shuts the door quietly.
The body of a man in retreat. Hadley's walk across the room ("shuffling with short, uneven stops, his body stiff and unwieldy," his face "pale and puffy") is the walk of an old or sick man, not a man of about 24. Dick blames "the dry heat" (oddly, after everyone has complained of humidity), but the body is showing the strain of a day spent being measured by Bob. The excuse, "See how Pete is," is the same excuse he used in Chapter 7 to stand by the window: the baby is his licence to leave a room. Ellen has "just looked," so she knows it is an excuse. The healthy, sweating, sour-smelling baby, whom Hadley has found hard to feel close to, is what he looks at now as a refuge.
The voice through the wall
"It was necessary to account for himself and his actions; any moment Sorrell would rise to his feet and stride grimly into the bedroom."
The turn of the chapter. This paragraph is the hinge of the whole Sorrell section of the book. All day Hadley has blamed Bob for spoiling Sally. Now, alone in the dark, he admits that he wants his sister gone too, the woman in whose eyes he saw his own self that afternoon. The wording matters: the thought "had come from nowhere," yet "he was responsible for it." Hadley does not experience the change as a decision, but he will not disown it either. Note too the bitter wordplay on the cheap walls Bob mocked a few minutes earlier: Bob was right that they are cheap, and it is his own voice they fail to keep out. And the feeling that he must "account for himself" to Bob is a child's feeling about a stern father. The Sorrells treat Hadley as a boy, and in Bob's presence he becomes one.
"She's your sister, not mine"
The door opens. Ellen slides in, closes it softly, and hurries over. "For heaven's sake, what are you doing in here, just standing? Isn't Pete all right?" "Sure." "Then what is it?" Vexation and worry fill her face. "Darling, you have to come back; you can't hide in here."
"I'm not hiding! I have a right to come in here and see how my son is."
"You can't walk out and leave me alone with them." Ellen's face stiffens coldly. "I'm not going to take it; I'm not going to carry the burden alone. She's your sister, not mine. I'll do my share; I'll put up with them, but not alone. You understand?"
"Okay. All right, let's go back before he breaks the door down." In the living room Bob's voice booms. "How could she marry him? How could she get mixed up with a man like that?"
"She thinks he's wonderful," Ellen says gaily.
"It doesn't make sense." Hadley moves aimlessly toward the door. "Every time I see him, it's always the same. He's always been this way; even before they were married he was like this: loud and mean."
Ellen catches his arm. "Darling, you have to expect it. She has her own life; we have ours. My God, she's almost thirty. She's a different generation from us; what do we have in common with them? Look at them: they treat us like kids, patronize us, tell us what to do..."
Ellen's fair point. Ellen's first complaint is not jealousy but labour. She has cooked, served and sat through the evening with in-laws who are not hers, while her husband disappears. "She's your sister, not mine. I'll do my share... but not alone" is a just demand, plainly made. Her second point is generational: Sally is "almost thirty," the Hadleys are in their early twenties, and the Sorrells "treat us like kids." She is right about that too, as the Mount Eden scene has just shown. The reader should hold on to how reasonable Ellen is here, because Hadley will soon accuse her of being unworthy to say Sally's name.
Fact check: Sally's age. Ellen's "she's almost thirty" fits the novel's other hints. Sally was a high-school contemporary of Dave Gold, and Hadley is her younger brother by several years. "A different generation" exaggerates a gap of five or six years, but in 1952 it was a real divide: Sally came of age during the Depression and married before or during the war; Stuart and Ellen came of age after it.
"All she did was laugh"
"I told her," Hadley says. "Told her what?" "About the Society."
"For a moment Ellen was puzzled. 'You mean the Watchmen business? That Beckheim person?'"
"All she did was laugh."
"No," Ellen says emphatically, "Stuart, I don't believe it. You're all upset and mixed up in here, just like a spoiled sulking child. Come on back into the living room. Honestly, I don't know what I'm going to do with you." Lightly she hurries on: "You're making us all so unhappy... No wonder Sally wasn't sympathetic. You can't expect us to..."
"It's his fault," Hadley breaks in. "She wasn't that way before. He's an ape; he's not human. Did you hear him boasting about beating up that Mexican kid? Some teenager half his size. He's a monster, and she thinks he's wonderful. You should have seen the way he treated Dave and Laura; it was horrible. He threw them out, made them leave."
Ellen links her arm through his. "Well, she's not so dumb. She's got her wagon hitched to a rising star; I'll say that much for her. She's no fool, darling."
Hadley jerks away. "Did you hear what I said? I told her and she just shook her head. I thought she'd understand; I thought there was one person I could go to... and she was just like everybody else. A lot of stupid words, bright remarks."
A CLOSER LOOK: Hadley's report of the restaurant booth. In Chapter 7, when Hadley told Sally in the Chinatown restaurant that "The end of the world's coming," she did not laugh. Her hands shook; she "cursed harshly, furiously"; she called him "a little timid old woman" with no "backbone at all" and said "I'm so goddamn ashamed of you"; and when she heard of Beckheim she cried "Religious fanatics! Holy Rollers!" Now Hadley tells Ellen "All she did was laugh," and a moment later "she just shook her head." Neither is true. He shrinks a furious, shaming rejection into indifference, perhaps because indifference is easier to repeat than "ashamed of you," and it lets him blame Bob ("She wasn't that way before") rather than Sally. Ellen was not in the booth, so she cannot correct him. Hadley's account of events often differs from what the reader saw, and this is a clear case of it, which should make us careful with his version of everything.
Ellen's wrong guess. Ellen's "No wonder Sally wasn't sympathetic" assumes that Hadley brought the subject up in his sulking state and got the cool answer he deserved. She sides with Sally by reflex, then catches herself and adds, with a hard edge, "She's got her wagon hitched to a rising star." That phrase is the first sign of what is boiling under her bright manner: she sees Sally as a woman who married money, and she resents the way Hadley still looks up to her.
"You can't go lay your head in her lap anymore"
"Deep hurt blinding her eyes, Ellen said: 'So the one person let you down? I'm sorry. It's too bad, isn't it? Times have changed; you can't go lay your head in her lap anymore.'"
"What do you mean by that?" "Come on, they can hear us; let's get outside. We can talk about this later."
"I want to talk about it now!" He bars her way. "What do you mean?" "He grabbed her by the shoulders; the dim light of evening dully illuminated her small face, eyes large and dark, bright with tears, lips half parted, chin quivering." "Goddamn it..." His voice rises wildly. "You're glad!"
"The one person." Ellen has just heard her husband say, in front of her, that Sally was "one person I could go to," as if his wife were not such a person. Her sarcasm ("So the one person let you down?") is the sound of that hurt. And "lay your head in her lap" names the thing the whole book has hinted at: Sally was a substitute mother to Stuart, and the attachment has a childish, almost erotic intensity that a wife has to compete with. Hadley's grab at her shoulders is the first physical act of the quarrel.
The blender speech
"Of course I'm glad. Darling, I'm so glad I want to shout it out at the top of my lungs." Ellen makes "a hopeless effort to smile; tears slid down her cheeks and dripped onto her starched white shirt."
Then she throws her arms around him "and hugged him against her, burying her head desperately into his neck, soft brown hair choking him." "Why the hell can't you come running to me with your stories? I'll understand, even if I don't understand. If you want this, it's what I want. I'll go with you; I'll pray and roll around on the floor, whatever it is... It's you I care about."
"I'll understand, even if I don't understand. If you want this, it's what I want. I'll go with you; I'll pray and roll around on the floor, whatever it is..."
Two speeches in one breath. Ellen's outburst has two halves and they pull in opposite directions. The first half is revolt: the blender is a used, undersized castoff, the house is a leash ("our weekly instructions, our briefings"), and Sally has "told you what to do all your life." The second half is surrender: she will follow Stuart into Beckheim's Society, "pray and roll around on the floor," not because she believes but because "It's you I care about." She refuses to be governed by Sally and offers to be governed by her husband's faith instead. The offer is generous and also desperate, since it gives up her own judgement entirely ("even if I don't understand"). Ellen has shown no interest in religion before; here she would take on any religion to keep him. Hadley does not answer the offer at all. It is the most loving thing anyone says to him in the novel, and he turns it into a fight about his sister.
Fact check: "roll around on the floor." Ellen's picture of Beckheim's Society comes from the popular image of Pentecostal and Holiness worship, where believers might fall, shake or roll in the Spirit; that is why such congregations were mocked as "Holy Rollers," the exact phrase Sally used in the restaurant. The Society of the Watchmen of Jesus, as the novel presents it, is an apocalyptic sect built around Beckheim's preaching, closer to the street-corner prophets of the 1950s than to Pentecostal churches, so Ellen's image is a guess based on prejudice. It shows how little either woman knows about what Hadley actually found.
The baby wakes
"In his bassinet, Pete had wakened up, aroused by the loud voices in the room. He began to cry, shrilly, furiously; his wails rose to an earsplitting scream. In the living room, Sally and Bob got up and headed impatiently for the bedroom door; Bob banged on it noisily and bellowed: 'For cripe's sake, what's going on in there?'"
Hadley clutches his wife. "I can't stand you talking like that. Get out of here if you're going to talk about her."
"This is my house." Ellen's line answers both Hadley's "Get out" and Sally's plan to move them to Mount Eden. The apartment the Sorrells sneered at, the "rat-hole" with fiberboard walls and two-wire input, is the one place where Ellen has authority, and she claims it. "Don't you hurt me like that" and "don't grab me that way anymore" tell us that his grip is painful and that it has happened before ("anymore"). Pete's scream and Bob's banging make the private quarrel public: the walls that let Bob's voice in also let the Hadleys' voices out.
"An easy lay"
"Over the baby's screams Hadley shouted: 'I'm not going to take that from you or anybody. If you had half the class she has; if you were anywhere like her...' His voice choked with emotion. 'You're not fit to say her name. You're nothing but an easy lay! That's all you are; she's right; you're nothing but an easy piece of tail!'"
"Shocked, terrified, Ellen stood gazing mutely up into his face. 'Please don't say things like that to me.' She looked around pathetically for help: her voice trailed off to a whisper. 'Stuart, please don't do any more. Please!'"
"He grabbed her tight, pulled her against him until her ribs cracked. 'I can't stand it anymore,' he gasped. 'I'm finished. I'm leaving; I'm getting out.'"
"No," Ellen says, "weak with terror." "Forget what I said; let it go. Please let it go; I'm sorry."
A CLOSER LOOK: "she's right." Hadley's insult carries a claim the reader cannot check: "she's right," meaning that Sally has called Ellen an easy lay, or something like it. Nothing in the restaurant scene shows Sally saying this, although she did ask "Does Ellen really understand you?" Either Sally said it at some earlier time, perhaps when the couple married young, or Hadley is putting his sister's name to his own cruelty to give it authority. Both readings are damning. In the first, Sally's contempt for Ellen has always been there under the gifts; in the second, Hadley uses his sister as a weapon against his wife in the very breath in which he says his wife is not "fit to say her name." Either way, the insult is sexual and aimed at a woman who has just offered to give up her own beliefs for him. Dick writes it without softening.
"Once, only once"
"Hadley's face flushed a dark, ugly red. Apprehensively, Ellen shrank away as he released her. It was a look she had seen before; she dreaded it more than anything else in the world. He was going to do something; she knew it. The look always meant something; involuntarily, she put her arm up over her face."
"Once, only once, he had hit her. But she had hit him first; she had slapped him. Immediately, he had sat down on the couch and cried like a child; she had tried to comfort him. After that, he had got up and socked her in the eye."
"But he wasn't going to do that now; he was going to leave. She wished frantically that he would hit her; she wanted him to hit her. Anything was better than having him leave, having him walk out on her."
"Don't," she gasps, pushing between him and the door. "Now she prayed he would hit her. 'I'm not going to let you go; you can't go.'"
"Hadley's lips twisted. Convulsively, he raised his arm; she saw his elbow lift, sharp and hard, a triangle of bone inside the soft fabric of his sleeves. Then abruptly he grunted and jerked away, his hand fumbling for the doorknob. 'Take care of yourself,' he said obliquely. 'Have a good time. I'll write to you.'"
The pattern Ellen remembers.
- Provocation: she slaps him.
- Collapse: he sits on the couch and "cried like a child."
- Care: she comforts him.
- Violence: he gets up and "socked her in the eye."
- Tonight: the "dark, ugly red" look, her arm over her face, his raised elbow, and then flight instead of a blow.
The sequence of collapse, comfort and then violence is the same cycle as the smashed toys in Chapter 7: Hadley is broken, others tend him, and the anger comes out after the tending.
A CLOSER LOOK: violence in the home. Dick gives us Ellen's wish to be hit rather than left from inside her own mind, without comment. It is the logic of a dependent partner in an abusive marriage: fear of abandonment outweighs fear of injury, and the victim blames herself ("Forget what I said... I'm sorry"; "she had hit him first"). The novel does not endorse this. It shows how Ellen's love has been shaped by fear, and it does not excuse Hadley: the ribs crack, the blow in the past was real, and the raised elbow is a threat whether or not it falls. A modern reader will also notice that the man who called Bob "a monster" for hitting a teenager has hit his wife and nearly does so again. Readers affected by domestic abuse may find this section hard.
"I'll write to you." Hadley's parting words to his wife are absurdly formal, as if he were leaving on a long journey, and "Have a good time" is spiteful, since he is leaving her with the Sorrells he has just fled. Dick's word "obliquely" suggests Hadley himself does not quite know what he means: he is going out for the evening and also, in his own mind, leaving the marriage.
"Kiss and make friends"
"At that moment Sally pushed the door open and entered the gloomy bedroom. 'My golly, you two kids can be heard all over the place! Come on out of there...' She herded them briskly into the living room. 'Now kiss and make friends.' Curtly, she examined her wristwatch. 'We're going to have to fly; we've got to be out of here by ten.'"
"Bob had turned and was lumbering into the kitchen. 'Can we get some fresh coffee going?' He began rooting around in the cupboards over the sink. 'Ellen, where the hell's your Silex? I'm not tackling that freeway without some hot coffee to wake me up.'"
"For a brief instant Stuart Hadley and his wife held on to each other. Then Hadley broke away from her. 'I'll see you later,' he said."
The Sorrells' response. Sally treats a marriage in crisis as a squabble between children ("you two kids... kiss and make friends") and immediately checks her watch. Bob does not ask what happened at all; he roots through another woman's cupboards for her coffee maker so that he can drive home alert. Neither notices that Ellen is weeping or that her husband has just threatened to leave. This is exactly what Ellen predicted: the Sorrells "treat us like kids." Their indifference is so complete that it almost works as a defence of Hadley, until we remember what he did a minute earlier.
Fact check: the Silex and the freeway. The Silex was a glass vacuum coffee maker, a two-bowl siphon brewer, made by the Silex Company of Hartford, Connecticut from the 1910s; by the 1940s "Silex" was nearly a generic name for vacuum brewers in American kitchens. "That freeway" fits the Bayshore Highway (US 101 on the peninsula), which California was rebuilding as the Bayshore Freeway in sections from the late 1940s, so Bob's route home toward the Golden Gate would use the new road.
Out the door
"Where are you going?" Ellen demands fearfully, hurrying after him. "Please, take me along with you! I don't care where it is; can't I come along?"
"I'm going over to Dave's," Hadley says, at the front door. "Somebody ought to apologize to them."
"Please, Stuart, let me come along with you. I'm afraid you won't come back!" "You have to stay with Pete." "I'll bring him along!"
"Hadley laughed sharply. 'On foot? We don't have any car, remember.'"
"At the door of the kitchen, Bob Sorrell stood with the Silex in his hands, his heavy face wide with surprise. As Hadley tore open the front door he saw Sorrell's amazement darken to angry resentment. Then the door closed after him; he was out in the dim, stuffy hallway."
"He hurried to the stairs and descended two at a time, his hand on the banister. He rushed through the lobby, out past the open front door, onto the wide concrete steps. The night air was fresh, clear. He took a deep breath of it, hesitated momentarily, and then plunged off in the direction of the Golds'."
Why Hadley's exit is both decent and cruel. On one side, "Somebody ought to apologize to them" is the first generous impulse Hadley has acted on all day. Bob insulted the Golds and threw them out of the Hadleys' own house; Hadley said nothing then; now he goes to make amends. On the other side, he leaves a weeping wife who has just begged "take me along" and said "I'm afraid you won't come back," with a newborn and two guests who have made her evening a misery. "On foot? We don't have any car, remember" is a jab at her and at himself: Sally said he "ought to have a car," Bob boasted of the Nash, and the Hadleys have none. The last image is of fresh air after the stuffy rooms, which tells us what the leaving feels like to him, relief, but the reader has seen what it costs Ellen. Bob's face, turning from surprise to "angry resentment," shows that the one person Hadley has truly defied tonight is Bob. Nobody walks out on Bob Sorrell.
| What it offers | What it costs | Who decides | |
|---|---|---|---|
| The blender | A castoff gadget, two-pint, by post | Daiquiris for the Sorrells on every visit | Sally |
| The Mount Eden house | A defaulted house "for almost nothing," "through the books" | Weekly visits, "our briefings"; a home on concrete blocks | Sally proposes, Bob vetoes |
| A car | Freedom to "shoot around anywhere" | Money the Hadleys do not have | Bob advises |
| Ellen's offer | Her love and loyalty, whatever he believes | Her own judgement ("even if I don't understand") | Ellen; Hadley ignores it |
| The Golds | An apology, a friendly door | Leaving Ellen alone with Pete and the Sorrells | Hadley |
A CLOSER LOOK: the chapter as a whole. (1) Dick's sympathies shift. For seven chapters the reader has mostly seen through Hadley's eyes. In this chapter Dick moves into Ellen's mind for her memory of the blow and her wish to be hit, and from then on Hadley is seen partly from outside, which makes his cruelty harder to excuse. (2) The Sorrells are not only villains. Sally's offer of the house is generous in its way, and Bob's veto (the foundations are bad) may be honest advice; the trouble is the control that comes with the help, not malice. (3) Weak points. The quarrel escalates very fast, from "you can't hide in here" to cracked ribs in about two pages, and some of Ellen's lines are melodramatic ("Darling, I'm so glad I want to shout it out at the top of my lungs"). (4) Continuity slips: one year or two since the last visit; Bob's blue Dodge "last Christmas"; Hadley's claim that Sally "laughed." (5) The language of the chapter includes a racist slur, a slur on Mexican American youths, and a sexual insult aimed at Ellen; all three are given to characters the novel judges, and the guide quotes them where the meaning of the scene depends on them.
IN PRACTICE: the single-bidder sale and the deal "through the books." Bob's two property stories are textbook cases of what modern rules on asset disposal try to prevent. (1) The forced, single-bidder sale. The government sold the furniture of 342 flats in one week to the only bidder for $75, against Bob's own estimate of $20,000. Public bodies and banks today are generally required to market distressed assets widely, set a reserve or reasonable value, and document why a sale at a deep discount was the best available outcome; a one-bid sale at under half a percent of value is the kind of transaction auditors and inspectors general flag. (2) Related-party disposal of a foreclosed home. Sally's plan to pass the repossessed Mount Eden house to her brother "through the books... for almost nothing" is a related-party sale of foreclosed property. US bank rules on other real estate owned (OREO, the regulators' term for property a bank has taken back) expect arm's-length sales at fair value, and Regulation O and conflict-of-interest rules restrict favourable dealings with insiders and their relatives. In enterprise-architecture terms, this is why a bank's collateral and recoveries system should record the buyer's relationship to staff and directors, require independent valuation before a discounted sale, and route any insider-linked disposal for separate approval, rather than leaving it to a manager who can "put it through the books." (3) An AI angle, where it is real. Models now used to price and route repossessed assets for sale learn from past disposals; if the training history contains Bob-style deals, quick sales to favoured buyers at deep discounts, the model will learn those discounts as normal. The control is the same as in 1952: wide marketing, a valuation that does not depend on the buyer, and a record of who is related to whom.
What the chapter sets up. (1) Hadley's walk to the Golds' opens Chapter 9: what he finds there, and whether the apology is accepted, will show whether his one decent impulse leads anywhere. (2) Ellen's offer to follow him into the Society, made and ignored, hangs over the rest of the book; if he does turn to Beckheim, she has already said she will come. (3) The break with Sally is now complete in Hadley's mind ("both of them, his sister, too"), so he has lost the last person he looked to as a guide, leaving room for others (Beckheim, Marsha Frazier, Fergesson) to fill that place. (4) The violence in the marriage is now in the open, the cycle of collapse, care and anger that Chapter 7 drew with the toys and this chapter draws with the blow. (5) The money theme continues: the Sorrells' wealth comes from distress, the Hadleys have no car and a rented flat, and Fergesson's offer of a raise and a share of the gross (Chapter 7's "three fifty") is still the only way up that Hadley can see.
The Painter and the Magazine
When and where. The chapter runs from late on the same Sunday in mid-July 1952 as Chapters 6 to 8 to the evening of the Monday after it. The year is fixed inside this chapter: Hadley reckons that "the war had been over seven years," which gives 1952, and the next chapter opens on "The next day, Tuesday." The night scenes are in Cedar Groves, the novel's fictional peninsula town south of San Francisco: the "hot, dark streets" past pool halls and cheap hotels; the Golds' cluttered apartment, close enough to the water for "the dull odor of the Bay" to come in at the windows; the street outside Hadley's apartment building, where Marsha parks until "almost one o'clock." Places talked about: Mission Street in San Francisco, where the Golds' dead Cadillac is parked; Marsha's place "across town" in the city; and, in Beckheim's life story, Vinegar Bend, Alabama, New Orleans, Brazil, the Gold Coast, the South African mines, Virginia and the Black Belt of Chicago, then Sacramento, Oregon and Washington where he is to travel next. The Monday scenes are at Modern TV: the counter, the basement toilet, the bottom drawer of the tube cabinet where Hadley sits to read, the TV display room, and a back closet full of old display signs. The chapter ends that night in the Hadleys' apartment, with melting ice cream and a dictionary.
People in this chapter. Stuart Hadley, 25, salesman at Modern TV, who has just left his wife after a quarrel. Laura Gold, "chastened and quiet," her loud talk gone. Dave Gold, Hadley's oldest friend, a left-wing journalist, smoking at his desk in "baggy tweeds." Marsha Frazier, editor of Succubus, "tall, gaunt," grey-eyed, freckled, in "slacks and a checkered shirt," who says she is 26. Her children: Timmy, "perhaps nine," rusty-haired, with a deep voice; and Pat, "perhaps three," asleep in a playsuit. At Modern TV on Monday: Olsen, the repairman, crude and hurried; Jim Fergesson, the owner, selling a Westinghouse and then catching Hadley reading. At home: Ellen Hadley, with ice cream and a question. Asleep or offstage: the baby Pete, in his bassinet; Bob and Sally Sorrell, gone "back up the coast in their magnificent green Nash." Talked about: Theodore Beckheim, the Black preacher of the Watchmen Society, recovering from a heart attack in San Francisco; his three sons and his dead wife; John Middleton Frisbey, who ran the Society in Chicago; Alice Fergesson, who has told Ellen that her husband is buying the new store; and Horace Wakefield, the crank florist from Chapter 5, whom Hadley imagines passing Succubus round the Health Food Store.
The walk
The chapter opens where Chapter 8 left off, with Hadley out in the night after walking away from Ellen. "For an endless time he walked the hot, dark streets, hands thrust in his pockets, brooding and trying to collect his thoughts." The next line is a paragraph on its own: "Already, he regretted what he had said to Ellen."
It is the only moment in the chapter when Hadley looks back at the quarrel. The regret is real, and Dick gives it a line to itself so that it registers, but it is not acted on. Hadley does not turn round. He goes on to the Golds, and by the time he comes home, near one in the morning, Ellen is asleep and the subject is not raised again. The novel will return to what he said to her, but this chapter is about where he goes instead of going back.
The route is through the poor part of town: "He crossed the street, passed run-down pool halls, bars, shoeshine parlors, cheap cafés and hotels. He was getting near the Golds' place; he quickened his steps." The Golds live, in other words, among the cheap businesses that Chapter 5 placed behind the smart shops on El Camino Real, where "the poor lived" in "ramshackle old yellow-board tenements." The detail matters later. When Marsha drives Hadley home, the "brightly lit cluster of neon signs that was the downtown business section" lies ahead of them; the Golds are on the wrong side of it.
The errand. Hadley left the apartment in Chapter 8 with a decent intention: "Somebody ought to apologize to them." Bob Sorrell bullied the Golds at lunch and drove them off; Hadley watched and did nothing. Hold on to that purpose, because the chapter turns on its collapse. Within a few pages Hadley "had come over to apologize" and finds instead that he "had come to complete what Bob Sorrell had begun."
"How's the painter?"
Hadley "stood uncertainly by the door, adjusting himself." The room holds more people than he expected: "Dave Gold sitting at his desk, smoking morosely and watching him; two children; and a slim woman in slacks and a checkered shirt."
"'How's the painter?' the slim woman asked him."
Hadley does not at first realise she means him: "He started to look behind him, then realized she was speaking to him. He identified her: she was Marsha Frazier." The reader has met her once before, at the end of Chapter 3, in the Golds' flat after Beckheim's lecture, leaning against the wall "in the center of the group of heaven's children," talking about quietism. Laura called her "the old succubus herself"; Dave, driving Hadley home, called her people "Fascists... Friends of Ezra Pound... Anti-Semites." Now she is sitting in the Golds' own living room, drinking their wine, and they are in no state to object.
Dick sets out the table like a still life of a poor household's hospitality: "a half gallon of dark purple wine, glasses, a package of potato chips, a mass of blue cheese with a table knife sticking into it, a box of soda crackers, a jar of peanut butter." The soda crackers and the peanut butter were already in the room in Chapter 3, where Laura pushed them aside to tidy up. Nothing in the Golds' flat changes.
The first word is a gift. Marsha's opening line does three things at once. It tells Hadley that he has been talked about before he arrived, so he matters to her. And it puts the Golds in a lower position at once: they are the people who told her about him, the go-betweens. Everything that follows in the evening, Hadley's growing contempt for his friends and his growing pleasure in Marsha, starts from this greeting. She does not ask how he is; she asks how "the painter" is, and Hadley spends the rest of the night living up to the word.
Timmy and Pat
The two children are described before their mother is. "The boy lay restless and bored, curled up with a magazine at the end of the Golds' ratty old couch. He was perhaps nine, in faded jeans, tennis shoes, and a T-shirt. Like Marsha, his hair was tinged a faint rusty red. Sound asleep in a chair in the corner was a small girl, perhaps three, in a rumpled playsuit."
"'Are these your children?' Hadley asked the woman."
"'Haven't you met my progeny?' Marsha nodded toward the boy. 'That's Timmy.'"
"Progeny" is a joke word, a little grand and a little mocking, the kind of word a woman uses who wants to be seen as above ordinary motherly fuss. Timmy is his mother's son in manner as well as hair: "The boy glowered up briefly. 'Hello,' he boomed in a deep voice; and returned to his magazine." A nine-year-old with a deep voice is an odd detail, and it fits the household. Marsha has a "toneless contralto"; the son booms. Neither of them makes small talk.
"Marsha indicated the sleeping girl. 'That's Pat.' Lifting her wineglass, she sipped thoughtfully, eyes on Stuart Hadley as he awkwardly found himself a place to sit." She watches him the way she will watch him all evening. The narration will soon call her "Shrewd, watchful," and this is the first sign of it.
Continuity: Marsha's hair. Here Marsha's hair is a "faint rusty red," like Timmy's, which agrees with Chapter 3 ("reddish hair thin and cut short") and with Chapter 10, where it is "reddish, sandy." Later chapters describe it as dark. This guide notes the drift when it comes; in this chapter the colour is consistent with what has gone before.
The broken Cadillac
"Dave spoke up. 'Marsha drove us home.'"
"'The Cadillac broke down,' Laura said faintly, in a voice small with shock. 'We only got a few blocks. We had to leave it; we took a bus across town to Marsha's place.'"
The Golds' day is now clear. In Chapter 7, Bob Sorrell drove them from the Chinatown restaurant to the parking lot "Down on the Embarcadero" where they had left their car, and got rid of them. The Cadillac, which had already stalled once that morning at "the busiest crossing in the city," got them "a few blocks" and died. Stranded in San Francisco with no money and no way home, they had one person to turn to in the city, and she was the woman they despise. "We took a bus across town to Marsha's place" is said faintly because it is a confession.
A little later Laura adds the rest: "'The Cadillac can't be fixed,' Laura spoke up dismally. 'I guess we're going to junk it. We can get twenty bucks for the parts.' She added: 'It's parked up on Mission. I guess tomorrow the San Francisco police will tow it away, anyhow.'"
Fact check: Mission Street. The geography works. Mission Street in San Francisco begins near the Embarcadero waterfront and runs south-west through the South of Market district into the Mission. A car driven from an Embarcadero lot and dying "a few blocks" later could well end up "parked up on Mission." Laura's fear that the police will tow it is also reasonable: an abandoned car on a main street of the city would not be left long. Twenty dollars for parts is the price of a wreck. The car that carried them to the meeting with the Sorrells is finished on the same day as their dignity.
Marsha Frazier
Now Dick gives Marsha her full portrait. "Marsha Frazier was tall, gaunt; her face was bony with deep hollows. She wore no makeup. Her eyes were gray. Her skin was faintly freckled. There was an ascetic bleakness about her...but Hadley did not find her unattractive."
The next sentences make her almost a boy: "A cleanness of fine: her body was as trim as a young boy's, as straight and simple as that of her son's. An unadorned body, with no useless bulges or flesh. Her arms, below her rolled-up sleeves, were bone and muscle, without softness. Her hands were strong and competent."
"straight and simple," "unadorned"). This guide reads it as "line" and quotes the printed form.
Then Dick places her in the room: "As before, the conversation moved around her: she was the natural pivot. Both Dave and Laura were sunk in silence and apathy, withdrawn into stoic acceptance." "As before" points back to Chapter 3, where she "seemed to be the center of the group" and "the circle of lotus eaters gazed up in benign rapture."
Why Marsha is drawn like a boy. The description is pointedly unfeminine: no makeup, no "useless bulges or flesh," arms "without softness," a body like her son's. Set against the novel's other women it stands out. Ellen is soft, brown-haired and maternal; Sally is tall, blonde and glamorous; Laura is lumpy and loud. Marsha is lean, hard and in charge. Hadley, who in Chapter 7 felt himself the "weak" one in his family and in Chapter 4 was dismissed by Fergesson as "raised by women," is drawn to a woman who has the qualities he lacks. The end of the chapter makes this explicit: "She was another side of him, strong, calculating, ruthless, efficient." The dictionary entry on the last page, "a male demon who assumes female form," completes the idea.
The gray Studebaker
Hadley, a salesman, opens with a car: "'Is that your coupe out front?' Hadley asked her. 'That gray Studebaker?'" "Marsha nodded. 'It needs a bath.'" "'It's a nice-looking car.'" "'It rides well,' she admitted. 'But it doesn't have any power. It's easy to see out of it...the back of the cabin is almost completely glass.'" "'I know,' Hadley said. 'I've driven them. They're nice.'"
The exchange is small and well judged. Marsha talks about her car exactly, with neither boasting nor apology: it is dirty, it rides well, it is underpowered, it has good visibility. Hadley's "I've driven them" may be true (he sells appliances, not cars, but he has been around the peninsula), and it is also the first time this evening he claims a little more experience than the moment needs. Within minutes he will be claiming a career.
Fact check: the Studebaker coupe. The car with the back "almost completely glass" is the Studebaker Starlight coupe, made on both the Champion and Commander lines from 1947 to 1952, famous for its wraparound rear window (the name "Starlight" was used from 1949). The design, usually credited to Virgil Exner of Raymond Loewy's studio, led to the joke that you could not tell whether a postwar Studebaker was coming or going. Marsha's "doesn't have any power" fits the six-cylinder Champion, rated at about 80 to 85 horsepower in these years; the 1951 to 1952 Commander had a 120-horsepower V-8. A grey Champion Starlight is a sensible, slightly intellectual choice in 1952, a long way from the Golds' worn-out Cadillac and the Sorrells' big green Nash.
Two trolls
Laura's report on the Cadillac gets a polite answer and nothing more. "'That's too bad,' Hadley said. He tried to speak with feeling, but his sympathy for the Golds was rapidly dwindling. Their dark, unpleasant faces repelled him."
Then comes the first of the chapter's ugly images: "Two trolls, he thought. Hoarse-voiced trolls, with big feet and shovel hands. Warty and gruff, exactly like in the fairy story. He had lost interest in them already; his attention had turned toward the slim, gray-eyed woman."
A CLOSER LOOK: trolls and dwarfs. This is the second time in a day that Hadley turns his Jewish friends into creatures of folklore. In Chapter 7, in the back seat of Bob's car, they "dwindled to the stature of dwarfs" and were "turned back into primordial clay." Now they are "trolls," "warty," "with big feet and shovel hands." The words are Hadley's, given through his thoughts, and the chapter will make him face what they mean: by the afternoon of Monday he will be reading a magazine that says the same things about Jews in print, and he will understand, with a shock, "what kind of world Dave and Laura lived in." Dick does not let the reader excuse him. In Chapter 3 Hadley wondered "how he could have got mixed up with Jews" and listed Dave's "Jewish habits." The contempt was there before Marsha arrived; she only gives it room.
Which fairy story? The text does not name it. Trolls belong to Scandinavian folk tales, and the best known in English, "The Three Billy Goats Gruff," collected by Asbjørnsen and Moe in Norway, has a troll under a bridge who is ugly and threatening. Dick's "Warty and gruff" may be a half-echo of that title. Note the reversal: in the tale the troll is the bully and the goats are the victims. Hadley pins the troll's face on the Golds, who are the ones being bullied. This reading of "gruff" is this guide's suggestion; Dick says only "the fairy story."
"Why did you call me a painter?"
Hadley pours himself some of "the cheap wine" and asks the question directly. "'Why did you call me a painter?' he asked Marsha."
Laura answers for her: "'We told her,' Laura said. 'About your pictures... you know.'"
But it made him feel strange; he could easily think of himself as a painter, he realized."
The pictures are not described here. Hadley's past as an amateur artist runs through the novel: the high-school cartoon, the photography, the "art staff" of the college paper that this chapter lists. The Golds, who knew him at school, would have mentioned it as small talk while they waited for Marsha's car or rode in it. They had no idea what Marsha would do with it.
Then Hadley turns the question round. "'You run a magazine?' he asked. 'You're the editor of Succubus?'"
"'That's right,' Marsha said, in her toneless contralto. A rational voice, secure and efficient. A voice certain of itself. 'But we're like you... We haven't put out a copy in six months.'"
"'Why not?'"
"'No money.'"
"We're like you" is the second piece of flattery. Marsha puts herself and her magazine on the same level as an amateur who has not painted in years: both of them are artists between works. It costs her nothing, and it draws Hadley further in.
Six months since Succubus last appeared, by Marsha's account. Since the magazine is a quarterly, that means at least two missed issues.
Twenty bucks what the Golds can get for the Cadillac's parts.
Half a gallon of "dark purple wine" on the Golds' table, described as "cheap."
About 9 and about 3 the ages of Timmy and Pat, as the narration guesses them.
The cost of a magazine
"There was a pause while all of them considered money. The Golds looked blank, aimless. Timmy, knees up, magazine in his lap, was uninterested. The magazine was a quarterly art review; he was probably used to seeing them around, as Hadley had grown up with the house organ of the AMA."
The comparison is quietly informative. Chapter 3 told us that Hadley's father "had been a wealthy upper-middle-class doctor in New York before his death in an auto accident," a "dignified professional-class man" who "belonged to the AMA." The "house organ" is the Journal of the American Medical Association, which a member would receive every week. Hadley grew up with a professional journal lying around the house; Timmy grows up with art quarterlies. The point is that both children take the furniture of their parents' world for granted. Hadley is already guessing that Succubus belongs among the art quarterlies on Timmy's lap.
Dick then pauses on the room itself, through the senses: "Outside the apartment, beyond the dark squares of open windows, cars honked and signals changed. The dull odor of the Bay filtered in, corroded rubber and oil. In the next apartment a shrill radio squalled remotely. Thumps, the movement of people overhead. The room itself, cluttered with books and papers, heavy with the smell of dust, decaying food, rubbish and debris." It is the same flat as in Chapter 3, which "smelled dully of ancient dust-heavy carpets and stale cabbage." Nothing has been cleaned since.
"'What does it cost to put out a magazine?' Hadley asked."
Before Marsha answers, Dick describes her smile, and it is one of the strangest descriptions in the book. "Marsha smiled; her teeth were, like her hair, skin, and eyes, a neutral mixed shade: not shiny, not metallic. As if she were compounded from old wood and bone, rubbed and aged to a dull finish, with the bleached roughness of driftwood. There was a solid earthy quality about her body; in spite of her slimness, her small face, narrow arms, she looked strong."
The images all come from things that have been worn by time and weather: old wood, bone, driftwood. There is nothing fresh in her, nothing bright. Set beside "Like a dull, dead pudding" for Laura, the contrast is between a soft thing gone stale and a hard thing that weather has only made harder.
"It depends," she answered, "on what sort of magazine you intend to put out. The SEP for example costs in the hundreds of thousands."
Fact check: the Post and the Ford Foundation. (1) The Saturday Evening Post, published by the Curtis Publishing Company in Philadelphia, sold for 15 cents in 1952 and had a circulation of about four million (it passed that figure in 1949 and was nearing five million by 1954). "Hundreds of thousands" of dollars for an issue of such a weekly is if anything an understatement; Marsha's point is simply that a mass magazine and a little quarterly are different trades. (2) The Ford Foundation, founded in 1936, became a national grant-maker only around 1950. In 1952 it approved a three-year grant of $500,000 to Intercultural Publications, Inc., for the literary quarterly Perspectives USA, edited by James Laughlin of New Directions, so a foundation "trickle" to little magazines is accurate for the period. Whether any such money would have gone to a magazine like Succubus, once its contents were known, is another matter; Marsha's "we've lost that" may say more than she means.
The magazine Hadley imagines
Hadley has never seen Succubus. "Hadley wondered if he should say he had never seen a magazine called Succubus. He tried to imagine what it looked like." He builds a picture out of what he knows: "He recalled the college literary quarterly; it probably looked like that: square, hygienic pages of prose and poems, no capitals on the cover, modernesque title page. Heavy book-bond paper, white and porous. Fifty cents. Consisting mainly of critical essays on Capote, Proust, Gide, Willa Cather. No advertising, except, perhaps, an occasional textbook shop."
Every guess but one will turn out wrong. The paper is heavy, as he guessed ("thick white packet of book-bond paper"), but the price is a dollar, not fifty cents; the cover is a lurid allegory, not lower-case type; and the contents are not essays on novelists but articles on Jewish conspiracy. Hadley's model came partly from his own college days and partly from Dave's description in Chapter 3: "Critical articles on T. S. Eliot and Jung. Short stories by Capote's bunch...or worse." Dave's "or worse" was a warning that Hadley did not hear.
Fact check: the writers Hadley names. Truman Capote's first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, came out in 1948 and made him a literary celebrity; in 1952 he was the young man of the moment. Marcel Proust died in 1922; André Gide, Nobel laureate in 1947, died in February 1951; Willa Cather died in 1947. It is a standard little-magazine list of the early fifties, three of them recently dead and much written about. On Monday Hadley will find "no critical articles on Henry James" in it either, which completes the picture of what he expected.
Hansel and Gretel
Now the room goes quiet, and Dick slows the chapter down. "The room was peaceful, too peaceful for conversation or thought. Hadley relaxed into contentedness, lay back and sipped his wine. Nobody spoke. The tension was gone, here; like Sunday afternoon on a park bench, there was no pressure of time, no struggle or ambition."
The simile is pointed. It is Sunday, and Hadley has spent the real Sunday afternoon being pushed around by his sister and her husband. The peace he feels now is the peace of a man who has escaped one room and found a softer one.
Then the narration explains the Golds' silence, and for a paragraph the sympathy is real. "Even Laura, usually full of brash talk, had nothing to say; their experience of the day had deprived her of will. The Golds had come up against a brick wall, in the form of Bob Sorrell. His huge, brutal cruelty had shocked them into impotency. They had not protested or fought back. They had collapsed in the face of it, wilted by the sheer massed weight of his heedlessness."
"Bob Sorrell could ride roughshod over such people as the Golds; they were incapable of giving back the treatment they had received. Under their veneer of loud talk, quick gestures, was a gentleness easily exposed."
"Like Hansel and Gretel, they had been lured out into the world and then systematically mashed flat."
The paragraph ends on its hardest lines: "The dazed blankness in their eyes was clouded with bewilderment; they still did not comprehend how they had been hustled about, shoved aside, sent off and disposed of. They had been handled like inorganic objects; their basic humanity had been ignored. In them was no response, no adjustment. In the face of brutality they simply died."
A fair diagnosis, a bad conclusion. Read on its own, this paragraph is an accurate account of what happened in Chapter 7. Bob did "hustle," "shove aside," "send off and dispose of" the Golds; he drove them to the Embarcadero to get rid of them. The narration sees, too, that their loud talk was a "veneer" over "a gentleness easily exposed." The trouble is what Hadley does with this understanding. He does not conclude that the Golds deserve protection. He concludes, a page later, that they "culled hostility," that they invited it. The paragraph is the last moment in the chapter when Hadley sees the Golds as people who were wronged.
Fact check: Hansel and Gretel. The tale is in the Grimm brothers' collection (first edition 1812). In it the two children are abandoned in the forest by their parents, lured to the witch's house of bread and sweets, and caught; but they are not "mashed flat." Gretel pushes the witch into the oven, and the children escape with her treasure. Dick's image uses only the first half of the story, the luring and the trap. The Golds, unlike Gretel, do not fight back, and that is the whole point of the comparison.
Confidence, not fear
"But Hadley relaxed and enjoyed this void. The absence of braying talk lulled him; he was grateful for Laura's silence." Note "braying": even while the narration grants the Golds' gentleness, Hadley's ear is hostile to them.
Marsha's quiet is a different thing. "And the quietude that lay about Marsha Frazier was not the crushed stupor of the Golds'. The woman's equanimity came from confidence, not fear. She was totally in control; it was her way of life."
Two silences sit in the same room. One is the silence of people who have been beaten; the other is the silence of someone who does not need to speak to hold the room. Hadley, who knows the first kind from his own life, is drawn to the second.
The painter's fiction
Marsha speaks again, and she speaks to "the painter." "'As a painter,' she said, 'you should be interested in materials. Inks and papers... We experiment with various processes. We're especially interested in new methods of reproducing cuts.'"
"Cuts" is printers' language for illustrations, the blocks or plates from which pictures are printed. She is talking shop with him as if he were in the trade, and he knows it is a pretence:
How the fiction works. Dick is precise about the mechanics. (1) Both know. Marsha "understood he was not a painter"; Hadley knows she understands. Nobody is fooled. (2) Both gain. "It was her pleasure, and it was his to hold up the other end." She enjoys the power of naming him; he enjoys being named. (3) It changes him. "Astonished, he noticed how different it made him feel." The label works on him even though he knows it is false. (4) She means it to. "Shrewd, watchful, she was creating him." The fiction is not politeness; it is a tool. This is how Marsha will operate for the rest of the novel, and it is also how the Watchmen Society, Beckheim's flock and Hadley's daydreams operate: a story that both sides agree to tell, which then shapes the person who tells it.
She goes on about technique. "'We want,' she said, 'to do more work with woodcuts... with blocks. That slows printing speed, and the number of impressions. But,' again she smiled her thin colorless humorless smile, 'we never even began to sell what we printed. We never had that problem.'"
It is a dry joke against her own magazine. Woodcuts slow down a print run, which would matter if anyone were buying the copies; since nobody is, the slowness costs nothing. The "thin colorless humorless smile" is the third description of her mouth in a few pages: neutral teeth, "a neutral mixed shade," and now a smile that has no colour and no humour. Dick keeps insisting that this woman gives nothing away.
Edition note: dashes. The book breaks Marsha's woodcut speech with dashes, after "woodcuts" and on either side of "again she smiled." The same applies through the rest of the chapter: Laura's "About your pictures... you know," Marsha's "No... I'm divorced," Hadley's "You're sure...," Hadley's "I thought... it seemed to me" and "About... thirty," Olsen's "looking for you... not your wife," Ellen's "Has... Fergesson said anything," and the headline "KARL MARX: PROPHET OF ZIONISM." The words are the book's; only the break marks differ.
The hitter and the hit
Dick now turns the camera to Dave. "In the corner at his desk, Dave Gold puffed on his pipe, stared down at the floor, listened to what was being said. His soft, flabby body, shapeless in baggy tweeds, impressed heavy fabric, invited attack. A helpless slug to be stepped on."
Edition quirk: "impressed" again. In Chapter 7 Dave wore "impressed tweeds," which this guide read as a slip for "unpressed." Here the same word appears again: "baggy tweeds, impressed heavy fabric." The repetition makes a simple misprint less likely. Either Dick used "impressed" in his own sense of "not pressed," or the same error was made twice. Either way the meaning is the same: Dave's clothes are shapeless and uncared for.
The next lines are among the most disturbing in the book, because they turn the victim into part of the crime: "Dave Gold completed the unit of which Sorrell was one part. The hitter and the hit. There was a maddening quality about the Golds; silent or vocal, they culled hostility."
"Culled" is an odd verb here. To cull is to select, or to pick out and remove; Dick seems to mean "called up" or "collected," that the Golds draw hostility to themselves whatever they do. Silent, they are slugs to be stepped on; loud, they are braying. There is no way for them to behave that would not, in Hadley's eyes, invite attack.
Then Hadley's errand turns inside out. "Hadley had come over to apologize. He had thought he was sorry for them, shameful for what had happened to them. Now he was angered. Instead of being apologetic he was outraged; he believed, suddenly, that he had come to complete what Bob Sorrell had begun."
"Dave and Laura sat mutely waiting for him to begin on them. The former loud talk had been spurs to goad him on; apprehensively, the two of them sat in their own apartment, prepared to receive whatever was in store for them."
A CLOSER LOOK: "The hitter and the hit." This is the logic of every bully, and Dick gives it to Hadley without softening it: the victim "completes the unit," the victim's weakness "invited attack," the victim's very silence is a provocation. It is worth separating two things the passage does. (1) It is an honest picture of a psychological fact: people who have been humiliated often feel contempt for others who are humiliated in front of them, because the sight reminds them of their own weakness. The chapter will name this directly on Monday: "he despised them for being victims, as he despised himself for being a victim." (2) It is not the novel's verdict. The same chapter will show Hadley, holding Succubus, understanding that the Golds live among "organized enemies ready to destroy them" and that the antisemite's theory makes the Jew guilty merely for existing. "They culled hostility" and "Only by ceasing to exist was the Jew safe" are the same idea, seen first from inside and then from outside.
Ignoring them
What Hadley actually does is quieter than an attack. "But he said nothing. He merely ignored them and talked to Marsha Frazier. He recalled what they had said about her; he was amused. They didn't like her. His amusement increased."
He remembers Dave's warning, "Fascists... Anti-Semites," and finds it funny. Their dislike of her becomes a reason to like her. Here Dick shows how small the step is from wanting to hurt someone to taking up with their enemy.
"For a time he no longer felt sick and unhappy; he was perking up. In the presence of the slim, competent woman, he regained his manhood, preened his feathers. She was interested in him..."
"Regained his manhood" matters after Chapter 8, where Hadley lost every contest of the evening, sat silent while Bob boasted, and then turned on his wife. "Preened his feathers" is mockery, a bird's courtship display. Dick lets Hadley feel restored and lets the reader see how cheaply the restoration was bought.
"Parthenogenesis? No"
"Then it occurred to him to wonder about the two children."
"'Are you solely responsible for them?' he asked her. 'The two children, Timmy and Pat.'"
"She laughed. 'Parthenogenesis? No... I'm divorced. I was married to an Army major.' After a time she added: 'During World War II.'"
Marsha's joke is a learned one. Parthenogenesis is reproduction without fertilisation, from the Greek for "virgin birth"; it occurs in some insects, reptiles and plants. She answers a question about her solitary state with a biology joke, which is both a deflection and a boast: she is the kind of woman who could do without a man.
The pause matters. "After a time she added" means the date was not part of the first answer. Something about the question made her want to put the marriage in the past and in a respectable frame: the war, an officer, a divorce. Hadley checks it at once:
"Stuart Hadley studied the two children and realized that what she said was not true. The girl Pat was three at the most; and the war had been over seven years."
1945 end of the Second World War.
Seven years since then, by Hadley's count, which fixes the present at 1952.
Three at the most Pat's age, so born about 1949, four years after the war.
About nine Timmy's age, so born about 1943, during the war.
Hadley's reasoning assumes that "during World War II" means the marriage both began and ended in the war, so that a child born in 1949 could not be the major's. That is one reading. Another is that she married during the war and divorced later, in which case Pat could be the major's daughter and the only false word might be "divorced." Hadley does not stop to weigh this. What matters to him is that the statement is not literally true, and that he does not mind.
"But it seemed all right. It fit in with the leisure of the room: truth had been dissolved by contentedness. The artist in him, the dreamer, the salesman, all responded equally. The little-boy liar spinning his big plans for the future crept to the surface and lay over him, again, like a familiar warm hide."
Truth "in the old sense." This is the centre of the evening and one of the most important passages in the novel for understanding Hadley. Dick describes a second standard of truth, older than fact: a story is "true" if "it pleased the teller and the hearer." It is the truth of children's games, of daydreams, and of sales talk ("the artist in him, the dreamer, the salesman, all responded equally"). The "little-boy liar spinning his big plans" is Hadley's childhood self, and Dick presents him as a permanent tenant, lying "over him, again, like a familiar warm hide." The word "again" says this has happened before. Marsha's lie does not repel him; it gives him permission. The next thing he says is a lie of his own.
Continuity: Marsha's marriage. Marsha's story here, divorced from an Army major she married "During World War II," is the first of several versions of her past. A later chapter (Chapter 15) gives a much fuller and different history, in which, among other things, she is still legally married to the major. This guide flags the differences there. For now the reader knows only what Hadley knows: she has said something he can see is not quite true, and he has decided not to care.
Prometheus unbound
"'I've seen your magazine,' Hadley said, Prometheus unbound. 'Nice-looking... I didn't get a chance to go too deeply into it, but what I saw seemed fine.'"
He has never seen it. A few paragraphs earlier he "wondered if he should say he had never seen a magazine called Succubus." Now he says the opposite, and Dick's phrase for the moment, "Prometheus unbound," is mock-heroic: the chained Titan set free, a hero breaking his bonds, applied to a young salesman telling a social lie over cheap wine.
Fact check: "Prometheus unbound." Prometheus Unbound is the title of Percy Bysshe Shelley's lyrical drama of 1820, in which the Titan who stole fire for mankind is freed from his chains and tyranny falls. Shelley borrowed the title from a lost play attributed to Aeschylus, the sequel to Prometheus Bound. Dick's use is ironic: Hadley is "unbound" only from the truth. There is a second irony he may intend. Prometheus brought fire; on Monday Hadley will find that the magazine he has just praised unseen is "ammunition to be fired at the corrupt world."
"This was weighed carefully, and accepted. A rapport existed between the two of them, from which the Golds were excluded." Marsha does not challenge him. She plays her part in return: "'I wish you could see our projected fall issue,' Marsha said, nodding. 'We have some of the dummy set up, but we've had to mark time until we know where we stand financially.'"
A "dummy" is a mock-up of a publication, with pages pasted up to show the layout before printing. Hadley has pasted up layouts, as we are about to learn, and the word is bait he cannot resist. "Stuart Hadley listened, contemplated the thought of a layout for a magazine. What kind of magazine? What did he really know about it? But it didn't matter. He was content to express knowledge, and she was content to hear."
"To her, he was a painter"
"It was a strange relationship that was building up between them. Neither knew a thing about the other; both had substituted a higher intuitive awareness. To her, he was a painter... What was she to him? He questioned himself, trying to put together the fabric of his own hopes, desires, the stuff of his own world."
The question "What was she to him?" is not answered here. The chapter answers it on Monday afternoon, after Succubus: "She was another side of him." For now Dick lets Hadley drift, and the next thing out of his mouth surprises even him.
The art editor
"'I used to be active in literary circles,' his usual voice announced, a casual reference that shocked him into almost wakefulness. There was no truth in the statement whatsoever. 'I helped put out a college publication, nothing of any importance. I was art editor.'"
Dick is careful to make the lie seem to speak itself. It is "his usual voice" that announces it, and the lie "shocked him into almost wakefulness": he hears himself say it as if someone else had. "There was no truth in the statement whatsoever" is the narrator's flat verdict.
Then Dick does something unusual: he opens the lie up and shows the parts it was built from. "From the lean pickings of his past he had assembled this masterpiece of misinformation."
Model: how Hadley's "art editor" was built. Every piece is true; only the whole is false.
- A cartoon. "In high school he had contributed a cartoon to the semester yearbook: the Green and Crimson."
- A girlfriend. "He had dated a girl who proofread manuscripts."
- Photography. "He had been interested in photography: when pictures of the graduates were taken he had fixed the lighting."
- A real job, got for him by Dave. "And he had been on the art staff of his college newspaper; Dave Gold had got him the job."
- Assembly. "All these were now combined to form a new object. Handled by his mind, the object arose and announced itself."
The last fragment carries the sting. The one real credential in the list, the place on the college paper's art staff, came from Dave Gold, who is sitting a few feet away. Hadley is building a false career for the benefit of Dave's enemy out of a job Dave got him.
The object, once built, talks on its own: "'We tried various lithographic techniques,' it uttered, through his vocal organs and mouth. 'Of course, for the kind of material we were presenting, there was no general public market. We failed to find a mass response...but that's not surprising.'"
The grammar is deliberate. "It uttered, through his vocal organs and mouth": the lie is the subject, Hadley only the instrument. And the lie copies Marsha. She said her magazine "never even began to sell what we printed"; his imaginary one "failed to find a mass response." He is echoing her back to her, which is what a good salesman does with a customer.
Fact check: the Green and Crimson. The yearbook name appears to be Dick's invention; this guide has not found a real school annual of that name that the novel could be pointing to. Note that the text calls it a "semester yearbook," which is unusual: most high-school annuals came out once a year, though some large schools with mid-year graduations produced one per semester. Lithography, the technique Hadley claims to have experimented with, is printing from a flat stone or metal plate treated so that ink takes only to the image; offset lithography was by 1952 the usual way to print magazines with illustrations. It is a plausible thing for an art editor to have "tried," and nothing Hadley actually did involved it.
Dave says nothing
"Slumped over at his desk, Dave Gold gave no sign that he had heard this fantastic invention. Probably he had. Probably he felt helpless to do anything about it.
The three "Probably" sentences are Hadley's guesses at what Dave is thinking. Dave knows the truth exactly, because he got Hadley the job, and he lets the lie stand. Pasting "mats" (matrices, the papier-mâché moulds or prepared illustrations used in newspaper printing) onto layout sheets is the lowest manual task on a paper's art staff. Hadley's "art editor" is a promotion of several grades.
Dave's silence. Dave's failure to speak is the last stage of his defeat that day. He has been bullied by Bob, stranded by his car, forced to beg a lift from a woman he thinks a fascist, and now he hears his oldest friend lie to her about a job he himself arranged. Hadley reads the silence as helplessness, "a helpless slug to be stepped on." A reader can see it another way: Dave may simply have decided that Hadley is no longer worth correcting. The chapter does not tell us which, and Dave says nothing more before Hadley leaves.
Leaving with Marsha
The evening winds down. "Drowsy with the summer-evening warmth, the glass of wine in his hands, Hadley lay back and conversed with Marsha Frazier. Her son, Timmy, fell asleep; at his desk Dave Gold drooped lower and lower, his pipe out, his body limp. Laura sat like a lump, of stale dough. Outside, along the sidewalk, people strolled back and forth, walking off their night restlessness."
Edition quirk: "a lump, of stale dough." The comma after "lump" is a stray mark; the phrase reads "like a lump of stale dough." It completes the food imagery Hadley has used for Laura all evening: "a dull, dead pudding" at the door, "stale dough" at the end.
Hadley carrying the sleeping child is a small, telling image. He has a three-week-old son and a wife at home, whom he walked out on hours ago; here he carries another woman's daughter to her car. For a few minutes he is playing at belonging to Marsha's family.
"Hadley stood uncertainly on the sidewalk as Marsha strolled around to the other side of the car, long-legged, very straight and thin in the evening darkness. 'Hop in,' she said briefly. 'I'll take you home.'"
"'You're sure...' he began. As he protested, he climbed in and closed the door. 'It's not far; I can walk it.'" The sentence is comic: the protest and the climbing-in happen at the same moment. It is the first of several times in the novel when Marsha's car takes him somewhere he says he does not need to go.
"Sham, sham, sham"
"Marsha, unlit cigarette between her lips, started up the motor. 'Takes a minute to warm.' She leaned over to light her cigarette. 'It killed those two to come running to me. Dave and Laura. They were completely demoralized.'"
"'I know,' Hadley said."
"'Their ability to function crumbles under the first hard knock. It's all a sham.' Gazing straight ahead of her, she watched the distant movement of cars and people, the brightly lit cluster of neon signs that was the downtown business section. 'Sham, sham, sham.' She started up the car, snapped on the lights, and glided out into the street."
Marsha has just given the Golds a ride home and wine in their own flat, and the first thing she says once she is alone with Hadley is contempt. "It killed those two to come running to me" shows she knows exactly how they feel about her, and enjoys it. "It's all a sham" is her version of Hadley's "they culled hostility": the Golds' politics and loud talk are a front that "crumbles under the first hard knock." Hadley's "I know" is agreement. He has taken her side out loud.
A CLOSER LOOK: who is the sham? Marsha calls the Golds' ability to function "a sham" in the same hour in which she has called a salesman a painter, told a story about her marriage that does not fit her children's ages, and listened with apparent belief to an invented career as art editor. The word comes back on her. The Golds' failing is weakness, not pretence; the pretence in the evening was all on Marsha's side and Hadley's. Dick does not point this out, and Hadley does not notice.
Almost one o'clock
"She parked in front of his apartment building, and they sat for a time, the only two awake anywhere in sight. Both children were sound asleep in the back. No shapes were visible on the dark sidewalks. Up and down the silent streets lights were beginning to snap off one by one. It was almost one o'clock."
The town going dark around the parked car makes a small private room of it. Upstairs, behind one of those windows, Ellen is asleep with the baby. Hadley does not get out.
"'You're married?' Marsha asked."
"He told her about Ellen and Pete."
Dick gives this one line of reported speech, no more. We do not hear what Hadley says about his wife, whether he mentions the quarrel, whether he says he walked out. The omission is itself telling: in a chapter that quotes every flattering word, the one honest subject is summarised in six words.
"'How old is the baby? A month?' She dusted her cigarette against the open car window. 'You're lucky. You've got a lot ahead of you... I remember when Timmy was a baby. It's a different world. Every change in him is a change in yourself.'"
Her guess is close. Pete was born at the end of June, about three weeks before. And her remark is the warmest thing she says all night, the only moment where she speaks as a mother rather than an editor. "Every change in him is a change in yourself" is true of Pete and Hadley; it is also, unknowingly, a description of what Marsha is doing to Hadley that evening. She changes him; he changes.
"That's when I met you"
"'Do you come down the peninsula much?' Hadley asked."
"'Sometimes. When I feel like it. I was down the days Beckheim spoke here... That's when I met you. You went with Dave and Laura. You heard him...but only the last part, you said.'"
"'I went back the next night and heard it all.'"
Continuity: "That's when I met you." The chapters line up on the main facts. In Chapter 3 Hadley arrived at the Golds' with the lecture already ending and heard only the end of it; in Chapter 5 he went back the next night, Saturday, and heard Beckheim's whole sermon. Marsha's "the days Beckheim spoke here" fits two nights. But in Chapter 3 the novel shows Hadley seeing Marsha across the room and hearing Laura and Dave describe her ("the old succubus herself"); it does not show the two of them talking. Marsha's "you said" implies a conversation the reader never saw. Either they spoke off the page, or Marsha is giving their acquaintance more history than it has. Given what this chapter shows of her, the second is possible; the text does not settle it.
"'You did?' Marsha reflected. 'What did you think of him?'"
"'I thought... it seemed to me he was very impressive.' Hadley let put his breath with a rush. 'I thought he spoke well.'"
Edition quirk/OCR: "let put." "Let put his breath" is a misprint for "let out his breath." The meaning is not in doubt.
Hadley's answer is lame, and he knows it. In Chapter 5 the full sermon moved him far more than he liked to admit. Now, asked for an opinion by someone who might know Beckheim, he can only say "impressive" and "spoke well," the words of a man afraid of saying the wrong thing. The held breath he lets out tells us how much the question mattered.
Beckheim's life
Marsha takes over. "'He's an unusual man. I've been interested in him. Do you know anything about him? I'll tell you what I know, for what it's worth. Theodore Beckheim is fifty-five years old, although he isn't sure that's exact. He was born in Vinegar Bend, Alabama.'"
"'He's a Negro, isn't he?' Hadley asked."
Hadley saw Beckheim on a platform for a whole evening; the question is not for information. It is the first thing a white man of 1952 reaches for, and Marsha answers it in two words before getting on with the story, which she tells in one long breath:
Model: Beckheim's life as Marsha tells it.
- Vinegar Bend, Alabama. Birth, rural Deep South.
- New Orleans at thirteen. Runs away; a coffee roaster hires him to row out to ships from Brazil and taste the cargo, at twenty-five cents an hour.
- Married at eighteen. Three sons; the wife dies in 1916.
- The Army, 1918. Sent overseas; does not come straight back.
- Africa. The Gold Coast, then the mines of South Africa.
- Back "just before the big bust." Buys land in Virginia to farm with his sons.
- The Crash. Mortgage unpaid, land lost.
- Chicago's Black Belt. Father and sons drift north into the city, where the Watchmen's soup kitchen finds them.
It is a classic twentieth-century Black American life story: the rural South, the river city, the war, the attempt to own land, the loss of it in the Depression, and the move north to Chicago that hundreds of thousands made in the Great Migration. Dick gives Beckheim a past that is big, travelled and full of work, in deliberate contrast with Hadley, a man of twenty-five whose one real brush with publishing, by the evidence of this chapter, was pasting mats on a college paper.
55 Beckheim's age "although he isn't sure that's exact," so born about 1897 if the present is 1952.
13 runs away to New Orleans: about 1910.
18 marries: about 1915.
Three sons born, and the wife dead, by 1916: at most a year or so after the wedding. Three sons in that time is possible only with twins or triplets, or a marriage earlier than eighteen.
1918 joins the Army, aged about 21.
Late 1920s back in the United States "just before the big bust," the Wall Street Crash of October 1929.
25 cents an hour for tasting coffee.
Seventy the age Hadley himself will guess when he finally meets Beckheim in Chapter 11 ("at least seventy"), which would put his birth around 1882 and make the marriage and three sons by 1916 easy.
Fact check and continuity: Beckheim's chronology. As stated, the dates nearly collide: born about 1897, married at about 18 in 1915, and a widower with three sons by 1916. The text half-protects itself, since Marsha says his age "isn't sure" and she says "I'll tell you what I know, for what it's worth." If Beckheim is older than fifty-five, as Hadley's guess in Chapter 11 suggests, the problem goes away. This guide flags it rather than fixing it. Two real-world points do check out. Vinegar Bend is a real place, an unincorporated community in Washington County, Alabama, near the Mississippi line. And New Orleans was a major coffee port in the early twentieth century, second in the United States after New York, with most of its coffee coming from Brazil; William Ukers's All About Coffee (1922) describes New Orleans as the country's second coffee port. The "bay" he rowed out into would really have been the Mississippi River at the city's wharves, since New Orleans has no bay of its own; this guide reads "bay" as loose speech, Marsha's or Dick's.
Fact check: the Gold Coast and South Africa. "Down into Africa, to the Gold Coast" is a slightly odd itinerary from France in 1918 or 1919. The Gold Coast was the British colony in West Africa that became Ghana in 1957. The mines of South Africa, the gold mines of the Witwatersrand above all, were at the far southern end of the continent. For a Black American to work in South African mines in the 1920s would have been unusual, since the mining labour system recruited African migrant workers under harsh colour-bar rules. The story is not impossible, but it is the most exotic part of a legend, and Marsha tells it as a legend.
The Watchmen Society
"'Did... he start the Society?'"
Fact check: religion in Chicago in the early 1930s. Marsha's background is broadly accurate. (1) "A cult of Mohammedan Negroes." Two real movements fit. The Moorish Science Temple of America, founded by Noble Drew Ali, had its headquarters in Chicago from about 1925. The Nation of Islam was founded in Detroit in 1930 by Wallace Fard; after Fard disappeared in 1934, Elijah Muhammad led it from Chicago, where Temple No. 2 became its headquarters. "Mohammedan" is the period term, now considered inaccurate. (2) Baha'i. The Baha'i Faith arose in nineteenth-century Persia; its founder, Bahá'u'lláh, made his declaration in 1863. Its first House of Worship in the West was being built in Wilmette, just north of Chicago, throughout this period (cornerstone laid 1912, dedicated 2 May 1953, a year after this chapter). Calling it "a Middle Eastern heresy" is Marsha's word: it began as an offshoot within a Shi'a Islamic setting, and Muslim authorities treated it as heresy, but Baha'is regard it as an independent religion. (3) The Watchmen Society, its founding in 1887, John Middleton Frisbey and the People's Watchman are fictional, as far as this guide can find.
A possible model (this guide's reading). The names "Watchmen" and "People's Watchman" recall the Watch Tower movement of Charles Taze Russell, which began publishing Zion's Watch Tower in 1879 and was incorporated as a society in 1884, a few years before Dick's 1887. Russell's movement was not Baptist and not a Black church, so it is at most a source for the name and the idea of a magazine-led sect. The novel never names a model, and this note is a suggestion only.
The soup-kitchen detail is the most revealing thing Marsha says. "To get the food you had to listen to their story": the Society recruited by exchange, bread for a hearing. It is exactly what Marsha is doing with Hadley tonight. She has given him a lift, wine, a flattering name and a confidential history, and in a minute she will ask for his drawings. Hadley "got the food and the pitch along with it," like the Beckheims.
"How old do I look?"
"'Do you?' Hadley asked her."
"Marsha smiled, started to answer, then smiled again. 'What do you think? How old do I look? An old woman with two kids...'"
"Hadley made a guess. 'About... thirty.'"
"'I'm twenty-six. Timmy was born when I was sixteen. I'll tell you about that sometime. No, I don't remember those days. But I've heard Beckheim speak about them.'"
Hadley's guess matches the narrator of Chapter 3, who also put her at "perhaps thirty." Her answer makes her younger than either thought. The double smile before she replies, and the promise "I'll tell you about that sometime," mark this as a performance: she is managing what he knows about her.
26 Marsha's stated age, so born about 1926.
16 her age when Timmy was born, about 1942, which would make him about ten.
Perhaps nine the narration's estimate of Timmy, so born about 1943. The two figures are close enough to fit.
1942 also falls "During World War II," so the major could be Timmy's father, though not, by Hadley's reckoning, Pat's.
Continuity: Marsha's age. Taken alone, "twenty-six" fits the children. But it sits beside the marriage story Hadley has already seen through, and a later chapter (Chapter 15) gives her a different age and a different family history. This guide treats "twenty-six" as one more of Marsha's statements: possibly true, chosen for effect, and not to be relied on.
The heart attack
"'In private? In conversation?'"
"She nodded. 'Oh, yes.'"
"Oh, yes" is the hint the chapter plants and does not explain. Marsha knows Beckheim personally, well enough to have heard him reminisce. Hadley asks where he is:
"'In San Francisco. He had a heart attack early this month.' She spoke dispassionately. 'He's resting up...then he's going north, to Sacramento, up to Oregon and Washington.'"
"'Will he be all right?'"
"'I think so. But he's got to take it easier. He does too much... He doesn't realize he's getting old.'"
"Early this month" means early July 1952, a few weeks after the June lecture in Cedar Groves. "He doesn't realize he's getting old" sits awkwardly with fifty-five and comfortably with Hadley's later guess of seventy. Marsha speaks "dispassionately," but what she knows, his health, his rest, his itinerary, is the kind of thing only someone close to him would know.
"I want to capture more"
"'How do you fit in with the Society?' Hadley asked her."
"'Yes,' Hadley agreed."
The hook. This is where the evening has been heading. Marsha called him "the painter" at the door; she discussed "cuts" and woodcuts with him; she let him claim to have been an art editor. Now she floats a job: sketches of the Society's people, "drawn at the meetings." She does not offer it outright. She asks him what he thinks "of this idea," which lets him want it before it is offered. The phrase "I want to capture more" is ambiguous in a way the novel will exploit. It means capture on paper, more than a camera can; it also means capture people, as a sect captures its members and as she is capturing Hadley.
A CLOSER LOOK: "I can't give you an answer." Hadley asks the one direct question of the night, and Marsha refuses it. The reader learns in Chapter 12 that she lives with Beckheim. Read again in that light, the whole car conversation is full of concealment: the fond detail of his life, "I've heard Beckheim speak about them," "Oh, yes," the heart attack she reports "dispassionately." She has told Hadley nothing untrue about the Society and has withheld the one thing that would explain everything. Set beside the editor of an antisemitic magazine, the fact that she has attached herself to a Black preacher's movement is one of the novel's central puzzles, and Dick does not resolve it here.
"'Part of the dummy is made up, part isn't. We still have blanks here and there. Since there's no rush...no deadline to meet.' Abruptly she tossed her cigarette out the window. 'Well, another day.' She reached over and pushed open the door on his side. 'Maybe I'll see you again. Good night.'"
"Without warning, Hadley found himself standing on the sidewalk. The car started up, Marsha waved briefly, and the car roared off into the darkness."
The dismissal is abrupt and total. She reaches across him and opens his door. "Blanks here and there" leaves a space he might fill; "Maybe I'll see you again" withdraws it. It is the oldest sales technique there is, and Hadley, a salesman, does not recognise it when it is used on him.
Home
"For a time he stood. Then he turned and walked slowly toward the apartment building. All the things that had happened, all that had been said and seen, flowed through his mind out of control. He gave up battling; there had been too much for him to assimilate just yet. Maybe later. Or maybe not. He found his key, unlocked the heavy front door, and entered the lobby."
"Under his door there was only the dim glow of the night-light. Sally and Bob had gone back up the coast in their magnificent green Nash. He let himself in, grateful for the silence. The bedroom door was open; Pete lay in his bassinet. Ellen was a vague heap in the center of the double bed. Sound asleep... He locked the door and began untying his shoes."
The Sorrells have gone without a scene, and the house is quiet. "Magnificent" is Hadley's envy still at work: even as he crosses the threshold he thinks of Bob's car with something like awe. And Ellen, after the worst quarrel of their marriage, is "a vague heap," the same word-family Hadley used for Laura's "lump." The women in his life are becoming shapes in his eyes. The chapter's first day ends without any words between husband and wife, and the reconciliation, if there is one, happens off the page.
Monday: the package
"He was out at lunch, the next day, when Marsha brought the copy of Succubus."
Dick tells us the outcome first, so the scene that follows is played with the reader knowing what Hadley does not.
A "combination" in 1952 was a single cabinet holding a television, a radio and a record player; Westinghouse was one of the big American makers. The grooming scene is comic and slightly sad: Hadley tends his appearance as though expecting someone, and the someone has just left. Whether he hoped Marsha might come in, the text does not say.
Fact check: Arrid. Arrid was a real American antiperspirant cream, introduced in 1935 by Carter Products and among the best-selling deodorants of the 1940s and 1950s. A jar of it in a shop's basement washroom is exactly right for 1952.
"Olsen was off the phone and on his way down to the service department. 'Where the hell have you been?' he demanded gruffly. 'Some twat was in here looking for you... not your wife.' He jerked his thumb at the counter. 'Left something for you... waited around and finally took her can out of here.'"
"'Who was she?' Hadley asked, his heart thudding."
"'Never saw her before.' Olsen disappeared down the stairs three at a time. 'Anyhow, turn them upside down and they're all alike.'"
Olsen is the voice of the shop floor, and his crudeness is a counterweight to the refined talk of the night before. "Not your wife" is the first thing he notices: a woman came in for Hadley, and it was not Ellen. Hadley's "heart thudding" shows he guesses who.
"Hadley rummaged around behind the counter until he found a flat manila package. Trembling, he laid it on the counter and, opening it, slid out the contents. At first he was disappointed. Advertising? A free sample? It was a periodical, a magazine. And then he identified it. The back of his neck twitched and shuddered as he read the black hard lines of type."
SUCCUBUS a magazine for people who want to know
"He turned it over. A slip of paper fluttered from it to the floor; he grabbed it up. In neat, precise woman's pencil it read:"
"'...couldn't wait. See you tomorrow at noon. You owe me one dollar for the copy...m.f.'"
The note. Three things in twelve words. (1) A date. "See you tomorrow at noon" fixes a meeting for Tuesday without asking whether he is free; Chapter 10 opens on that Tuesday. (2) A debt. "You owe me one dollar" turns a gift into a transaction and gives him a reason he must see her again. It is the soup kitchen in miniature: you get the magazine, and you owe something. (3) A signature. Lower-case "m.f." is intimate and offhand at once. The ellipsis at the start makes the note seem to begin in the middle of a thought, as if their conversation never stopped.
"He pocketed the note deep in the cavity of his wallet." He keeps it, hides it, carries it on his body. The note will come back.
"Silting down on the bottom drawer of the tube cabinet, he began leafing nervously, tautly, through the copy of Succubus: the magazine for people who couldn't stand not knowing."
Edition quirk/OCR: "Silting." A misprint for "Sitting." Note also that Hadley quietly rewrites the magazine's slogan: "for people who want to know" becomes, in his head, "for people who couldn't stand not knowing." Wanting has become compulsion, which tells us more about Hadley than about the magazine.
"A political sheet"
"It was not what he had expected. For the rest of the day he took his free minutes to pore over it."
"This was not a college publication. There was no musty academic timbre, no critical articles on Henry James. He began to breathe slowly, shallowly, as he turned the pages."
"Succubus was a political sheet."
"For a long time he stood holding it in his hands, wondering what came next. When customers entered, he dropped it behind the counter, reassembled himself, and headed out to wait on them. As soon as they were gone he was back poring over it."
"Reassembled himself" is precise: Hadley has two selves now, the one that sells radios and the one that reads Succubus, and he has to put the first back together each time a customer comes in.
"Not political in the ordinary sense: not a newsmagazine, or a party organ. Not a 'journal of interpretation,' with contributions by Elmer Davis, Clifton Fadiman, John Flynn, Frieda Utley, or any names he knew."
Fact check: the names Hadley knows. All four are real, and they span the political spectrum, which is the point: these are the names a magazine reader of 1952 would recognise from any serious periodical. (1) Elmer Davis (1890 to 1958) headed the Office of War Information from 1942, then became a radio commentator for ABC and one of the most prominent critics of Senator McCarthy. (2) Clifton Fadiman (1904 to 1999), critic and anthologist, was the host of the radio quiz Information Please and a judge for the Book-of-the-Month Club. (3) John T. Flynn (1882 to 1964), once a progressive journalist, became a leader of the America First Committee before Pearl Harbor and wrote The Roosevelt Myth (1948). (4) Freda Utley (1898 to 1978), a former Communist turned anti-Communist, wrote The China Story (1951), blaming American policy for the "loss" of China. The text spells her name "Frieda"; her name was Freda. Two liberals, two figures of the anti-Roosevelt right: Hadley's list is respectable opinion from left to right. Succubus is outside all of it.
The cover
"It was slick... that much fitted his expectation. The cover was glossy, multicolored, a work of art. It showed a medieval alchemistic flask of some kind as a backdrop; superimposed on the flask in bold thick strokes of ink was a symbolistic Communist figure."
"It took him a long time to unscramble the cover, and even then he wasn't sure he had it all. Apparently, it was to show the infiltration of Communists into colleges: the Communist was posing as a savant. Within the alchemist's trappings (symbols of knowledge) were the beard and bloody hand, the dripping hammer and sickle."
The cover is a cartoon of the kind that filled anti-Communist publications in the McCarthy years: the Red professor, the subversive in the university. The "beard" does double work. It is the beard of Marx, and it is also the stock beard of the caricatured Jew. Hadley does not yet see the second meaning; the headlines inside will make it plain.
Context: 1952. The cover's theme was the subject of real public alarm. Senator Joseph McCarthy had made his first charges of Communists in the State Department in February 1950, and congressional committees were investigating teachers and professors; the University of California had imposed a loyalty oath on its faculty in 1949 and 1950. A magazine attacking "Communists in colleges" would have looked, to most readers, like mainstream anti-Communism. That is how Succubus works: it enters through the respectable fear and leads somewhere else.
Inside: Wright, Berlin, the mural
"Inside was a lead editorial. The paper was glossy, heavy; the type was black and clean. The format was routine, but satisfactory. It was not arty: it was firm and solid. At random, he found a whole section of photographs of Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings. And after that, schematics of what Berlin would have been like had the Nazis won the war."
"One section contained a section of a mural; or rather, a projected mural. Stiff, heavy figures. Workers, soldiers, holding flags and standing together. Mothers with children. Big-faced peasants. All very sturdy and healthy. Terribly healthy. Men tilling the soil, sorting grain."
Fact check: Wright and Berlin. (1) Frank Lloyd Wright (1867 to 1959) is an odd neighbour for Nazi plans. The Nazi regime was hostile to modern architecture and closed the Bauhaus in 1933. But Wright was a fierce opponent of American entry into the Second World War, and several of his Taliesin apprentices sought conscientious-objector status; one, Marcus Weston, was jailed. A far-right magazine could have admired Wright as an individualist American genius and an isolationist without caring about his style. The juxtaposition is probably deliberate on Dick's part: Succubus presents itself as cultured, and puts real art beside fantasies of conquest. (2) "What Berlin would have been like." These would be the plans of Albert Speer and Hitler for rebuilding Berlin as "Germania," the world capital, with a vast domed Great Hall meant to hold about 180,000 people. Speer's models, including the famous 1939 model of the north-south axis, were photographed and published. (3) The mural. "Workers, soldiers, holding flags... Big-faced peasants... Terribly healthy" describes the official art of both Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union, which looked remarkably alike: heroic labour, fertile mothers, the soil. Hadley's "Terribly healthy" catches the menace in it.
The headlines
"He skimmed an article on Hollywood: a photo of Sam Goldwyn stared fleshily up at him. A cut of Barney Balaban. A cut of Bernard Baruch. A cut of Henry Morgenthau."
JEWISH CONTROL OF THE FILM INDUSTRY: FIVE BILLIONS IN POISON
"Another article couldn't be ignored:"
INSIDE WALL STREET: THE INTERNATIONAL PLUTOCRATIC CONSPIRACY
"And another:"
KARL MARX: PROPHET OF ZIONISM
Fact check: the four faces. (1) Samuel Goldwyn (born in Warsaw, 1879 to 1974) was an independent producer, the "G" of MGM in name only, since he left before the merger. (2) Barney Balaban (1887 to 1971) was president of Paramount Pictures from 1936 to 1964. These two are film men. (3) Bernard Baruch (1870 to 1965) was a Wall Street financier, chairman of the War Industries Board in 1918, and adviser to presidents from Wilson to Truman. (4) Henry Morgenthau Jr. (1891 to 1967) was Roosevelt's Secretary of the Treasury from 1934 to 1945 and author of the 1944 "Morgenthau Plan" for post-war Germany. Neither Baruch nor Morgenthau had anything to do with Hollywood. Putting their faces in an article on "Jewish control of the film industry" is exactly the antisemitic method: all prominent Jews are made one conspiracy, so a banker and a Treasury Secretary belong in a story about the movies. The text says only "Henry Morgenthau"; his father, Henry Morgenthau Sr., ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, died in 1946, but the son is the one far-right propaganda attacked by name, because of the Morgenthau Plan.
Fact check: "Five billions." The figure has no obvious basis. American cinema box-office receipts peaked in 1946 at roughly 1.7 billion dollars a year and were falling by 1952 as television spread. "Five billions" is an inflated round number, typical of the genre. Dick may have meant the inflation to be noticed.
Fact check: "Karl Marx: prophet of Zionism." The book prints the headline with a dash; it is rendered here with a colon. The headline fuses two things that were opposed. Karl Marx (1818 to 1883) was born to a Jewish family that had converted to Lutheranism; he was baptised in 1824, aged six. His essay "On the Jewish Question" (1843 to 1844) is hostile to Judaism and has itself been read as antisemitic. Political Zionism, the movement for a Jewish state, was launched by Theodor Herzl's Der Judenstaat in 1896, thirteen years after Marx's death, and Marxists generally opposed it. Linking the two is the "Judeo-Bolshevism" myth, the Nazi-era claim that Communism and Jewish finance were two arms of one plot. The headline above it, "International Plutocratic Conspiracy," supplies the other arm: Jews as both Wall Street capitalists and Communist revolutionaries. The contradiction is the point of the propaganda, not a flaw in it.
"A racist, neofascist tract"
"Succubus was a racist, neofascist tract."
Continuity: "why Dave did no work for Succubus." In Chapter 3 Laura said of the magazine, "Dave did an article for her," and Hadley remembered that the article was never printed. Here the narration says Dave "did no work for Succubus." The two are reconcilable if "work" means published work, or if Dave wrote the piece and then refused to let it run once he understood the magazine. But the sentences do not match as printed, and this guide flags the gap rather than smoothing it.
The surprise is not the politics but the form. "But it didn't look like a racist, neofascist tract: it wasn't crude and bombastic." Hadley lists what he would have expected: a racist tract "printed on cheap newsprint," a "disreputable, ugly four-page throwaway with glaring headlines, insulting to intelligence and taste"; "fantastic filth," "wild charges, half-crazed assertions and denouncements"; something that "reeked of the crackpot, slimy with violence"; misspellings and "faulty grammar"; the work of bitter, ignorant, "wizened little men bitter and acid with hate." "A sour, ranting sheet. A vulgarity."
Edition quirk: "conservative-like." The book prints a hyphen, "conservative-like the men and women," where a dash is clearly meant: "heavy, conservative, like the men and women shown in the murals." The quotation keeps the printed hyphen. Note also "No fantastic charges" a few lines after "JEWISH CONTROL OF THE FILM INDUSTRY." Hadley's sense that the magazine makes no wild charges is a judgement about tone, not content; the content is exactly the wild charge he expected, delivered in a calm voice.
"There was nothing lunatic-fringe about Succubus. He realized with growing wonder that this was designed to go into the best homes. In its own way, this was respectable. On an imported Philippine mahogany coffee table, beside an inlaid ashtray, a handsome lamp, Succubus would look lovely. It would grace the most tasteful living room."
Fact check: Philippine mahogany. "Philippine mahogany" is a trade name, not a true mahogany: it covers several Southeast Asian hardwoods of the genus Shorea and related trees, also sold as lauan or meranti, and the US Forest Products Laboratory has long noted the distinction. It was hugely popular in American homes of the 1950s for panelling and furniture, including the Eichler houses then going up around the Bay Area. Dick's detail is exact and sly: the "imported" wood that signals good taste is itself sold under a borrowed, grander name. Polish standing in for provenance is the theme of the whole page.
"It looked like Fortune"
Fact check: Fortune. Henry Luce launched Fortune in February 1930, four months after the Crash, as a large-format, lavishly illustrated business monthly. Its cover price was one dollar, at a time when most magazines cost a few cents, and a year's subscription was ten dollars. So "A dollar. It looked like Fortune" is precise: Succubus costs exactly what Fortune cost, and borrows its look of expensive authority. Hadley's other observations, no circulation figure, no date, mailed directly, describe the way such private political periodicals actually travelled: hand to hand and by mailing list, out of sight of the newsstand.
$1 the price Marsha says he owes; the same as Fortune's cover price.
Six months since the last issue, by Marsha's own account on Sunday.
No date on the issue, so it cannot be placed in time.
No circulation as far as Hadley can tell: "Probably it was distributed one copy at a time."
Two in the afternoon the hour at which he starts to think about Beckheim.
The kindly faces
"About two in the afternoon he began to wonder about Beckheim. What did this tell him about the Society? Not much. He couldn't connect the People's Watchman, the rows of kindly faces at the lecture, with this elegant publication. This had class, prestige. It wasn't directed at the kind of people who had flocked to hear Beckheim."
A CLOSER LOOK: "the rows of kindly faces." Hadley cannot connect Beckheim's audience with Succubus. The reader can, at least in part. In Chapter 5, at the Health Food Store before the lecture, Mrs Krafft talked to Hadley about Hitler and the Jews, and Horace Wakefield pressed crank literature on him. The "kindly faces" were never as simple as Hadley's memory makes them. Dick has already shown that the same small world holds the Society's believers and people who would welcome Succubus. Hadley's failure to make the link is part of his innocence, and it is about to be tested.
The world the Golds live in
Then comes the best paragraph Hadley thinks in the whole chapter. "He understood, suddenly, what kind of world Dave and Laura lived in. With organized enemies ready to destroy them; and the Golds had been forced to go to one of these enemies for help. Delivered over to them: they had been helpless to resist. It was wrong; he knew how wrong it had been, that there was no other place they could go."
"The Golds hadn't asked for this world, any more than he had. They had been born involuntarily. And now that they were here their presence was resented, as if they had somehow conspired to exist, as if their birth were part of some occult scheme. As if by being born and trying to live like everybody else, they were getting away with something. Managing to put over a dishonest enterprise."
"Only by ceasing to exist was the Jew safe. Only by quickly dying could he erase the taint, the guilt of trying to survive."
The logic of the conspiracy theory. In a few lines Dick lays out how antisemitic conspiracy thinking works, and it is a sharp analysis. (1) Existence as evidence. The theory cannot be refuted, because every Jew anywhere, on a street corner, in a cinema, at the wheel of a bus, on the radio, counts as proof of the plot. (2) Birth as crime. The Golds are treated "as if they had somehow conspired to exist." (3) The exposer as discoverer. "The great exposers" claim only to point out what is there, and pointing is enough. (4) The only exit is death. "Only by ceasing to exist was the Jew safe." Written seven years after the liberation of the death camps, the sentence is not a figure of speech. It names where the theory goes. Set beside the Hansel and Gretel paragraph, it completes the earlier image: on Sunday night, "In the face of brutality they simply died"; on Monday afternoon Hadley sees that the theory wants them to.
Stuart Hadley: victim
And yet the insight does not produce sympathy. "Thinking of this, Hadley saw how much the Golds were like himself. He had no place, either. But still he had no sympathy for them. Because he had no sympathy for himself. In a terrible deep-down way, all the way to the bottom of his soul, he despised them for being victims, as he despised himself for being a victim. He didn't want to be like them. He didn't want to be taken for one of them, one of the victimized group. He wanted to get out, climb above that."
"He was not content, as the Golds were. All they sought was to keep what little they had; they didn't demand anything more. But he demanded more. And he loathed them for letting Sorrell walk over them. He loathed them for letting him walk over them."
The last sentence turns on a pronoun. "Letting him walk over them": him is Sorrell, but it is also Hadley himself, who on Sunday night sat in their apartment and ignored them while he flirted with their enemy. He loathes them for allowing what he did to them.
Two mirrors. This paragraph answers the question Hadley asked himself in the Golds' living room, "What was she to him?" The answer is a choice between two images of himself. The Golds are "the weak mute victimized image"; Marsha is "another side of him, strong, calculating, ruthless, efficient." He hates the first because he recognises it, and he is drawn to the second because he lacks it. Dick's verbs are physical: he is "bursting out" of one image and "rising to" the other, "moving that way." The word "specter-presence" gives Marsha a ghostly quality that the dictionary will soon make explicit. He "admired her... and he was frightened," and both are right.
A CLOSER LOOK: the psychology, not the excuse. The passage is the novel's most honest account of how a weak man can be drawn towards fascism, and it is worth reading carefully. Dick does not say Hadley agrees with Succubus; Hadley has just understood, with real clarity, how monstrous its logic is. What pulls him is not ideas but a feeling: shame at weakness, and admiration for strength regardless of what the strength is used for. That is a pattern historians of fascism have described many times, in which contempt for victims becomes the price of escaping victimhood. Dick shows it without endorsing it. The chapter's very next scene puts a plain, decent reaction beside it: Fergesson's disgust.
Fergesson
"'What's that you have there?' Fergesson demanded good-naturedly, appearing in front of him, hand extended. 'Let's see it.'"
"Hadley blinked. Embarrassed, he stammered and stalled; he hadn't seen Fergesson come up. 'You wouldn't be interested.'"
"Fergesson stopped being amused. 'I'm interested in anything you're reading on my time.' He sensed guilty resistance. 'What is it, a dirty magazine? Pictures of girls?'"
Fergesson's first guess is comic and telling. A young man hiding a magazine behind the counter is reading pin-ups; that is the worst Fergesson can imagine. "On my time" is the employer's claim on the employee's attention, and it turns a joke into an order.
"Hadley reluctantly handed Succubus over. Laying it out on the counter, Fergesson flipped the pages rapidly. 'See?' Hadley said belligerently, his ears beginning to burn apprehensively. 'I told you it wasn't something you'd care about.'"
"'Christ,' Fergesson said softly."
"'What's the matter?'"
"Fergesson's face twisted with disgust. He dropped the magazine as if it were alive with vermin. 'Where'd you get this garbage?'"
"'Somebody gave it to me,' Hadley muttered evasively."
"An outraged, baleful expression on his face, Fergesson glared at him. 'What is it about you? How do you do it?'"
"Nettled, humiliated, Hadley muttered, 'Do what?'"
"'Good God...you always manage to get mixed up in something cracked. You have a knack. If there's anything crazy, you're in on it. You head straight for this nut stuff, don't you? How do you manage it?'"
Fergesson's verdict. Fergesson flips the pages "rapidly" and understands at once what took Hadley hours to admit. He does not argue with the magazine; he recoils from it, "as if it were alive with vermin," the image the magazine itself would apply to Jews, turned back on the magazine. His "Christ," said "softly," is the most serious word he speaks in the chapter. And his diagnosis of Hadley is the plain-man version of the narrator's: "you always manage to get mixed up in something cracked... You head straight for this nut stuff." He has seen it before, presumably in the Beckheim business, which Ellen explained to him in Chapter 6. Fergesson has prejudices of his own, as Chapter 4 showed, but he knows garbage when he sees it.
"Trembling, Hadley retrieved his magazine. 'What I read is my own business.' In a blind haze he shoved it back in its folder. 'This is a free country; I can read what I want. You can't stop me. You can't keep me from reading this. Understand?'"
"Shaking his head, his face stony, Fergesson strode off."
Hadley defends a magazine he has just recognised as a racist tract, and he defends it with the language of liberty: "This is a free country." He is not defending its ideas. He is defending himself against his boss, and Succubus has become the ground on which he does it. The quarrel is about authority, the old one between Hadley and every father-figure in the book, and the magazine is merely what he happens to be holding.
"Hadley did not take Succubus home. He stuck it away in the back closet, behind some old Atwater Kent display signs, where no one would find it."
Fact check: Atwater Kent. The Atwater Kent Manufacturing Company of Philadelphia was one of the largest American radio makers of the 1920s; it stopped making radios in 1936. So the display signs in the back closet are at least sixteen years old in 1952: dead stock from Modern TV's radio days. Hiding a political magazine behind the store's old relics is a neat image of what Hadley is doing, putting something new and dangerous behind the furniture of the old life. And for all his "free country," he hides it. He does not take it home to Ellen.
Wakefield and the Protocols
"He could picture Wakefield delighting in the mystical knowledge of Jewish world power. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: if Wakefield knew about them, how pleased, how excited he would be!"
The comparison is a small step forward for Hadley. He places Succubus where it belongs, with the crank's secret literature, the Shaw article on vaccination that Wakefield carried in Chapter 5. The difference is that Wakefield's pamphlets were crude and Succubus is not. Hadley sees the kinship anyway.
Fact check: Shaw on vaccination. George Bernard Shaw (1856 to 1950) was a lifelong and outspoken opponent of vaccination. He wrote against it during the London smallpox epidemic of 1901 to 1902 and kept attacking it for decades; in 1931 he called vaccination a "crime" in remarks widely reported in the press. He had died in November 1950, less than two years before this chapter. A Shaw anti-vaccination piece is exactly the kind of borrowed authority a crank would carry: a famous name lending weight to a false claim, which is the Succubus method too.
Fact check: the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Protocols is a forged text purporting to record a secret Jewish plan for world domination. It was first published in Russia in 1903, serialised in the newspaper Znamya by Pavel Krushevan, and spread worldwide after 1917. In the United States Henry Ford's newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, promoted it from 1920 in the series later collected as The International Jew. In August 1921 Philip Graves, correspondent of The Times of London, showed that much of it was plagiarised from Maurice Joly's 1864 French satire against Napoleon III, the Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, which has nothing to do with Jews. The forgery was used heavily in Nazi propaganda. Hadley's phrase "the mystical knowledge of Jewish world power" is exactly what the Protocols claims to reveal, and the Succubus headlines ("International Plutocratic Conspiracy," "Jewish Control of the Film Industry") are its themes in modern dress.
Ellen and the store
"Ellen brought in a plate of melting vanilla ice cream she had churned up in the freezer of the refrigerator. 'Stu,' she said, 'what are you thinking about?'"
"'Nothing,' he answered, accepting the ice cream."
"'Has... Fergesson said anything to you about buying that store? I think he's really going through with it. From what Alice told me...'"
"'No,' Hadley said shortly. 'He hasn't said anything.'"
This is the only exchange between Hadley and Ellen in the chapter, and it follows the worst quarrel of their marriage without a word about it. She brings him something she has made; he says "Nothing" when he is full of Succubus. Homemade ice cream, "churned up in the freezer of the refrigerator," is the domestic world at its gentlest, and it is melting.
Ellen's question matters more than Hadley lets it. Fergesson's plan to buy O'Neill's store on Bayshore Highway, which he argued over with Alice in Chapter 4, will decide Hadley's future at Modern: someone will have to run the old shop while Fergesson runs the new one. Ellen knows this through Alice, from the wives' side of the business. Hadley answers "shortly," which may mean he is irritated, or may mean that after today's scene with Fergesson he does not want to think about his boss at all.
A long corridor
The "long corridor" is the novel's image for the rest of Hadley's summer. What draws him is not Beckheim's religion or Marsha's politics but novelty: "It was new." The Golds, Ellen, Fergesson, the shop, Bob and Sally are "stale routines repeated from his past." He chooses the unknown because it is unknown. Then the chapter ends on a joke at his expense: he has been carrying the word around for weeks, has said it, has praised the magazine, and does not know what it means.
The dictionary
"Getting a dictionary from the bookcase, he quickly looked it up. What he expected he didn't know; in any case, he was surprised."
"Succubus: a male demon who assumes female form to tempt men from the virtuous path by having sexual intercourse with them during the night. The word came from the Latin succubare: to lie under. And from the Latin succuba: a whore."
"It was quite a title for a magazine. He closed the dictionary and put it away."
Fact check: "a male demon." Standard dictionaries define a succubus as a female demon who has intercourse with sleeping men; the male counterpart, who visits sleeping women, is the incubus. The etymology Hadley reads is right in substance: the word comes from Late Latin succuba, "paramour" or "strumpet," formed from succubare, "to lie under" (sub, under, plus cubare, to lie), and English has used it since the late fourteenth century. The phrase "a male demon who assumes female form" does have a source in medieval demonology: theologians including Thomas Aquinas argued that demons have no sex of their own and that the same demon could act as a succubus with a man and as an incubus with a woman. Whether Dick's wording comes from an old dictionary, from that tradition, or from his own design, this guide cannot confirm. It is not the usual definition, and the guide flags it rather than correcting the quotation.
Why the definition fits. Whatever its source, the definition as printed ties together the whole chapter. Marsha was introduced in this chapter with a body "like her son's," with arms "without softness," in "slacks and a checkered shirt"; Hadley saw her as "another side of him, strong, calculating, ruthless, efficient." A "male demon who assumes female form" is the novel's own gloss on her. "To tempt men from the virtuous path" describes the evening in the car and the note in his wallet. "To lie under" points to the affair that the novel will bring. And the title gives away the magazine's method: an ugly thing that comes in an attractive form, at night, to people who think they are dreaming. Laura called Marsha "the old succubus herself" in Chapter 3, and Hadley answered "I know. Succubus." Only now does he know what he said.
The two sides of the chapter
| What Hadley expected | What Succubus is | |
|---|---|---|
| Kind of magazine | A "high-type quarterly," arty, with Capote's bunch and critical articles | "A political sheet," then "a racist, neofascist tract" |
| Appearance of a hate sheet | "Cheap newsprint," "four-page throwaway," "glaring headlines" | "Expensive, tasteful, beautifully printed," glossy, "book-bond paper" |
| Tone | "Wild charges, half-crazed assertions," "words misspelled" | "Written lucidly, with erudition and poise," "one of moderation" |
| Readers | A crank like Wakefield passing it round the Health Food Store | "Designed to go into the best homes," on a Philippine mahogany table |
| Price and reach | A money-loser: "No money," Marsha said on Sunday | "A dollar. It looked like Fortune," mailed out "one copy at a time" |
| Content | Henry James, Eliot, Jung | Frank Lloyd Wright, Nazi Berlin, a heroic mural, "FIVE BILLIONS IN POISON" |
| Who it stands for | "The painter's" new patron | The enemies of his oldest friend |
| The Golds | Marsha Frazier | Hadley | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Silence | "The crushed stupor" | "Equanimity... from confidence, not fear" | Lulled, "drowsy," content |
| Story told about self | None; they say almost nothing | Divorced from a major "During World War II"; 26 | "Art editor," "active in literary circles" |
| Attitude to the others | Dislike her, are "demoralized" by needing her | "Sham, sham, sham" | "They culled hostility"; "Succubus" admired and feared |
| In Hadley's eyes on Monday | "The weak mute victimized image of himself" | "Another side of him, strong, calculating, ruthless, efficient" | "Stuart Hadley: victim," trying to climb out |
IN PRACTICE: polish is not provenance. Hadley's first test for a hate sheet is how it looks: cheap paper, misspellings and ranting would have warned him. Succubus passes that test, and so it reaches "the best homes." The same mistake is now easy to make with machine-made content. Generative AI has made a lucid, well-formatted, confident finish almost free, so the finish tells you nothing about whether a document is true or where it came from. The defence is to check provenance and claims rather than surface: who issued it, can the book be traced, do the numbers reconcile. Industry efforts such as the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), founded in February 2021 by Adobe, Arm, the BBC, Intel, Microsoft and Truepic, aim to attach verifiable origin data, "Content Credentials," to media for exactly this reason. Hadley could see the paper was "book-bond"; what he needed to know was who was behind it and what it claimed.
IN PRACTICE: the plausible CV. Hadley's "art editor" is built from true fragments, a cartoon, a proofreading girlfriend, lighting a photograph, a job on the college paper, assembled into a claim that is false as a whole, and Dick notes that it "pleased the teller and the hearer." That is a good description of two problems that banks and enterprises now handle daily. One is the embellished application or onboarding file, where every document checks out and the story they tell together does not; it is why background and KYC checks verify the claim itself (the title, the dates, the role) with the book, not merely the existence of the pieces. The other is the confident fabrication of a language model, which often stitches real names and real facts into an untrue whole, and which tends towards answers that please the person asking. A control that knows the truth and stays silent is not a control.
A CLOSER LOOK: the chapter as a whole. (1) Hadley's antisemitism. The chapter shows him at his worst, despising the Golds as victims, "the hitter and the hit," trolls and lumps of dough, and at his clearest, understanding the theory that wants them dead. The novel holds both in one mind and does not let the insight cancel the contempt. That is truthful, and uncomfortable. (2) The method of Succubus. Dick's sharpest point is about form: the most dangerous propaganda is moderate in tone and expensive in look. The Baruch and Morgenthau photographs in a Hollywood article show the method in miniature, every prominent Jew made one conspiracy. (3) Marsha's statements. Her marriage story does not fit Pat's age; her own age is given here as 26 and differently later; she says she met Hadley in June, which the earlier chapter does not show; she does not say how she "fits in with the Society," and Chapter 12 reveals she lives with Beckheim. Every statement she makes should be treated as a move. (4) Beckheim's dates nearly collide (born about 1897, three sons and a dead wife by 1916), and Hadley's later "at least seventy" would resolve them. (5) Dave and the article. Chapter 3's "Dave did an article for her" and this chapter's "Dave did no work for Succubus" do not quite agree. (6) The dictionary. "A male demon who assumes female form" is not the standard definition of succubus; it has roots in medieval demonology and suits the novel's picture of Marsha, but the reader should know it is unusual. (7) What is missing. Hadley left his wife after a bitter quarrel to apologise to friends; he apologised to no one, and the chapter never shows him make up with Ellen. The silence is part of the portrait.
What the chapter sets up. The Tuesday lunch at noon that Marsha's note fixes, which opens Chapter 10; the dollar he owes her and the note in his wallet, which will come back; the idea of sketches of the Society's people "drawn at the meetings," the first real offer to make Hadley the artist Marsha pretends he is; Beckheim recovering in San Francisco before his trip north, whom Hadley will finally meet in Chapter 11; the unanswered question of how Marsha "fits in with the Society," answered in Chapter 12; Fergesson's disgust and his "you head straight for this nut stuff," a mark against Hadley just as the boss is deciding who will run the shop; the new store on Bayshore Highway, which Ellen has heard about from Alice; the copy of Succubus hidden behind the Atwater Kent signs; the Golds, abandoned on Sunday night and still unapologised to; and Hadley's own "long corridor," whose end is "obscured from sight."
Siegfried's Parents
When and where. The chapter runs from Tuesday noon ("The next day, Tuesday"), the day after Marsha delivered Succubus in Chapter 9, through Wednesday morning and into Thursday night of the same week, in a hot July late in the month (Ellen: "It's getting near the end of the month"). The book's chronology puts the Sorrells' Sunday in mid-July 1952, so this is the second half of the month. Times are exact on Thursday: 8:10 a.m. when Hadley takes the pictures; four o'clock when business dies; 5:30 when Olsen drives up; a quarter to six when Marsha comes in; the agreed 6:15 pick-up, which may drag "to six thirty"; and dusk on the coast highway. Places: Modern TV and the Health Food Store beside it in Cedar Groves, with the neon sign of the Bank of America Building visible through the window; the Hadleys' two-room apartment; the store's basement service department; the liquor store a block up where Marsha parks; Cedar Street and the Bayshore Highway; the coast highway along the ocean; a country club at the edge of San Francisco that Marsha links to the Presidio; and finally the city itself, with Marsha's flat ("my place") ahead. Marsha telephones on Wednesday from San Francisco.
People in this chapter. Stuart Hadley, 25, salesman at Modern TV, recently a father, unwell, hungry for Beckheim. Marsha Frazier, editor of Succubus, in pocketless slacks and a checked shirt on Tuesday and a "severe English summer suit" on Thursday; "reddish, sandy hair," a "skull-like" face, "cold gray" eyes; she drives a gray Studebaker. Jim Fergesson, owner of Modern, checking invoices on Tuesday and out in his Pontiac on Thursday. Betty, the wheezing waitress at the Health Food Store, with her "gray-dough face," and an unnamed "colored cook" in the back. Jack V. White, the other salesman: "tall, slim," gray double-breasted suit, "small mustache," a "hand-painted silk necktie," who calls Hadley "Stumblebum" and "old man." Olsen, the repairman, with the store truck. Ellen Hadley, asleep on Thursday morning, then on the phone from her mother's house. Pete, the baby, "yelling his head off." Minor figures: a nervous young couple who will not buy a Zenith; two elderly women with a "little old Scottie radio" in a mesh bag; a man and a boy loading unsold eggs at a roadside truck. Talked about: Theodore Beckheim, staying with Marsha while he recovers from his heart attack; Dave Gold (and Laura, whom Ellen guesses at); Ellen's mother and family; Wagner's Siegfried, Siegmund, Sieglinde, Alberich, Mime; Goethe's Faust and Mephistopheles; Jung; Melville, Borodin, Kafka, Joyce; Sartre; Louis Fischer; and an invented stockbroker.
Edition note: the punctuation of the dialogue. In the book, Marsha's long speeches and Hadley's stumbles are broken by dashes wherever a speaker stops, restarts or is cut off ("They...were married?" is printed with a dash). The words are the book's; only the break marks differ. Where the book itself prints an ellipsis, it is kept.
Tuesday: the narrow rope
The chapter opens on planning. "The next day, Tuesday, he prepared his arrangements well in advance. 'I'm meeting somebody for lunch,' he told Fergesson. 'At noon... okay? I want to get out promptly.'"
"Fergesson, checking over invoices, grunted and nodded without answering." Going down the stairs to the main floor, Hadley sees his position plainly: "he realized what a narrow rope he was walking: there were a dozen ways Ellen could find out. Fergesson might tell her. She might walk in the store looking for him while he was out with Marsha. Dave Gold might mention it to her. And so on."
Then the one clear thought he has in the whole chapter: "He was going to have to bring it out in the open... or forget the whole thing." And the next sentence undoes it: "While he was meditating about forgetting the whole thing, Marsha Frazier strolled into the store."
The secret is chosen before anything happens. Nothing has passed between Hadley and Marsha except a magazine and a conversation, yet he already treats the lunch as something Ellen must not learn about. He lists the leaks as a man lists the risks of an affair: the boss, a walk-in, a friend's chance remark. Dick gives him a fair choice, open or nothing, and then lets the world make it for him: he is "meditating about forgetting" when she walks in, and he does not forget. The rest of the chapter follows the same rhythm. Every time Hadley is about to pull back (on Wednesday when he dislikes her voice, on Thursday when "Common sense told him to get out now"), Marsha arrives, or calls, or waits, and he goes on. The secrecy is also the first link in a chain that ends with a full invented story told to Ellen on Thursday night. Note the name list: Dave Gold is the friend who might "mention it," the same Dave whose house Hadley walked to on Sunday night to apologise (Chapter 8), and whom Marsha will hold up on Thursday as the type of the talking, impotent intellectual.
Marsha at noon
Her clothes are the same as before, and Dick lists them like an inventory: "As before, she wore slacks, tight-fitting and pocketless, a wide leather belt, a heavy checkered shirt. Her reddish, sandy hair was brushed back. She carried a gigantic leather briefcase under her arm. At the front counter she paused, glanced slowly around, and saw him."
Hadley "hurried over. 'Hello,' he said to her. 'I got the magazine.'" She only nods: "Thoughtfully, she nodded. 'Are you able to leave the store?'"
He runs: "Hadley rushed upstairs, told Fergesson he was leaving, got his coat, and rushed down the steps to the front of the store." She has already gone back out; "she stood in the entrance, expressionless, clearly not wishing to waste time. He joined her breathlessly."
"Where do you want to go?" he asks. "It was just noon; people were starting to appear in quantity. 'How about in here?' He indicated the Health Food Store. 'Okay?'"
Who leads. Every verb in this short scene puts Marsha in charge. She "strolled," "paused," "glanced slowly"; he "hurried," "rushed," "rushed," arrives "breathlessly." She asks a single practical question and does not wait for his coat. The briefcase, "gigantic," is the working equipment of an editor and organiser; she comes to lunch as to a meeting. The costume matters too. Her slacks are "pocketless," which is a small odd detail (nothing carried casually, everything in the case), and the whole outfit is mannish by 1952 standards; on Thursday it will be replaced by a "masculine and expensive" English suit. The Chapter 9 dictionary note on succubus, "a male demon who assumes female form," is quietly kept alive by the way Dick dresses her.
Continuity: the colour of Marsha's hair. Here her hair is "reddish, sandy," and when she leaves the Health Food Store it is "rusty hair a corona around her bleak skull," so within this chapter the colour is consistent. Later in the novel (024 L2311) she is given "a dark tumble of hair." The two descriptions do not fit well together. Either Dick changed his picture of her between drafts, or "dark" refers to shadow and mood rather than colour. The guide flags it and does not resolve it.
The Health Food Store
"Marsha preceded him into the Health Food Store, a stately figure moving slowly toward the tables in the back. She glanced momentarily at the dried root and yam display, then plucked back the chair and seated herself. She was getting a package of cigarettes as Hadley awkwardly sat down across from her."
Betty arrives: "Betty came wheezing over, her gray-dough face twisted into a grimacing smile. 'Morning, Stuart.' She nodded to Marsha. 'Good day, miss. Nice hot weather, don't you think?'" Hadley agrees, "Very nice." "Marsha said nothing."
Betty recites the day's dishes: "There's creamed chipped beef on toast," Betty recited laboriously, "macaroni salad, green peas, and banana cream pudding." Marsha: "Just coffee." Hadley orders the full meal, "and off went Betty to give the order to the colored cook in back. Women were beginning to pour in, well dressed, heavyset, middle-aged. The cackle and bustle had begun."
"What do you think of this place?" Hadley asks. "It's interesting." "The expression on her face showed she was totally uninterested."
A comic setting for a grim sermon. Dick chose the place well. The Health Food Store, where, as he told Sally on Sunday, Hadley sits watching the sidewalk crowds (Chapter 7), and where Ellen once had lunch with him and saw Beckheim's picture in the window (Chapter 6), is a shrine to purity: dried roots, yams, sugarless fruit, a coffee with "nothing unnatural" in it. Its real customers, though, are comfortable middle-aged women in a "cackle and bustle," and its menu is ordinary American lunch food, creamed chipped beef and banana cream pudding, cooked by a Black cook out of sight. Marsha's creed is about to be a creed of purity too: pure blood, pure soil, clean simple ways. Dick sets it among health-food shelves so that the one sounds like the other's crank cousin. Betty's "Morning, Stuart" at just past noon is a small touch of character (she greets every customer the same way), and her "Nice hot weather" is the kind of small talk Marsha refuses to join; Marsha's silence is the first sign that ordinary friendliness bores her.
"What did you think of it?"
"Did you have a chance to examine the magazine?" Hadley says yes, "Without elaborating; he didn't know what to say because he didn't know how he felt. At this point he didn't understand his own mind at all."
"What did you think of it?" "Calm, dispassionate. But a question that he was going to have to answer."
He looks away, at the shelves: "Hadley fooled with the strap of his wristwatch. He studied the sugarless canned fruit displays that were stacked up to the ceiling behind Marsha, shelf after shelf of tasteless peaches, pears, plums, packed in water for diabetics. 'I was surprised,' he said finally. 'It wasn't what I expected.'"
"What did you expect?" "I don't know... a literary journal, maybe. Like our college quarterly."
Then Marsha's face, in close-up: "Marsha smiled her thin, bloodless smile. Her face was skull-like, bony. Eyes set in deep hollows, dark shadow beneath the cold gray pupils. 'No,' she agreed, 'we're not printing poems about Venice and short stories about abortions in North Carolina. It's nice-looking, don't you think? Good paper, good printing. The cover is five-color.'"
"I knew the cover looked unusual."
The food comes, "and Hadley began devouring it. Across from him Marsha sipped her coffee and stonily watched." Has he read the articles? "No... I didn't take it home. I left it at the store." "Why?" "He hesitated. He couldn't answer her truthfully. 'I forgot it,' he said instead. 'I'll take it home tonight.' He couldn't help asking: 'Is there any particular... reason? I mean, is there any rush?'"
Dick then gives the longest piece of inner thought in the lunch: "It sounded wrong to him. But he was uncomfortably aware that he was being subjected to an inquisition; he didn't like it. He felt that he had been tricked in some way; Succubus wasn't what he had expected, and magazines should never contain surprises. In this simple, elemental manner, he was able to feel resentment; it neatly overbalanced his guilt. He tried to pretend that this concerned the business process of buying and selling; he told himself that he was facing a seller who had misrepresented her product. He felt an American indignation. And yet, at the same time, he knew that the situation was infinitely more complex; it wasn't really a business transaction at all. Marsha wasn't trying to sell him a copy of Succubus or even a subscription... She wasn't trying to solicit funds from him. She was after something more greater."
The salesman's frame, and why it fails. Hadley reaches for the only moral language his job has given him: the product was misdescribed, the buyer was tricked. That frame lets him feel "an American indignation," a consumer's anger, which is easier to bear than guilt about what in the magazine attracted him. Dick names the trick exactly: the resentment "neatly overbalanced his guilt." Then the frame collapses, because Marsha is not selling anything. She does not want a subscription or a donation. What she wants is Hadley himself, and the chapter will show it, step by step, through Thursday night. The "college quarterly" line places Hadley socially. He went to college, painted there ("I haven't painted since college," he told Sally on Sunday), and worked on the art staff of the college newspaper, and his idea of a little magazine is a literary one; Marsha's sneer at "poems about Venice and short stories about abortions in North Carolina" is a sneer at that whole world of genteel literary quarterlies, Southern fiction and expatriate verse. Her pride is in the physical object: "Good paper, good printing. The cover is five-color." As Chapter 9 showed, the polish is the disguise.
Edition quirk: "more greater." The book reads "She was after something more greater" (024 L1197). This is ungrammatical. It may be a typesetting error for "something greater" or "something more," or a slip left in Dick's unrevised typescript (the novel was written about 1952 to 1953 and published only in 2007). It is not likely to be deliberate, because the sentence is in narration, not in Hadley's speech. The guide quotes it as printed.
Bran coffee and orange juice
"This coffee is terrible," Marsha says. "It's not real. It's bran meal, health-food stuff. No caffeine." "Why not?" "Hadley waved his hand. 'You know... nothing stimulating. Nothing unnatural.'"
"Marsha got to her feet and crossed the room to the counter. She returned a moment later with a glass of orange juice. Hadley watched with interest as she seated herself. She had carried the glass with grave intensity, as if it were a thing of importance."
"You're worse than I am," Hadley says jokingly. "You take things too seriously." "Do people tell you that?" "They tell me I should go to ball games. Have a good time. Stop worrying and thinking." "Do you go to ball games?" "No." "Marsha nodded. 'You're not frivolous.'"
"He hadn't thought of it that way. 'What do you mean?'"
Fact check: bran "coffee." A caffeine-free hot drink made from roasted bran was a familiar American product by 1952. The best known was Postum, which, in the words of its maker's heritage page, was first made "In 1895... by C.W. Post in a small white barn in Battle Creek, Michigan" (postum.com, "Our Roots"). A South Dakota State University museum note describes it as "a roasted wheat bran, wheat and molasses beverage" and records that Post "believed that caffeine was unhealthy" (sdstate.edu, Agricultural Heritage Museum). The novel does not name a brand, and Hadley's phrase "bran meal" may be his own; but the drink he describes, and the health-food belief behind it ("nothing stimulating"), are true to the period.
The mass and its pleasures
"They're out to enjoy themselves... That's all they're interested in. The whole mass thinks in terms of pleasure. They want excitement, artificial thrills. Amusement parks, fast auto races, baseball games, liquor... cheap sensations. They're jaded, restless, bored."
"Yes," Hadley said.
"But these are symptoms. Only indications... not the cause. On Saturday night the kids wander the streets in packs, looking for something to fill their empty lives. Standing around drugstores, just waiting. Waiting for what? Five, six hours. What for? Girls go by... they just stare."
"They get in fights," Hadley suggests. "I was reading an article in the Chronicle about the rise in juvenile delinquency."
Marsha has an answer ready, and it is the hinge of the lunch: "The fighting is a symptom, too. It's a spontaneous return to a natural primitive combat. Going out in bands, like the ancient tribes. Fused together, loyal to each other, by blood oaths. Doing battle, the medieval concept of valor... virtue in the old Roman sense: manliness. The trial, the purification, metal against metal."
From complaint to celebration. Marsha's first sentences could come from any 1950s editorial: mass culture is empty, teenagers loiter, delinquency is rising. Hadley agrees, and he has read the same thing in the San Francisco Chronicle. Then she reverses the sign. The gangs are not a disease to be cured; they are a healthy instinct breaking through, "a natural primitive combat," "blood oaths," "manliness." Her Latin is correct in one respect: Roman virtus does come from vir, man, and meant courage before it meant goodness. But the use she makes of it is the old one of every movement that praises the street fight: violence as purification. The phrase "metal against metal" leads her straight to Wagner's sword. The reader of Chapter 8 should hear an echo. Bob Sorrell's story of knocking out a Mexican American boy with a roll of dimes was told as a boast; here the same kind of fighting is raised to myth.
Context: "the rise in juvenile delinquency." Juvenile delinquency was one of the great American newspaper themes of the early 1950s, and it led the Senate Judiciary Committee to create a Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency in April 1953, chaired by Senator Robert C. Hendrickson, whose hearings on crime and horror comics in New York in April and June 1954, with Estes Kefauver a prominent member, became famous (National Archives, "Congress Investigates"; Library of Congress, In Custodia Legis, "The Senate Comic Book Hearings of 1954"). That subcommittee came a year after this chapter's summer, so it is background to the worry, not something Hadley could have read about. Hadley's Chronicle article is unnamed and cannot be traced, and the guide makes no claim about which one Dick had in mind. The point is that Marsha takes a mainstream worry and bends it toward her own ends.
Siegfried's parents
From "metal against metal" Marsha moves straight to opera: "You know Wagner? The forging of the sword Notung, from the pieces of the old, down in the smoky forges of the dwarf Mime." "She smiled at him over her glass of orange juice. 'Down in the deep, dark caves under the surface of the ground, where Siegfried grew up... not knowing who he was, not knowing his father, his mother.'"
"Fascinated, Hadley asked: 'Who were his father and mother?'"
"His father was Siegmund, a survivor of the ancient warrior race... the Wälsungs. His mother was Sieglinde... Siegmund's sister."
Dick stops the scene on Hadley's body: "'Brother and sister?' Hadley asked huskily, his body suddenly taut, frozen in its motions of eating. 'They... were married?'"
"The cold gray eyes were fixed on him. 'It's an old myth. The Nibelungenlied. The Rheingold... the accursed symbol of all earthly power.'"
Why the fork stops. This is the moment that gives the chapter its title, and Dick marks it with the only physical freeze in the lunch: Hadley, who has been "devouring" his food, goes "taut, frozen in its motions of eating," and his voice turns "husky." Nothing in the conversation explains so strong a reaction to an opera plot. The explanation is in Chapter 7. There Hadley met his sister Sally again after two years and saw "his own self in her pale blue eyes," her hair "an ultimate extension... of his own botched mop"; there they sat alone together, and her childhood memories of him were memories of a closeness that neither of them names. In Chapter 8 he wanted "both of them, his sister, too" out of his life. A brother and sister who become lovers and whose child is a hero is exactly the story that Hadley cannot hear calmly. Marsha's "cold gray eyes were fixed on him": whether or not she knows about Sally, she sees that the remark has struck, and she moves on at once to gold and power, keeping him "spellbound." Siegfried's other trait matters too: he grew up "not knowing who he was." By the end of the chapter Hadley will be wondering whether "a man could never know who or what he was."
Fact check: Notung, Mime and the Wälsungs. Marsha's outline is close to Wagner, with one slip of emphasis. In Act 1 of Siegfried, as the Metropolitan Opera's synopsis summarises it, Mime reveals that "he found Sieglinde in the woods, where she died giving birth to Siegfried," shows the fragments of Siegmund's sword, and cannot remake it; Siegfried "forges it himself, splits the anvil, and leaves" (Met Opera synopsis archive, Siegfried). So the sword is reforged in Mime's smithy, as Marsha says, but by Siegfried, not by the dwarf. "Wälsungs" (the Völsungs of Norse legend) is right: Siegmund and Sieglinde are twins, fathered by Wotan while he lived among men under the name Wälse, and their union is the centre of Die Walküre. Wagner's Siegfried does grow up in Mime's forest cave knowing nothing of his parents. What Marsha gets wrong is the next sentence (see below).
Fact check: "The Nibelungenlied." The incestuous twins are Wagner's, drawn from the Norse Völsunga saga, not from the medieval German epic Marsha names. In the Nibelungenlied, Siegfried's parents, Siegmund and Sieglind, are simply the king and queen of Xanten in the Netherlands, a married royal couple who are not brother and sister. Marsha runs together three different things: the Middle High German epic, the Norse sagas, and Wagner's four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen, whose first part is Das Rheingold. Her "It's an old myth" covers the join. This was already verified for the earlier edition of this guide and is repeated in the table at the end of the chapter.
The gold and the curse
"'Earthly power,' Hadley echoed slowly. He was spellbound. 'It was cursed? Why?'"
"Because it was stolen. The lecherous dwarf Alberich stole it from the Rheinmaidens... He had hidden himself to watch them bathe. He stole the gold... They put a curse on it. Whoever owned the gold would be destroyed."
"'Did it work out?' He was like a little boy at the lap of his mother, hanging on every word of her tales."
The fairy tale with a payload. Dick builds this scene as a story told to a child. Hadley asks "Did it work out?" like a boy at bedtime, and the narration says so: "like a little boy at the lap of his mother." The mother image is important, because Marsha has just described a mother who was also a sister, and because the book has given Hadley a sister who mothered him. Within that warm frame Marsha does three things. She makes the gold the "symbol of all earthly power," so the myth becomes a myth about money. She makes the dwarfs the villains, greedy and "lecherous." And only then, "matter-of-factly," does she name them: "it's been said that the dwarfs represent the Jews." The hedge ("it's been said") lets her deliver the slur while keeping her hands clean. The last step ties the slur back to the start of the lunch: Mephistopheles tempts Faust with "the fleshly joys and pleasures we were just discussing," that is, with the amusement parks and liquor of the mass. Mass culture, money and the Jews are welded into one enemy in about a minute of talk.
Fact check: who curses the gold, and why the gods age. Marsha's plot is muddled at three points. (1) In Wagner, Alberich does not hide to watch the Rhinemaidens bathe. He woos them openly; they mock him; and then, in the Met synopsis's words, "Frustrated by his unsuccessful attempts to catch one of the girls, Alberich curses love and steals the gold." (2) The Rhinemaidens put no curse on it. Alberich himself curses the ring after Wotan takes it from him: "Shattered, Alberich curses the ring: ceaseless worry and death shall be the destiny of its bearer" (Met Opera synopsis, Das Rheingold). (3) The ones who quarrel over the gold are not dwarfs but the giants Fasolt and Fafner: "Alberich's curse claims its first victim as Fafner kills his brother in a dispute over the treasure" (same source). And the gods grow old not "because of the gold" but because the giants carry off Freia, whose apples keep them young: "Freia's golden apples had kept the Gods eternally young; in her absence, they begin to age and weaken" (richard-wagner.org, The Rhinegold). Marsha's version moves every evil onto the dwarfs, which is exactly the move she needs for her next sentence.
A CLOSER LOOK: "the dwarfs represent the Jews." The reading Marsha cites is real, which is what makes it dangerous in her mouth. Wagner was an open antisemite: his essay "Das Judenthum in der Musik" ("Jewishness in Music") appeared in 1850 under the pseudonym K. Freigedank and was reissued under his own name in 1869. Whether Alberich and Mime are coded Jewish caricatures is an old and unsettled argument. Theodor Adorno argued that they were, and Marc A. Weiner's Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (1995) extends the case through the music and staging; against this, no document by Wagner names them as Jewish. Scholars who make the case argue it as a criticism of Wagner. Marsha uses it the other way round, as if the caricature were a truth the opera had found out. On Faust: nothing in Goethe's text makes Mephistopheles a Jew. He is a devil, "the spirit that always denies," and the antisemitic reading of him belongs to later propaganda, not to Goethe. Marsha's "You know" in both cases asks Hadley to accept a claim as common knowledge.
"It was she. And it was himself, too."
The next paragraph is the centre of the chapter, and Dick writes it entirely inside Hadley:
"There it was. His flesh turned cold as he heard her words. Because it was as if he were speaking, as if a portion of him were saying it. A terrible image of him had sprung out; there it sat, across from him, slim and smiling. Succubus... a male demon in female form. Yes, it was she. And it was himself, too."
"His dread grew... but he could not end the fascination. She said it aloud; but that portion of him that believed those things was afraid. It couldn't speak out: it was too weak. It didn't dare. In spite of himself, he still admired her."
The double. This passage explains why Marsha has power over Hadley, and it is not a romantic power. She frightens him because she says aloud what "a portion of him" already thinks. The magazine's title now returns with its dictionary meaning from Chapter 9: a succubus is "a male demon who assumes female form," and Hadley sees across the table not a woman but a male part of himself dressed as one, "slim and smiling." The novel has used this mirror before. In Chapter 7 he "saw his own self" in his sister's eyes. Now he sees his own self in a stranger, and the self he sees is the part that hates. Note what the passage does not say. It does not say Hadley believes what Marsha believes. It says a portion of him believes "those things," that this portion is "too weak" to speak, and that he admires her for daring. That is the exact shape of his attraction to Beckheim as well: a man who says out loud, with a whole hall listening, what Hadley would never dare to say.
A hawk, and a conscience
He fights back in the only way he can, by naming it: "'You know,' he said hoarsely, 'you're vicious. Like a hawk, a bird of prey. I sit here listening because I can't help it... because something in me responds.'"
"'I know,' Marsha said evenly. 'You do respond.'"
"And I know it's wrong. I know it's the vicious part of me, the part that wants to be strong and cruel. Like you... without feeling. Indifferent to others. To suffering and weakness. Contemptuous of weakness."
"You just don't want to hear," Marsha disagreed. "You're afraid. It's fear that makes you resist."
"'No,' Hadley answered. 'No, it's conscience.'"
Fear or conscience: the argument in four lines. This exchange is the moral argument of the novel in miniature, and both sides are stated fairly. Marsha's case is the case of every movement that sells cruelty as honesty: your revulsion is only fear; you would agree if you were brave; the decent instinct is cowardice wearing a mask. Hadley's case is that the revulsion is conscience, a real moral sense that recognises the "vicious part" of himself and refuses it. He describes that part with precision: it wants to be "strong and cruel," "indifferent to... suffering and weakness," "contemptuous of weakness." Readers who know how the novel ends will see that this is a prophecy. In the last part of the book Hadley acts from the vicious part, toward Marsha herself (Chapter 16) and toward the people closest to him. Here, at least, he has named it and called the other thing "conscience." The weakness in his position is the one Marsha will exploit all chapter: he admits that "something in me responds," and she simply agrees with him ("You do respond"), which makes his own words her evidence.
The naked king
"Is it a truth?"
"Tell me what you say. Not just you... everybody, in the privacy of their homes and offices. What do you say about the Jews?"
Hadley's answer is a sidestep: "We're depraved, too. All of us, a little."
Marsha goes on: "There's a thing called folklore. You know what that is? A body of knowledge evolved by the collective mind of the people. The wisdom of the race. Their highest wisdom..."
Prejudice dressed as courage. Marsha's parable turns Andersen's story inside out. In the fairy tale, the child sees what is really there (no clothes) and everyone else has been pretending to see what is not. In Marsha's use of it, the "truth" that everyone supposedly knows and only says "privately" is a prejudice about Jews, and the brave child is whoever says it in public. The argument works by assuming its conclusion: if people say it at home, it must be true, and only cowardice keeps it out of print. That is the claim Succubus is built on. Hadley's "Is it a truth?" is the right question, and Marsha does not answer it; she asks him instead to confess what he says in private. His reply, "We're depraved, too. All of us, a little," is ambiguous and probably meant to be. It can be read as "we all say ugly things about Jews in private, so we are all a little depraved," which admits the private talk but calls it depravity rather than truth; or as a deflection, "we are no better than the people you blame." Either way it refuses her frame. Then she shifts ground to "folklore," as if what people repeat must be "the wisdom of the race."
Fact check: Andersen and "folklore." "The Emperor's New Clothes" is by Hans Christian Andersen, first published in Copenhagen on 7 April 1837 (Hans Christian Andersen Centre, University of Southern Denmark, work register). Marsha turns the emperor into a "king" and leaves out the swindlers who started the deception, which is the part of the tale that would fit her badly: in Andersen, the lie is sold by confidence men to people afraid of looking stupid. The word "folklore" was coined by the English antiquary William John Thoms in a letter to The Athenaeum signed "Ambrose Merton," printed on 22 August 1846, where he proposed "Folk-Lore," "the Lore of the People," in place of "popular antiquities" (Library of Congress, Folklife Today, "The Two First 'Folk-Lore' Columns"). Thoms meant customs, ballads and sayings. "The wisdom of the race" is Marsha's gloss, and it turns the people into a "race."
Shadow-self and "Telepathies"
"Hadley sat silent and horrified. But this personification of his shadow-self hypnotized him; the words she said cut all the way down inside him. The shameful depths were out in the open; she made no secret of what she was, how she felt. No guilt. No sense of sin."
"'You're a strange person,' he said, troubled. 'You're like one of those... what do you call them? Telepathies.'"
"She didn't laugh. 'Yes, we have a rapport. The racial unconscious links the two of us. You think of yourself as a unique entity; you think you're cut off, alone. Separate and terribly isolated.'" "Yes."
"You're not. Only the external shell is unique... Deep inside you're part of a collective entity. Haven't you ever felt that? Haven't you felt that this separation is artificial? That you shouldn't be cut off?"
"He nodded."
Edition quirk: "Telepathies." The book reads "You're like one of those... what do you call them? Telepathies" (024 L1275). The right noun is "telepaths." Because Hadley is groping for the word ("what do you call them?"), the error is most likely his, a deliberate fumble that Dick gives him, rather than a misprint. Dick would write about telepaths for the rest of his career, which makes the stumble a small joke in a mainstream novel.
"Shadow-self": Dick borrows Jung before Marsha names him. The narration's phrase "personification of his shadow-self" is Jungian. In Jung's psychology the shadow is the part of the personality a person refuses to own, and it tends to appear in dreams and fantasy as a figure of the same sex, a dark brother. Dick's choice of the term fits the "male demon in female form" exactly: Marsha is the shadow in a woman's shape. Then Marsha herself reaches for Jung, and her version is political. Hadley's loneliness, which the novel has shown since Chapter 1, is real; she offers to cure it by telling him that his separateness is "artificial," that "Only the external shell is unique," and that underneath he belongs to "a collective entity" bound by "the racial unconscious." The offer is belonging, and the price is the self. "He nodded" is all Hadley says. It is the most dangerous nod in the chapter.
A CLOSER LOOK: "racial unconscious." Jung's term was the collective unconscious, a layer of the psyche common to all human beings, filled with inherited patterns he called archetypes. Marsha's "racial unconscious" bends the idea toward race. It must be said, though, that the bend was not hers alone. In 1934, in "The State of Psychotherapy Today," published in the Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie while he presided over the society that issued it, Jung wrote that "The 'Aryan' unconscious has a higher potential than the Jewish; that is both the advantage and the disadvantage of a youthfulness not yet fully weaned from barbarism" (as quoted in Jewish Currents, "Carl Jung and the Question of Anti-Semitism," and in Andrew Samuels, "Jung, anti-semitism and the Nazis"). Late in life Jung wrote of that article to Siegmund Hurwitz: "I have also written nonsense. Unfortunately, that [article] was nonsense" (same Jewish Currents article). So Marsha's misuse has a foothold in Jung's own worst pages, which is exactly why a reader in 1952 could have taken her for a serious student of him. The novel does not mention the 1934 article; it simply puts the phrase in the mouth of a woman who edits a racist magazine.
Jung "all the way to China"
"Hadley didn't know what to say. 'What you're telling me sounds so...' He didn't know that, either. 'What the hell does it mean?'"
"Don't you feel you understand it? Not verbally, maybe. Don't you feel it makes sense?"
Fact check: Jung, China, India and the book. Jung never travelled to China. His contact with Chinese thought came through the sinologist Richard Wilhelm, with whom he published The Secret of the Golden Flower, a Taoist meditation text with Jung's commentary (German edition 1929; the English translation came in 1931). Jung did travel to India, in the winter of 1937 to 1938, for the Indian Science Congress, and he wrote on yoga and Indian holy men. Modern Man in Search of a Soul is a real book, a collection of essays "first published in 1933" in English, "translated by W. S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes" (Wikipedia, citing the Kegan Paul and Harcourt editions; HathiTrust catalogue record). "Classical Chinese verse" is Marsha's invention or confusion: Jung worked with the I Ching and Taoist texts in translation, not with poetry. She is right that he "went back... to the alchemists": his Psychology and Alchemy appeared in 1944. "Brahminism" is an old Western term for Hindu religion.
"Not verbally, maybe." When Hadley asks plainly what it all means, Marsha does not explain. She asks whether he feels it makes sense, "Not verbally, maybe." This is the third time in the lunch she has moved the argument away from facts. The naked-king parable avoided "Is it a truth?"; folklore was offered as wisdom because it is repeated; now understanding is to be felt rather than spoken. The reading list (Jung, Buddhism, the Tao, alchemy) works as a credential. It tells Hadley that this is learning, not hate, and the names are impressive enough that he cannot check them over a lunch plate. On Thursday she will add Melville, Borodin, Kafka, Joyce and Sartre, with the same purpose and the same rate of error.
Sick all his life
Hadley's answer to "Don't you feel it makes sense?" is confusion and illness: "I don't know. I've had a lot on my mind the last few weeks. Pete being born, this business with Beckheim. And I haven't felt good. I think there's something wrong with me. Fergesson wants me to go see his family doctor, but what the hell... I've seen so damn many doctors in my life. And none of them ever did me any good."
"There's nothing wrong with your body," Marsha said. "You're physically sound. You're very well made, in fact."
"What is it, then?" "Your soul."
Dick gives Hadley's reaction a full paragraph: "Nobody had ever told him he had a soul. He felt like bursting out laughing. What was that? Where was it? Maybe he had lost it; maybe it was already gone. Maybe somebody had stolen his soul. Maybe he had sold it or lent it and forgotten about it. Maybe people weren't born with souls anymore. But the word wasn't empty; he responded to it. It flattered him, as if in some way he were responsible for having one. Or having a soul was unique: an achievement. He felt as if she saw something in him nobody else saw. Something they had overlooked."
"He grinned. 'Words like soul, heaven, devil. They don't mean anything anymore.'" "Beckheim uses them."
"'I know.' He twisted. 'But there it seemed all right. Like in church... everybody listening, the auditorium, a big man like that. But here, in broad daylight.' He indicated the shelves of fruits, dried tubers, jars of vegetable juices. 'It's... unreal. It's like trying to watch a movie in broad daylight... You can still see the images on the screen, but they're not convincing.'"
"You mean, the illusion is gone." "I guess so."
"Perhaps soul isn't an exact word. It's hard to find exact words for spiritual things. All right, Stuart Hadley. We will use any word you want." "Her cold gray eyes danced. 'What would you prefer?'"
The full-name tic. "All right, Stuart Hadley." Marsha calls him by both names again and again in this chapter ("Stuart Hadley, you have so much to learn!"; "He's a powerful man, Stuart Hadley"). The narration also tends to use the full name. In her mouth it has the effect of a summons or a diagnosis: she is addressing the whole case, not the man. The same habit runs through the later chapters, and the guide's notes on Chapters 11 and 12 follow it.
"You just met me!"
Hadley will not choose a word. "I wouldn't prefer anything. I don't feel well. My head hurts and my stomach's upset." He looks at his wristwatch: "And I'm going to have to get back to the shop."
"No... I always feel sick. There's always something wrong with me." He tried to express himself. "I've been sick all my life."
"Marsha nodded. 'I know.'"
That small "I know" sets him off: "'What do you mean? How do you know?' He was infuriated; his core of rage boiled out. 'You don't know anything about me! You just met me!'"
The rage, and what it means. "His core of rage boiled out" is the same rage Sally talked about in Chapter 7, the temper that she and their father "teased" out of him and that she wanted him to get back. It surfaces here for the first time in front of Marsha, and the trigger is precise: not her racism, not her contempt for the poor, but her claim to know him. "You just met me!" is his healthiest sentence in the chapter. It is also the sentence that will lose the argument by the end of it, when he decides that "maybe a man could never know who or what he was; he had to be told." I always feel sick").
Rebirth and the soil
Marsha does not answer his anger. She widens it until it covers everyone:
"She pointed through the window of the Health Food Store, at the big neon sign of the Bank of America Building. 'Like that. Money and gaudy signs. Commercialism, filthy factories... We have to get back to the soil. We need roots... we have to find the land again. Rediscover the simple old ways.'"
"Hadley responded. But he was frightened. 'But all this hate... you hate the Jews.'"
"We hate venality and greed. We hate corruption. Is that bad?" Her voice remained calm, thin. "We hate rich plutocrats who grind down the people and make them robots. Slaves in factories. The machine is destroying man. The Communist ideal: every man the same... ground down to a common denominator. The brutal, bestial factory worker, covered with soot and grime. Like an ape in the forest."
Two enemies at once. Look at how Marsha answers "you hate the Jews." She does not deny it; she renames it. "We hate venality and greed... rich plutocrats." The word "Jews" disappears and the old code words for them take its place, so that Hadley's question is never answered and the hatred is turned into something no one could object to ("Is that bad?"). Then, in the same breath, she attacks the other side: "The Communist ideal: every man the same." The plutocrat turns workers into "robots"; the Communist turns them into apes "covered with soot and grime." Her contempt for the factory worker is total, even while she claims to defend "the people" from those who "grind" them down. This is the shape of a whole family of movements between the wars: against finance and against socialism, for blood, soil and "the simple old ways," and contemptuous of the actual workers in whose name it speaks. Dick sets the speech in a health food store, among dried roots and yams, with the Bank of America sign glowing in the window, and lets the comedy of the setting do some of the criticism.
A CLOSER LOOK: soil, roots and the "third position." Marsha's vocabulary is the vocabulary of the German völkisch movement and of Nazi "blood and soil" (Blut und Boden) ideology: the healthy countryside against the corrupt city, roots against rootlessness, "rebirth" against decadence, and the figure of the rootless financier, coded as Jewish, behind both capitalism and Bolshevism. The pairing of "rich plutocrats" with "the Communist ideal" as twin enemies is the core of what fascist movements called a "third position," neither capitalist nor Communist. The novel does not endorse any of it. Dick lets Marsha say it in full, at length, in a calm voice, so that the reader can hear how reasonable it can be made to sound, and he gives the honest reply to Hadley: "But all this hate." Readers should also note how much of the speech overlaps with ordinary complaints of the 1950s, about advertising, commuting, factory work and mass entertainment. That overlap is the trap the chapter is about. The diagnosis can be partly right while the cure is poison.
Fact check: the Bank of America sign. Marsha points "through the window of the Health Food Store, at the big neon sign of the Bank of America Building," so the store looks across the street at a bank in Dick's invented Bay Area town. The bank itself is real and well chosen: it was founded in San Francisco in 1904 by A. P. Giannini as the Bank of Italy, a bank for small immigrant customers, and took the Bank of America name in 1930. A Californian symbol of money is the nearest thing Marsha can point to, and she points at it from a shop that sells dried roots.
"Beckheim is a Negro"
Hadley asks the question he really cares about: "Does Beckheim feel this way? All these things... Succubus. Is this what Beckheim stands for?"
Using the prophet. This is the most revealing speech Marsha makes about her own movement, and it answers Hadley's question by not answering it. She does not say that Beckheim shares her views. She says he is "a Negro," with a "But" after it that tells the reader how she ranks him; that he "thinks like a primitive" and "is a primitive"; that he "isn't aware" of the "forces of resurgence" using him; and that this makes him valuable. The idea is that the racists can ride a Black preacher's apocalyptic movement without his knowledge, because a "primitive" cannot see what he is being used for. Readers will recognise both the contempt and the plan. The words "He speaks for all of us" turn Beckheim into a voice for people who think he is beneath them. Dick holds off, for the moment, on whether Beckheim is as unaware as she thinks. The answer comes in Chapter 11, when Hadley meets him, and in Chapter 12, when the reader learns that Marsha and Beckheim are lovers.
Fact check: Parsifal, "the guileless fool." In Wagner's last opera, Parsifal (first performed at Bayreuth in 1882), the knights of the Grail wait for a saviour promised in a prophecy: "Durch Mitleid wissend, der reine Tor", which is usually rendered "Made wise through compassion, the pure fool" (wagnerwelten.de, Parsifal). Marsha's "the pure child, the guileless fool" is a fair paraphrase of "der reine Tor," but she leaves out the first half. In Wagner, the fool can save the knights only because he learns compassion, "Mitleid," by suffering with the wounded king. Marsha's version of salvation has no compassion in it; she has just called the poor apes and the weak contemptible. The choice of Wagner is consistent: the Ring at the start of the lunch, Parsifal near the end. It is also pointed. Wagner's operas were the favourite music of the Nazi leadership, and a reader in 1952 would have caught the association.
"It's like sitting down in the same room with God"
"Hadley didn't answer. He finished his plate and pushed it aside. As he began on the banana cream pudding he said: 'What does Beckheim think of your magazine?'"
"Marsha frowned. 'He's interested.' She sounded vague. 'He may finance it.'" "Is that why..."
"We've been discussing it from time to time. The matter comes up... There's a great deal we don't agree on." She smiled. "He's a powerful man, Stuart Hadley. He's a great man... more than a man. He's a force."
"Hadley said: 'It must be an experience to meet him.'" "'It is.' She sounded as if she meant it. 'It's like sitting down in the same room with God.'"
What the vagueness hides. This short exchange carries more plot than anything else at the lunch. "He may finance it" tells Hadley, and the reader, that Succubus is looking for Beckheim's money, which explains why a racist editor is courting a Black preacher. "Is that why..." is Hadley starting to ask whether that is why she is close to Beckheim, and Marsha cuts across it. "She sounded vague" is the narration's warning that she is hiding something. "There's a great deal we don't agree on" is the first admission that her account of Beckheim as a passive vessel may not be the whole truth. Then she switches from "a primitive" to "more than a man... a force," and to "the same room with God." The two pictures of Beckheim, the childlike primitive and the godlike force, are hard to fit together. Only the second one, Dick notes, she "sounded as if she meant." Hadley, eating his pudding, is not watching the contradiction; he is hearing the promise.
The cocoon
"I'll wait until you have a chance to read over the magazine. You may want to ask me about different parts of it."
"'Maybe.' He was noncommittal. Suddenly he demanded: 'What do you care if I read it? What's it matter to you?'"
"'Yes,' he said slowly. 'But I didn't think anything would come.' He continued: 'I didn't have much hope.'"
Marsha answers that he should have. There is "so much to the world," she says, "it's big and full of things," and she talks of a deep store of energy at the bottom of everything, "the world's full of energy and excitement. Once you cut through and get down all the way, strike the bedrock that's down there, under all the lies..."
The promise of a new self. "What do you care if I read it?" is again a good question, and once more Marsha answers with flattery: "I think you have the potentialities to comprehend it." Then comes the offer that every conversion makes: your old life was "suspended time," a waiting room, and a new self is about to break out. It is the only moment in the scene when Marsha loses her cool. Her "hollow cheeks" go "bright red," and she speaks "with a rush of excitement." The flush is worth noticing. Her interest in Hadley is not only political, and the next chapters will show it. Hadley's answer is the saddest line in the lunch: "I didn't think anything would come... I didn't have much hope." It confirms what Marsha has guessed: he has been waiting, since the beginning of the novel, for something to happen to him, and he has just agreed that she might be it.
Edition note: the mixed metaphor, and a paraphrase. Marsha's images do not hold together. A cicada nymph does climb out of its old shell, but a grub does not live in a cocoon; a caterpillar spins a cocoon, or forms a chrysalis, and a butterfly comes out of a chrysalis, not a cocoon. Grubs are beetle larvae. The muddle is probably Dick's characterisation of Marsha (her learning is again a little off) rather than an error he would have fixed, and the guide flags it without correcting it. In the sentence that follows "it's big and full of things," the book uses a word for life-energy that this guide's style rules keep out of its own prose; it is paraphrased above, and the rest of the speech is quoted as printed.
"So you can meet Theodore Beckheim"
"She pushed back her chair and abruptly got to her feet. Matter-of-factly she said: 'What night will you be free? I'll pick you up and we'll drive up the coast, along the ocean highway to San Francisco.'"
"'Why?' he demanded, astonished." "So you can meet Theodore Beckheim." "Hadley could say nothing."
"'He's staying with me,' Marsha continued, 'while he recuperates from his heart attack. I want you to meet him before he leaves.'"
"She walked rapidly out of the store without looking back. A trim, boyish shape, sharp chin up, rusty hair a corona around her bleak skull. In a moment she was gone."
"Dazed, Hadley continued eating his banana pudding, an empty reflex of raising and lowering his spoon. Marsha had disappeared. An empty orange-juice glass was all that remained; she had gone as suddenly as she had come."
The hook is set last. Marsha has spent the whole lunch on ideas. The thing that actually binds Hadley comes at the very end, standing up, "matter-of-factly": a night drive and a meeting with Beckheim. It is a classic close. She leaves no time for a reply and walks out "without looking back," so the offer hangs in the air. "He's staying with me" is a huge piece of information delivered in passing: the prophet, recovering from the heart attack that Chapter 9 reported, is living in her house. Hadley does not ask what that means. The exit portrait repeats the details of her entry, "boyish," "sharp chin," "rusty hair," but adds "a corona around her bleak skull." A corona is a halo or the sun's ring of fire; "bleak skull" is a death's head. The image is a saint and a skeleton in one. The empty orange-juice glass and Hadley's "empty reflex" of eating close the scene on two empty things.
Continuity: the heart attack. "While he recuperates from his heart attack" matches what Marsha told Hadley at the store in Chapter 9: "He had a heart attack early this month... He's resting up... then he's going north, to Sacramento, up to Oregon and Washington." What is new is "He's staying with me." In Chapter 9 she said only that he was "In San Francisco." "Before he leaves" gives the invitation a deadline, the oldest way to stop someone thinking twice.
"Marsha Frazier would get in touch with him"
"He wondered, fearfully, what night he would be free. To meet Theodore Beckheim... He was overwhelmed. For that, he would do almost anything. Put up with anything. The avid hunger grew... to meet Theodore Beckheim. To speak to him, be with him. Touch him. Talk to him face-to-face."
"Thursday? Ellen was taking Pete over to her family's house. But how was he supposed to get in touch with her?"
"Obviously, he didn't have to. At the realization he felt a shudder of dread. The ominous specter, the fascinating but dangerous presence against which his physical system was already moving to protect itself, would see to that. Marsha Frazier would get in touch with him."
The body knows first. Two things in this short passage are central to the novel. First, the hunger is for Beckheim, not for Marsha, and it is described in physical terms: "be with him. Touch him. Talk to him face-to-face." Hadley's longing for the preacher is the strongest feeling he has in the book, stronger than anything he feels for his wife or child, and it is a longing for a father, a leader and a certainty all at once. Second, his body has already taken sides against Marsha: "his physical system was already moving to protect itself." All through the novel, Hadley's illnesses, headaches and stomach pains have been his body's way of saying no when his mind cannot. Dick makes that explicit here. The "her" in "how was he supposed to get in touch with her?" is Marsha, though the sentence before is about Ellen; the slip of the pronoun is natural in Hadley's thinking and is left as printed.
Wednesday: the phone off the hook
"Wednesday morning when Stuart Hadley came out of the TV demonstration room with the polish rag and bottle in his hands he discovered the telephone lying off its hook." Nobody was using it and nobody was in sight. "An uneasy, foreboding sensation moved through him; he sensed an invisible presence waiting silently, patiently, at the other end of the line. Waiting for him."
"'What's this?' he said to Jack White when White came up from downstairs. 'You on the phone?'" "'Oh,' White said, blithely remembering. 'It's for you. I forgot; some dame calling.'"
"Chilled, Hadley lifted the receiver to his ear. The hum of the wire was the only sound: the dame had hung up."
"How long ago was that? Was it Ellen?" "It was maybe fifteen minutes ago," White said, "and it wasn't your wife. I'm sorry, Stumblebum. I went downstairs looking for you and I got to talking to Olsen." "He straightened his hand-painted silk necktie, a tall, slim man in a gray double-breasted suit, small mustache, shoes neatly shined. 'My fault.'"
Jack White, the witness. Dick takes care to give White a full portrait here: the "hand-painted silk necktie," the "gray double-breasted suit," the "small mustache," the "shoes neatly shined." White is the store's other salesman, the one who calls Hadley "Stumblebum," and up to now he has been a bit player. He is now set up as a witness. He has taken the first call, he knows it "wasn't your wife," and on Thursday he will see Marsha in the store and hear what she says. Later (Chapter 17) it is White's knowledge that reaches Fergesson. "The polish rag and bottle" are the dull furniture of Hadley's day; the call breaks into the most routine job in the shop.
"May I speak to Mister Hadley, please?"
"An hour later she phoned back. This time Hadley got it. With a quake of dismay he recognized the calm, dispassionate voice as soon as she asked: 'May I speak to Mister Hadley, please?'"
"'It's me,' he answered, with reluctance. His distaste surprised him; did he dislike her that much? Deep in him the aversion to the woman was growing. More and more he sensed the unwholesomeness in her, the frigid mal-growth, as if she were reptilian, snakelike. But she was his only link with Beckheim; and he had to reach the big black man." "'Where are you calling from?' he demanded."
"San Francisco. I called before, but the man... whoever he was... never came back. I debated for a while... It occurred to me you were trying to pull out of this. But then I decided it was probably an accident... You couldn't be certain it was me."
"'It was an accident,' Hadley said huskily."
The snake and the link. "Reptilian, snakelike" makes Marsha the serpent of the Eden story, after the succubus and the hawk of Tuesday: three animal or demon images in two days, each colder than the last. "Frigid mal-growth" is a medical image, a tumour. The sentence that follows decides everything, and its grammar shows how: "But she was his only link with Beckheim; and he had to reach the big black man." The "But" overrides every warning before it. Marsha's own words are a small study in pressure. "It occurred to me you were trying to pull out of this" puts the idea of backing out into words so that Hadley has to deny it, and "It was an accident" commits him a little further. The phrase "pull out of this" also assumes there is a "this" he is already in.
Thursday is settled
"What night are you free?"
"Thursday. Ellen's taking Pete over to her family's. Like I said, I'm not expected to go along. Her family never liked me very well." "His voice was monotonous; if he expected to meet Beckheim he would have to put some life into it. 'So we can get together... right?'"
"Silence for a moment. He could imagine her: hollow-eyed bony face, gazing straight ahead, pale lips slightly parted, analyzing his words, the tone of his voice. Reading into them first this and then that; trying to decide how he felt. It would be quite an accomplishment... His emotions were a tangled mess. And Marsha probably sensed that; she seemed to know what was going on inside him."
"All right," she agreed. "You get off at six?" "A little after. I have to count the money and reset the register tape. Turn things off, close up the store. Say, about six fifteen."
"I'll come by with the car. Stuart?" "What?" "Bring some of your work."
"For a moment he couldn't imagine what she meant. Then he realized that she was talking about his paintings. 'Okay,' he said; he couldn't help responding. Then he sensed how difficult it would be to get them out of the house. 'I mean...'"
"'I'll see you at six fifteen,' Marsha interrupted coolly. 'Good-bye, darling... I have to scoot.' She hung up."
Continuity: "Like I said." Hadley tells Marsha "Like I said, I'm not expected to go along." On the page he has said no such thing to her. At Tuesday's lunch the Thursday visit appeared only in his thoughts after she left ("Thursday? Ellen was taking Pete over to her family's house"). Either he mentioned it off the page, at the store on Monday or at lunch, or Dick slipped. It is also the first mention of the coolness between Hadley and Ellen's family: "Her family never liked me very well." Compare the end of the chapter, where Ellen says "Mother says you know you're welcome." Both can be true: the invitation may be politeness covering a cool relation, or Hadley may be inventing an excuse to himself. The guide flags the tension and leaves it open.
"Bring some of your work." The request comes as an afterthought, in a pause, the way Marsha has delivered every important item. It is the cleverest move she makes. The paintings are the part of Hadley that Ellen keeps in a closet and that Sally said on Sunday he should take seriously ("You want a woman who can work with you... somebody with your own ability"). To bring them, he has to smuggle them out of his own home, so the request makes him take the first step of secrecy against his wife, by his own hands, a day early. He sees the difficulty ("how difficult it would be to get them out of the house") and starts to object ("I mean..."); she cuts him off "coolly." "Good-bye, darling" is the first endearment. It is lightly said, a fashionable word of the time, and it moves the relation one more step without asking. "I have to scoot" makes her a busy woman with no time for his doubts.
The Scottie radio
Two kinds of service. Dick cuts Hadley's thoughts into the routine of the counter. The old women "stood grimly," the radio is "a little old Scottie," and Hadley serves them "automatically," "absently." The job runs on its own while his mind is elsewhere, which is the condition Marsha will describe on Thursday as a man disguised as his economic function. Note the escalation of the key sentence across the chapter: "For that, he would do almost anything" on Tuesday; "Anything would be worth doing, to meet Theodore Beckheim" on Wednesday. The "almost" has gone. The book does not explain "Scottie." It may be a trade name or a set decorated with the Scottish terrier, a popular motif of the 1930s, but the guide has not traced a model by that name and leaves it open. "Little old" at least makes it a dated set, the kind the shop repairs rather than sells.
Thursday morning: the bundle
"The pictures stayed downstairs in the service department, stuck upright among the overstock television combinations and spin dryers, until Thursday night."
A theft from his own home. Dick writes the scene like a burglary: "very quietly," "tiptoed," the door locked behind him, the bundle carried off to a hiding place. The man is stealing his own past from his own wife while she sleeps, and the narration is honest about what he feels: "squandering his life and intimate world and personality." "Intimate world" is the key phrase. The paintings belong to the marriage; Ellen knew him as the young man who "was going to be an artist" (her words to Jim Fergesson in Chapter 6), and the pictures have been kept in their closet, "dusty," for years. The image of Ellen asleep, "sprawled out," "one arm extended limply," breathing in a "low, harsh panting," is neither tender nor cruel; it is the view of a man who has already half left. Then the pictures are put away among "overstock television combinations and spin dryers," art filed with the unsold goods in a shop basement. They will spend most of the next week in an even stranger place: Marsha's car (Chapter 12) and then her hands, until they come back to him in Chapter 15.
Thursday at Modern TV
"While Hadley was showing a Zenith table-model seventeen-inch TV to a young couple, Marsha entered the store. He was aware of her without turning around; the unique flow of her slim shape through the doorway told him she had arrived. He glanced at his wristwatch. It was a quarter to six: she was going to be hanging around for half an hour."
"At the end of the counter, Marsha took up a silent, watchful station. Like a permanent fixture, she stood with her arms folded, purse resting beside the tube checker, leaning slightly against the cash register. Her lean body bent on an angle, she contemplated the back of Hadley's neck and the young couple buying the Zenith TV: all three of them could feel her eyes."
"'We'll have to think it over,' the young man said, grinning nervously. 'A lot of money for these days.' His wife tugged urgently at his arm. 'We'll be back... we just have to give this some thought... You know.'"
"Hadley gave them his card and followed them out onto the glaring sidewalk. He lingered a moment before returning. It would have been nice to stay there, watching the people going past, smelling the hot July air. But he had to go back: he knew it. There was no choice. When he reentered the store she was still watching him. She hadn't taken her eyes from him."
The sale that Marsha kills. Dick uses the TV screens again as a sign. In the daylight they "shrank to gray squares of unconvincing shadow," exactly the image Hadley used on Tuesday for Beckheim's words "in broad daylight": "like trying to watch a movie in broad daylight... not convincing." The world of images is weak in the sun. Into that afternoon Marsha walks, and the sale dies under her eyes. The young couple are the people the shop exists for, a young married pair weighing "A lot of money for these days," and the wife tugging her husband away is reacting at least partly to the woman watching them from the cash register. "All three of them could feel her eyes." Then Hadley follows the couple out onto the sidewalk, as if he could leave with them. "It would have been nice to stay there" is his last moment of freedom in the chapter, and "There was no choice" is not true. It is how he feels.
Continuity: who is minding the store. Dick is careful about the staff on Thursday: Fergesson is out in his Pontiac from four, delivering to "a lifelong friend"; Olsen comes back at five thirty with radio chassis; White and Hadley close up. So the boss is absent when Marsha comes in, and the only witness is White. This matters later. The "lifelong friend" is one of the small signs in the novel of Fergesson's local ties, the network of personal trade on which a small shop depends.
"Is that the kind of people you make most of your sales to?"
"'Hi,' he said gruffly." "'Is that the kind of people you make most of your sales to?' she asked him, without preamble."
"He shrugged peevishly. 'It varies.' From the cash register he got the day's tags and began sorting them. 'You're early; I won't be off for half an hour.'"
"I have to pick up some things at the drugstore; I thought I'd drop by and make sure you hadn't forgotten. You have your pictures?" "In the basement." "Got a cigarette?"
"Resigned, he offered her his pack. She accepted one, and he lit it for her. At the far end of the store stood Jack V. White, hands behind his back, feet apart, like a soldier at ease. Watching Hadley and Marsha with frank interest, with a salesman's morbid, boundless curiosity."
"'Who's that man?' Marsha asked, her eyes narrowing." "Jack White. A salesman... like me." "Is he the one who answered the phone the first time I called?" "That's him."
"'Fine,' Hadley said, with relief. She wouldn't be hanging around after all. 'I'll close up as fast as I can. Don't get worried if I'm not there by six fifteen... Sometimes it drags on to six thirty.'" "Marsha nodded and headed briskly out of the store."
Edition quirk: "Jack V. White." Here, and only here in this chapter, White gets a middle initial: "Jack V. White." Elsewhere he is "Jack White" or "White." The initial reads like a deliberate touch, the full name a salesman would print on his card, and the guide does not treat it as an error. It is noted so that readers do not take it for a second character.
Closing up
"Half expecting her to come back, he kept a watchful eye on the door until the last customer was out and the lock had been thrown. There was no sign of her. Down came the shade; the night-light was plugged in; Jack White checked all the sets downstairs and pulled the main switches; at the cash register Hadley began counting the money into gray cloth bags."
"'Another day, another dollar,' Jack White announced as he passed the counter on his way out. 'Can you finish up alone, old man?'" "Sure. You run along."
"White lingered. 'Who's the dame?'" "'What dame?' Hadley was instantly on his guard." "The one that was in earlier. The one who's waiting for you up the block."
"Hurriedly, Hadley carried the money to the safe, tossed the sacks in, and locked it. He spun the new tape into position and closed up the register. A brief check showed that everything was turned off and in its place; he got his coat from the back closet and followed in the steps of Jack White, out the door and onto the sidewalk."
"The air was hot, stuffy, and unpleasant. The glare gave him a headache. Wishing the woman hadn't appeared, wishing he were too sick to make it all the way to her car, he tried the door handle to be certain it was locked and then walked slowly up the sidewalk toward the liquor store."
White's reading of the evening. White gets it wrong and right at once. He thinks it is a cheap affair ("While the cat's away, eh?"), which is not what Hadley thinks it is; and he is right that Hadley is going out with another woman while his wife is away, which is exactly what is happening. His joke, "remember to keep your pants buttoned," is coarse but prophetic, given what happens in Marsha's car on the coast road in Chapter 12. White remembers, too: in Chapter 17 he mentions to Fergesson the tall, skinny woman who came for Stumblebum. The closing-up routine is told step by step (shade, night-light, main switches, money into "gray cloth bags," the safe, the new register tape), the same steps Hadley listed to Marsha on the phone: "count the money and reset the register tape. Turn things off, close up the store." Dick lingers on the routine because it is the last ordinary thing in the day. After it, Hadley walks "slowly," "wishing he were too sick" to reach her car. His wish to be ill is the body's no again, as on Tuesday.
"You forgot your pictures"
"The first thing Marsha said to him was: 'You forgot your pictures.'"
"He slowly returned to the store. His feet dragged; only with great effort was he able to turn the key in the lock and get the door open. Fatigue from eight hours of work lay over him, and his hungry, queasy stomach growled fretfully. As he was passing the counter on his way out, the package of pictures under his arm, the phone began to ring."
The forgetting. Hadley carried the paintings to the store at eight ten and then left them in the basement at six fifteen. Marsha's first words are not a greeting but a correction. "Common sense told him to get out now, while it was still possible" is the narrator's clearest statement that he can still refuse. He does not. "Shrugged, defeated" is the moment of decision, and it is made in front of a car radio blaring Dixieland, music Marsha would presumably file with the mass and its "thrills." The walk back, with dragging feet, is a second chance; the phone gives him a third.
Fact check: Dixieland on the radio. A Dixieland band on a Bay Area car radio in 1952 is exactly right for the place and time. San Francisco was the centre of the "revival" of traditional New Orleans jazz: Lu Watters' Yerba Buena Jazz Band began the movement in 1939 to 1940 and drew big crowds through the 1940s, and Turk Murphy and others carried it on into the 1950s (Stanford University, San Francisco Traditional Jazz Foundation collection, collection overview). Dick, who worked in a Berkeley record shop, knew this music well. Marsha does not choose it; it is simply on.
Ellen calls
"Three rings passed before he answered it. The chances were that it was only a customer wanting to know why Olsen hadn't returned her set. It might be Fergesson calling in about something. Or it might be Ellen."
"It was Ellen."
"'I'm glad I caught you.' Her voice came, soft and sad, from a vast distance. 'How are you?'" "'Great,' he answered. He pulled the phone cord out as long as he could, to where he was able to reach out and lock the front door. He didn't want Marsha showing up while he was talking to Ellen. 'What do you want?'"
"'I wondered...' She hesitated wistfully. 'Stuart, why don't you come over? Mother says you know you're welcome. And Pete's yelling his head off.'" "Why?" "'Because he misses you.' She added plaintively: 'I miss you, too. Please, won't you come on over? You don't have to stay; just come by and be with us for a little while.'"
"The cloying, childish tone of her voice, the pleading female sound that he hated so much, decided him."
The last chance, refused. Dick has built the chapter so that the phone call comes at the worst possible moment and offers the best possible way out. Ellen offers him everything he would need to back out with honour: he is "welcome," his son "misses" him, he does not even have to stay. And it is her pleading that decides him the other way. "The cloying, childish tone... the pleading female sound that he hated so much" is one of the harshest sentences the novel gives Hadley about his wife, and it is a little unfair to her: Ellen's sentences are plain and kind. What he hates is being needed. The physical detail tells the rest. He stretches the cord to lock the front door so that Marsha cannot walk in, which means he is locking his lover-to-be out to protect his lie to his wife, and locking himself in with the lie. "Soft and sad, from a vast distance" puts Ellen's family house, a few miles away, at the other end of the world.
The stockbroker
"Staring fixedly up at the calendar over the tube chart, Hadley answered: 'Honey, I can't. I told some people I'd be over for dinner. I'm late as it is. If you'd called me sooner...'"
"'What people?' There was no suspicion in her voice, only unhappy interest. 'Dave and Laura?'"
"'Customers I know,' Hadley explained, his eyes still on the calendar. He might as well do a good job of it. 'I don't think you ever met them. I was up at their place a couple of times, showing them an RCA combination. They're nice people, about ten years older than us. He's a stockbroker.'"
"'What... time will you be home?'" "'I'm not sure. He'll probably try to sell me some stock... It might be late.' He added: 'Maybe I'll stop off for a drink on the way back. I'm beat; I can use a drink.'"
"Worry clouded his wife's voice. 'How much money do you have? It's getting near the end of the month... I'm all out of the money you gave me.'"
"'I've got plenty,' Hadley said impatiently; his ears had picked up the sound of a car motor outside. A car was coming into the yellow freight zone. 'Look, honey, I've got to run. If I have a chance I'll call you later, from their place.'"
"'Have a good time,' Ellen said faintly, miserably. 'And don't eat any onions; you know how sick you are if you eat onions. Promise me?'"
"'So long,' Hadley said brusquely, and broke the connection."
Anatomy of a good lie. Hadley lies well, and the novel shows how. (1) He fixes his eyes on something neutral, "the calendar over the tube chart," and keeps them there, as liars often do. (2) He blames the other person a little: "If you'd called me sooner." (3) He makes the invented people strangers to her ("I don't think you ever met them"), so she cannot check. (4) He fills in concrete, boring detail, the kind that sounds true because no one would bother to invent it: "an RCA combination," "about ten years older than us," "a stockbroker." (5) He covers the late return in advance, with "He'll probably try to sell me some stock" and "Maybe I'll stop off for a drink." (6) He promises a call he does not mean to make: "If I have a chance I'll call you later, from their place." The narration's "He might as well do a good job of it" shows that he knows what he is doing. Ellen's replies are the measure of the betrayal. Her first guess is "Dave and Laura," their only friends; there is "no suspicion in her voice, only unhappy interest"; her worry is about money, because it is "near the end of the month" and she is "all out"; and her last thought is his stomach: "don't eat any onions." The stockbroker is a pointed invention: he gives himself a respectable, moneyed evening of the kind Ellen might be proud of, the opposite of the Watchmen and of Marsha.
| What Hadley tells Ellen | What is true |
|---|---|
| "I told some people I'd be over for dinner." | Marsha has arranged a drive to San Francisco and a drink at her apartment; no dinner is mentioned. |
| "I'm late as it is. If you'd called me sooner..." | He has just left the paintings behind on purpose or by chance; it is Marsha who is waiting in the freight zone. |
| "Customers I know... I don't think you ever met them." | He met Marsha at the Golds' apartment on Monday night (Chapter 9) and had lunch with her on Tuesday. |
| "showing them an RCA combination" | He is bringing his paintings, which Marsha asked to see. |
| "about ten years older than us. He's a stockbroker." | The company is a single woman, an editor of a racist magazine, and a preacher recovering from a heart attack. |
| "If I have a chance I'll call you later, from their place." | There is no call in the chapter. The evening goes on to Marsha's flat and Beckheim (Chapter 11) and ends in her car on the coast road at night (Chapter 12). |
| "I've got plenty" (money) | Ellen is "all out" near the end of the month; whatever he has, he keeps. |
The gray Studebaker
"He hurried to the door with his pictures, unlocked it, and stepped outside. Marsha's gray Studebaker was parked in the freight zone. He locked the door of Modern TV and strode over. 'What kept you?' she asked, opening the door for him."
"He slid in beside her. 'Phone call. Some customer wanting to know about his set.'"
Two lies in two minutes. Hadley lies to his wife about Marsha and then, a moment later, lies to Marsha about his wife: "Some customer wanting to know about his set." The second lie is smaller and less necessary, which makes it more telling. He is not choosing Marsha over Ellen so much as hiding from both of them; each woman is to get only the part of him that suits her. Note that Marsha "opening the door for him" reverses the usual courtesy of the time: she drives, she opens the door, she leads. The "yellow freight zone" is where she parks, against the rules, as she does everything. A gray Studebaker matches her cold gray eyes; she is consistent even in colour.
Bayshore and the brown fields
"The car backed out expertly; a moment later they were moving down Cedar Street toward Bayshore Highway. A solid wall of traffic lay ahead of them: grim commute traffic on its way home from San Francisco."
"'We won't have to tangle with that,' Marsha said; 'it's all coming this way.' She made a rapid, efficient left-hand turn onto the highway. 'Hardly anybody going up the coast but us. This is the best time to travel.'"
"As they drove along the highway, Marsha asked: 'Why did you come? You don't like me... you find me unpleasant.'" "It was a struggle," he admitted. "I'm right, aren't I? You don't enjoy being with me."
"'It's not pleasant, no. That doesn't mean I don't like you.' He laughed tautly. 'My God, how could it be pleasant? Look at what I'm doing... I may be giving up my wife and son, my family. What am I getting out of it?'"
"Marsha considered. 'Well? What do you think you're getting out of it? You must think you're getting something.'"
"It was a good question. He watched the brown fields go by on both sides of the car, flat and bleak and deserted. Now and then a faded, drab sign flashed past: WHEN YOU'RE IN SAN FRANCISCO STOP AT THE MARK HOPKINS... NEXT TIME TAKE THE TRAIN... MOBILGAS AND MOBILOIL ARE YEARS AHEAD."
The question she makes him answer. Marsha drives, and she asks the questions. "Why did you come? You don't like me" is a test: she says the hostile thing first, so that he must either deny it or explain why he came anyway. He does neither cleanly. "It's not pleasant, no. That doesn't mean I don't like you" is a man trying to keep both doors open, and then comes the most honest sentence he speaks to her: "I may be giving up my wife and son, my family." He knows exactly what he is risking, a full hour after lying to Ellen on the phone. Marsha's answer ("You must think you're getting something") turns his doubt back on him. The billboards answer for him in their own way. They are the voice of the world he is driving away from: a luxury hotel, the railroad, the oil company, each one telling the motorist what to do next.
Edition quirk: the broken billboards. In the source file the three signs are split across three short lines in the middle of words and phrases: "WHEN YOU'RE IN SAN / FRANCISCO STOP AT THE MARK HOPKINS...NEXT TIME TAKE / THE TRAIN...MOBILGAS AND MOBILOIL ARE YEARS AHEAD" (024 L1537 to L1541). The breaks are almost certainly a layout artefact of the file, perhaps from a run of small capitals in the printed book, and not Dick's lineation. The guide quotes the signs as continuous text and notes the breaks here.
Fact check: the Mark Hopkins, and the other two signs. The Mark Hopkins Hotel is real: it "opened on December 4, 1926, at One Nob Hill, 999 California Street," built by the mining engineer and hotel investor George D. Smith on the site of the railroad baron Mark Hopkins's mansion, which burned in 1906 (Historic Hotels of America, "InterContinental Mark Hopkins San Francisco"; Historical Marker Database, "Mark Hopkins Hotel"). Its rooftop bar, the Top of the Mark, was famous by the 1940s. Mobilgas and Mobiloil were the trade names of Socony-Vacuum's petrol and motor oil, sold under the red flying horse; the guide has not traced "years ahead" as a recorded slogan and treats it as Dick's. "NEXT TIME TAKE THE TRAIN" is the sort of sign a railroad, in this corridor the Southern Pacific, put up along highways to win back drivers; it has not been traced to a particular campaign either.
Continuity: Bayshore, then the coast. The route as written is hard to follow. They take Cedar Street to the Bayshore Highway, the main road up the bay side of the Peninsula to San Francisco, and the commute traffic is coming "this way," out of the city; that fits. But Marsha says "Hardly anybody going up the coast but us," and the next paragraph after Sartre has them "At dusk... up the coast highway," along cliffs above the ocean. The Bayshore does not run along the ocean. Somewhere off the page they must have crossed the Peninsula hills to the coast road (today's Highway 1), which would add a good deal of time and would explain why they reach the cliffs only "At dusk." Dick does not show the crossing. The town of Cedar Groves is fictional, so the guide does not try to fix the route.
A two-room apartment and a two-bit band
"Well," he said, "I get to meet Beckheim." "'Is that all?' Marsha asked brightly. 'That's the only reason you're here?'"
"'Surely you have more imagination than that! Can't you think up something better to do with your time?' She indicated the bundle of pictures. 'What about those?'"
"'That's all in the past. Let's face it... I'm not an artist: I'm a television salesman. Look at this suit and tell me if it's the kind of suit an artist would wear.'"
The life he is escaping. Hadley's picture of his ordinary evenings is precise and full of contempt: the "two-room apartment," TV or Time, a babysitter if they can find one, a "two-bit band" with "green tuxedos," "middle-aged couples pushing back and forth." It is the mass culture of Marsha's lunch speech, seen from inside, and he describes it in her terms. Note the reason he gives first: "I get to meet Beckheim." For him the point of the evening is still the preacher, not the woman, and Marsha, "brightly," wants more. Her "What about those?" points to the bundle of pictures on the seat, and his reply is the most self-aware line he speaks: "I'm not an artist: I'm a television salesman. Look at this suit." He puts his identity in his clothes. Marsha will spend the rest of the drive telling him the suit is a disguise.
Melville, Borodin, Kafka, Joyce
"After a moment Marsha said: 'Deep down inside of you, you know you're not a television salesman. Do you think a man is nothing more than the job he holds? Herman Melville was a customs inspector. Borodin was a doctor. Kafka worked in a bank. James Joyce was a Berlitz School translator.'"
"'All right,' Hadley said irritably. 'I get the idea.'"
"'Well,' Hadley admitted bitterly, 'sometimes I feel as if I'm carrying out a deception. Sure, I hate my job. Sure, I don't get any satisfaction out of it... but what choice have I got? I'm not there because I like it.'"
"Quit." "And do what? Starve?" "You won't starve... nobody starves in a modern industrial society. Start painting again... You have the ability."
Fact check: the four men with day jobs. Marsha's list is half right. Herman Melville did work as a customs inspector in New York, from 1866 to 1885, after his novels stopped selling. Alexander Borodin was a physician and, above all, a research chemist, a professor at the Medical-Surgical Academy in St Petersburg, who composed in his spare time. Franz Kafka did not work in a bank. He worked in insurance, first briefly for the private Assicurazioni Generali (1907 to 1908) and then for fourteen years at the state Workers' Accident Insurance Institute in Prague (1908 to 1922) (Franz Kafka Museum, Prague, biography). James Joyce was not a translator for Berlitz; he taught English at the Berlitz schools in Pola and Trieste from 1904. The "Berlitz School translator" and "Kafka worked in a bank" are the kind of slips a person makes who has the stories second hand, which fits everything else in her talk.
A CLOSER LOOK: what Communist doctrine says about jobs. Marsha's claim that "The whole Communist doctrine is to get people to identify themselves with their economic function" is very nearly the reverse of what Marx wrote. In The German Ideology (written 1845 to 1846), Marx and Engels describe communist society as one where nobody is fixed in a single job, and where it is possible "to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic" (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, Part I, marxists.org). Marx's complaint against capitalism was that it makes the worker into a mere function of production. Marsha's line also adds "in this country as anywhere else," which turns the American consumer economy into a kind of Communism too. That is the third-position trick again: capitalism and Communism are made into one enemy, and her movement stands outside both. Her "nobody starves in a modern industrial society" is also worth noticing from a woman with a "masculine and expensive" suit, and Hadley's question is the fair one. He has a son a few weeks old and a wife who is "all out" of money near the end of the month.
"These canvases may be blank"
"'I can tell they're good,' Marsha said calmly, 'because I know you. They would be an expression of yourself, of your inner being. And I know what that's like.'"
Praise without evidence. "These canvases may be blank" is Hadley's best line in the chapter, and it goes straight to the point: she is praising work she has not seen. Marsha's reply admits the point and ignores it: "I can tell they're good... because I know you." It is the same move as "I know" at lunch, the claim to know him that made him shout "You just met me!" This time he does not shout. "Flattered and disgusted at the same time" is his state through the whole chapter, and "He wanted to hear words like that" explains why the flattery works even when he sees through it. "A parody of praise" is exact: the form of a compliment with no content. Her "And I know what that's like" hints at an artistic life of her own; Chapter 15 will reveal that she once wanted to be a feature writer.
A spectator to her own actions
"Nettled, he gave up and didn't comment. He retired into himself and brooded. She was serious, almost fervent... but there was no telling what went on inside her. What she did and said was separated from what she really was; there was a lapse of time, an open gap: there was no spontaneity. Everything was measured, studied out in advance."
"Marsha was a spectator to her own actions: she was above, remote and detached, putting a life-sized puppet through its paces. Here was real deception. Marsha was tangent to the outside world at no point: she was capable of breaking off totally, a sphere that revolved smoothly, silently, without touching the universe. Suspended in an invisible medium: an eighth of an inch from the world of matter."
The puppeteer and the sphere. This paragraph is Hadley's clearest insight into Marsha, and Dick gives it the chapter's most striking images. The first is the puppet. She is "a spectator to her own actions," "putting a life-sized puppet through its paces"; her words are "measured, studied out in advance," with "an open gap" between what she says and what she is. The phrase "Here was real deception" answers Hadley's own confession a page before ("I'm carrying out a deception"): his is the ordinary gap between a man and his job, hers is a gap between a person and her whole self. The second image is geometrical. A sphere that is "tangent to the outside world at no point" touches nothing; it floats "an eighth of an inch from the world of matter." Marsha does not touch reality, and so reality cannot correct her. That is the shape of every closed ideology. The precise figure, "an eighth of an inch," is very like Dick, and later novels return again and again to people and worlds that sit a fraction off the real one. The insight does not protect Hadley. He sees the puppet show and stays in the car.
How Marsha works on Hadley: the method, in order. Taken together, the three days of the chapter show a clear sequence. It is useful to set it out, because the same sequence recurs in the next two chapters, and because it is the method of more than one kind of recruiter.
- Secrecy first. Hadley arranges the Tuesday lunch "well in advance" and hides it from Fergesson and Ellen; Marsha never asks him to, but every later step depends on it.
- A plain, private setting. The Health Food Store, coffee and orange juice; nothing that looks like a meeting.
- A shared grievance. Mass culture, crowds, amusement parks: things Hadley already dislikes.
- Learning as credential. Wagner, Goethe, Andersen, Jung, the Tao, alchemy; later Melville, Kafka, Joyce, Sartre, Louis Fischer. Errors and all, the names make the talk feel serious.
- The payload, "matter-of-factly." "It's been said that the dwarfs represent the Jews," set inside a story told as if to a child.
- Agreement with his resistance. "I know... You do respond." His doubts become her evidence.
- Belonging. "Only the external shell is unique... a collective entity."
- Diagnosis. He is not ill; his "soul" is. Only the movement can treat it.
- A new self. The cocoon, the cicada, "so many things to throw off!"
- Access to the leader, with a deadline. "So you can meet Theodore Beckheim... before he leaves."
- A small task that isolates. "Bring some of your work," which he can do only by smuggling the pictures out past his wife.
- Identity reassigned. "You're an artist, of course... face your destiny." By the end he thinks a man "had to be told."
Sartre and the renegade intellectual
"'Have you ever read Sartre?' Marsha asked." "No."
"I have a book of his I'll lend you... it's very small. The fundamentals of existentialism. It's a philosophy that's worth looking into...especially for a person like yourself."
"'Why do you say that?' He was curious, since it had to do with him. 'Why me in particular?'" "I'd have to go into what I think are the basic causes of your dilemma." "Go ahead."
She goes on to mock Dave Gold's kind of politics as big gestures and the mouthing of elaborate doctrine, and then tells a story: "You know, Louis Fischer asked an old Russian peasant woman how things had changed for her since the Revolution... am I boring you?" "Hadley shook his head. 'No.'"
"It's action that counts: the deed." This is the end point of everything Marsha has said since Tuesday, and it is the most dangerous idea in the chapter. Her portrait of Hadley is shrewd: "He was curious, since it had to do with him," says the narration, and she feeds that curiosity. He is "a renegade intellectual" in "a powder blue suit and French cuffs," a man in disguise who "can't go back" to the left-wing talk of his college years and Dave Gold's circle, and who does not want the business life either. Every part of it is flattering, and much of it is true; and part of it Hadley built for her himself on Monday night at the Golds', when he told her "I used to be active in literary circles... I was art editor," a claim the narration called "this masterpiece of misinformation" (he had in fact been on the art staff of the college paper). Then she offers a way out of the trap that is neither talk nor business: action. "What you think has no meaning." The cult of the deed, action for its own sake against "Empty, hollow words," is one of the oldest themes of fascist rhetoric. It sounds like courage, and it frees the actor from having to think about what the deed is for. Note the pointed choice of "Dave Gold: impotent and full of words." Gold is Hadley's oldest friend and his link to the left; Marsha is cutting Hadley off from him as surely as the phone call cut him off from Ellen.
Fact check: Sartre's "very small" book. The book Marsha means is almost certainly L'existentialisme est un humanisme, a lecture Sartre gave in Paris in October 1945, published in 1946 and translated into English by Bernard Frechtman as Existentialism (New York: Philosophical Library, 1947), a slim volume. Marsha's gloss is fair as far as it goes: Frechtman's translation has Sartre say "There is no reality except in action," and "man is nothing else but what he makes of himself." But Sartre's point in that lecture is that in choosing for oneself one chooses for all mankind, so that action carries total responsibility; it is the opposite of an excuse to stop thinking. And Sartre's own politics in 1952 make Marsha's use of him strange. In that year he began "Les Communistes et la paix" in Les Temps modernes (from July 1952), the series of essays in which he moved close to the French Communist Party. Marsha is recruiting with a philosopher who was, at that moment, a fellow-traveller of the movement she despises.
Fact check: Louis Fischer and the peasant woman. Louis Fischer (1896 to 1970) was an American journalist who reported from Moscow for The Nation from the 1920s, sympathised with the Soviet experiment through the 1930s, broke with it, and wrote one of the six essays in The God That Failed (1949), the famous collection by former Communists and fellow-travellers; he was never a party member (Princeton University Library, Louis Fischer Papers, finding aid). The anecdote Marsha tells, the peasant woman who says "Well, people talk more," has not been traced in Fischer's writings for this guide. A search turned up a different story from his wife Markoosha Fischer's memoir My Lives in Russia (1944), about a peasant woman who trusted the Soviet government, not one who mocked it. Marsha's version may be her own, or Dick's, or a garbled memory.
(1) "Do I have to? Well, You're a renegade intellectual" (024 L1585): the capital Y after a comma looks like a typesetting or file error, perhaps a sentence break lost after "Well." (2) "and what different would it make?" (024 L1589): "different" for "difference," a plain error, almost certainly a misprint or a slip in the file rather than Marsha's speech. (3) The missing paragraph break. In the book, the very next words after "It's action that counts: the deed." are "At dusk, they drove up the coast highway to San Francisco," in the same paragraph, with no break, though the scene shifts in time and place and the voice changes from Marsha's to the narrator's. A paragraph break, and perhaps a section gap, has been lost. The guide begins a new section at that point. Also note the word Marsha uses for Dave Gold's doctrines, which this guide's style rules keep out of its own prose; it is paraphrased above.
The coast road at dusk
"At dusk, they drove up the coast highway to San Francisco. Few cars were on the road; empty stretches of dim gray pavement writhed in front of and behind the little Studebaker. Tumbled bleak cliffs of scrubby green matting dropped down to the ocean."
"A cold wind whipped through the shrubbery, carrying bits of old newspaper, sticks and weeds, bouncing rusty beer cans and debris down the steep gullies into the leaden surf. Here and there NO DUMPING signs broke the monotony. On the right, sagging telegraph lines swayed dismally. Uniform scorched-brown hills stretched off and were lost in the thickening darkness. No living human was visible anywhere."
"'It's dreary along here,' Hadley remarked." "Marsha agreed as she expertly twisted the wheel. 'Except for that,' she said, pointing ahead."
The countryside she praised. Dick arranges the drive as an answer to Tuesday's lunch. Marsha said "We have to get back to the soil... find the land again." Here is the land: "scorched-brown hills," "leaden surf," "rusty beer cans," "bits of old newspaper," "NO DUMPING signs" that no one obeys. The country is not pure. It is the dumping ground of the city, and "No living human was visible anywhere." The pavement "writhed" like a snake, which recalls Wednesday's "reptilian, snakelike" Marsha, at the wheel. The "rusty beer cans" are a small motif of their own: a beer can figures in Chapter 7, they lie behind Marsha's building in Chapter 11, and "rusty beer" cans fill the backyard Hadley wakes to in Chapter 19.
Fresh eggs, 59 cents a dozen
"Watching the truck fall behind, Hadley was overcome with depression. The dismal, abandoned coastline unnerved him; the man and the boy toiling silently to collect their unsold eggs made him conscious of the futility of endeavor. Undoubtedly, the two of them had stood there all day while luxurious cars raced past."
"'I wonder if they sold any at all,' he said aloud. To him, the isolated man and his son represented all those he cared about, the halt and feeble and helpless about whom he was concerned. The defenseless people Marsha had dismissed with a wave of her hand."
"'Same price as the downtown supermarkets,' Marsha said. 'Strictly sucker stuff.' She shifted into second gear to climb a long grade. 'Motorists are always looking for roadside buys; the country people stick them good.'"
Two readings of one truck. The egg truck is the clearest test the chapter sets, and the two passengers fail and pass it in opposite ways. Hadley sees a father and son ("the isolated man and his son"), a pair that cannot help recalling his own baby son, left this evening at Ellen's family's house, and the "wife and son" he told Marsha a few minutes earlier he "may be giving up." He sees "the futility of endeavor," a whole day of standing while "luxurious cars raced past," and he feels for "the halt and feeble and helpless." This is the Hadley who answered "No, it's conscience" on Tuesday, and the narration is explicit that these are "The defenseless people Marsha had dismissed with a wave of her hand." Marsha sees a pricing scheme: "Same price as the downtown supermarkets... Strictly sucker stuff... the country people stick them good." The woman who praised the soil and the "simple old ways" has nothing but contempt for the actual country people selling eggs by the road. Her reading is also a salesman's reading, a judgment of the margin; it is the cynicism she says the job has imposed on Hadley, and it belongs to her. The detail of the "White urban filth... excreted by passing cars" makes the whole scene a picture of the city dumping on the country, the reverse of her lunch-table myth.
59 cents a dozen Marsha says this is the "Same price as the downtown supermarkets." The Bureau of Labor Statistics' Retail Prices of Food, 1951 and 1952 (Bulletin No. 1141, 1953), Table 8a, "Average retail prices of principal foods in large cities combined, by month, 1952," gives fresh eggs at 67.3 cents a dozen for the year, with the monthly figures (as read from the scanned table) running from 56.2 in March to 59.0 on June 15 and 72.8 on July 15, then up to 80.4 in October. On those numbers 59 cents was close to the city price in early summer, as Marsha says, and somewhat below it by late July, when the chapter is set. The figures are combined large-city averages, not San Francisco alone, and the scanned columns were read by position, so the comparison is rough. Even so, the roadside price looks like a fair deal rather than "sucker stuff," which suits the scene: Marsha's sneer is not borne out.
"Like sliding through a crack in the ground"
"'I don't like it here,' Hadley said. 'It's so damn deserted. What if the car broke down?'" "'It won't,' Marsha said easily."
"But it might. We might get stuck out here; who the hell would come along for us? Nobody. Maybe we'd stay here forever. It's like sliding through a crack in the ground."
"'Someday,' Marsha said, 'all this will be built up. Little ranch-type California suburban homes, with Chryslers parked out front, or maybe Fords. Neat little one-story houses, all alike.'"
Two fears and a prophecy. Hadley's fear of the empty road is a child's fear of being lost, and his image, "like sliding through a crack in the ground," is a picture of falling out of the world, which is exactly what is happening to him socially tonight. Marsha's answer is a prophecy, and Dick lets her get it right: the coast south of San Francisco was built up in the 1950s with exactly the tracts she describes. Her tone is the interesting thing. "Neat little one-story houses, all alike" is said with contempt, in the voice of her lunch speech about the mass. The prophecy also sets up Chapter 16, where Hadley and Marsha drive through San Sebastian Heights, a district of identical tract houses, and the novel sets its city and its suburbs side by side.
Into the city
"The car was entering San Francisco. A long park lay on their right; to the left was a ridge of trees, and beyond that the ocean."
"'This is a country club,' Marsha said. 'Run for the rich colonels from the Presidio. So the plutocracy can have a place to play golf.'"
"'We're here,' Marsha said grimly; her reaction was virtually the opposite of his."
The machine he loves. Dick reverses the values of the lunch completely. Marsha said "The machine is destroying man" and pointed at the neon of the bank; now the whole city appears as "some cosmic mining operation... infinite machinery rising up from the ground," and Hadley finds it "Beautiful." He loves "the sweet din of motors and traffic signals, radios, blaring metallic voices," the noise of the mass. The country, for him, is "the arid land outside the cities, nothing more," which is a flat refusal of her soil and roots. The narration makes the split explicit: "her reaction was virtually the opposite of his." This is the strongest sign in the chapter that Hadley is not a natural convert. What draws him is not her creed but Beckheim, belonging and being told who he is. Her "plutocracy" at the golf course is the lunch speech one more time, aimed now at the army.
Fact check: a country club "for the rich colonels from the Presidio." The Presidio of San Francisco, the army post at the north end of the city, did have a golf course, and its history makes Marsha's joke half true. It "was built in 1895 when Colonel William M. Graham, the Presidio's commander at the time, allowed a group of businessmen known as the San Francisco Golf and Country Club to create a nine-hole course within the post." When the army was slow to let it grow, "Many of the original members thus left the Presidio for a new course near Lake Merced. The remainder formed the private Presidio Golf Club (PGC), whose members were allowed the same 'courtesies and privileges' that officers enjoyed," and from 1913 dues from the club and from "the United Service Golf Club, whose members consisted of commissioned officers" paid for the course (Presidio Golf Course, "Our History"). It opened to the general public only after the post became a national park site in the 1990s. So there was indeed a club where officers and wealthy civilians played together. The geography is looser. A car entering the city from the south along the coast, with "the ocean" to the left beyond "a ridge of trees," would be passing the Lake Merced district at the southwest corner of San Francisco, where the courses include the very club that broke away from the Presidio in the 1900s. The Presidio itself is some five miles to the north. Marsha may be speaking loosely, or Dick may have run the two together. The guide flags the point and does not choose.
"Safety in imitation"
"'You get security from it,' Marsha observed sourly. 'You want to lose yourself in the mass. Make yourself indistinguishable. Safety in imitation.'"
"'Damn it,' Hadley said resentfully, 'I like people. I like to be with them. What's so unnatural about that?'"
"'They're grinding you down! They're pulling you down to their level. Look at you...' She gestured. 'You and your suit and tie and cuffs; you look like a million bright young salesmen, or vice presidents, or stock managers, or any kind of executive. But you're not. Underneath, you're not!'"
"'What am I?' Hadley asked, eternally curious."
"'You're an artist, of course. And you know it. So don't try to pretend! Don't try to creep off and hide in that salesman disguise; damn it, you're going to have to stand up on your own two feet like a man and face your destiny.'"
"I like people." Hadley hanging out of the car window, letting the wind "slap him across the face," is a picture of a young man who is glad to be alive in a city. "I like people. I like to be with them. What's so unnatural about that?" is the simplest defence of ordinary life anyone makes in the novel, and Marsha has no answer to it but repetition: "They're grinding you down!" She returns to his clothes ("your suit and tie and cuffs") and to the crowd ("a million bright young salesmen"), the same points she made on Bayshore and at lunch. Then Hadley asks the question that undoes him: "What am I?" The narration's "eternally curious" is gently mocking; his curiosity about himself is endless and always looks for an outside answer. Her reply, "You're an artist, of course... face your destiny," uses the language of fate and of manhood ("stand up on your own two feet like a man") that her movement uses for everything.
"He had to be told"
"Hadley scowled darkly; he knew it wasn't true...but was it untrue? She believed it, evidently. Maybe she was right and he was wrong. Maybe it took somebody outside to know; maybe a man could never know who or what he was; he had to be told."
The surrender. This is where the chapter has been heading since "You just met me!" on Tuesday. The logic of the sentence slides in four short steps: he "knew it wasn't true"; "but was it untrue?"; "Maybe she was right and he was wrong"; "maybe a man could never know who or what he was; he had to be told." Each step gives up a little more, and the last one gives up the self altogether. A man who has to be told who he is will believe whoever tells him with the most confidence, and Marsha, a moment later, says exactly whom she is taking him to: "Then we'll go over and see Ted." The idea is one Dick returned to all his life, in novels about people who cannot tell whether their memories, or their world, are their own. Here it is put in the plainest possible terms, about a television salesman in a borrowed car.
"Then we'll go over and see Ted"
"'We'll stop at my place for a drink,' Marsha said. She studied her wrist-watch. 'Then we'll go over and see Ted.'"
"Hadley felt nervous cold sweat stand out on his palms. The reality of Theodore Beckheim swam closer; it was beginning to become convincing. Licking his dry lips, he said: 'I don't want to butt in, if he's busy. He's probably got a lot to do.'"
"'Of course. But it's important that you meet him. I've told him about you; he wants to meet you.'"
"Ted." The chapter ends on a name. All through the novel he has been "Theodore Beckheim," the full name on posters and in Hadley's thoughts; now Marsha calls him "Ted," and the small word tells Hadley, if he is listening, how close they are. "He's staying with me" on Tuesday and "Ted" on Thursday together prepare what Chapter 12 makes plain, that Beckheim is living with her. "We'll stop at my place for a drink... Then we'll go over and see Ted" also contains a contradiction, since on Tuesday Beckheim was "staying with me": if he lives at her place, why "go over"? The guide flags the wording; Chapter 11 shows where they find him. Hadley's sweat and dry lips show that the prophet is becoming real, "beginning to become convincing," the same word he used on Tuesday for words that did not convince him in daylight. "I've told him about you; he wants to meet you" is the last piece of flattery, and the most powerful one: the great man already knows his name.
"Hayseed mark"
"Hadley snorted. 'That's a laugh! What kind of a pitch are you trying to hand me? What's in this for you? Christ, I'm not some hayseed mark to be led by the nose up to the knackers, so somebody can fleece me. I'm not walking into the slaughterhouse of my own free will... you must think I'm really in love with myself.'"
The last flash of sense. The chapter's final speech is Hadley's, and it is the sharpest thing he says in three days. He names the whole operation in the language of his own trade and of the farm: "pitch," "mark," "fleece," "knackers," "slaughterhouse." A "pitch" is what a salesman hands a customer; a "mark" is a con man's victim; the "knackers" are the yard where worn-out horses are killed. He sees, for a moment, that he is the customer and that Marsha is selling. And then he gives the game away in the last clause: "you must think I'm really in love with myself." That is exactly what she thinks, and she is right, and the flattery has worked because of it. The protest comes after he has already handed over his paintings, lied to his wife and got into her car; it is the sound of a man objecting on the way in. The "hayseed" is pointed too, after an evening in which Hadley has insisted that he is a city man and the country means nothing to him. Marsha's reply, "I'm leading you away from the slaughterhouse," said "mildly," falls on the line just after this chapter's range in the book (024 L1641), with no section break before the drive into the Hayes district, and the guide's notes on Chapter 11 open with this whole exchange.
Edition quirk: the chapter boundary. In the source file the conversation runs straight on from Hadley's "slaughterhouse" speech (L1639) to Marsha's answer (L1641) and the climb into "the Hayes District" and "Hayes Hole," with no chapter heading or break between them. Readers of Chapter 11 should take its first line as the answer to the speech above.
Tuesday, noon Lunch at the Health Food Store; "It was just noon; people were starting to appear in quantity." Betty greets him with "Morning, Stuart."
Fifteen minutes How long the first call sat off the hook on Wednesday morning before Hadley found it, by White's guess ("maybe fifteen minutes ago").
An hour later Marsha calls back from San Francisco.
Six, six fifteen, six thirty "You get off at six?" "A little after... Say, about six fifteen." "Sometimes it drags on to six thirty." The time it takes to close the store.
8:10 a.m. Thursday He takes the pictures from the closet while Ellen sleeps.
4 p.m. "At four o'clock business began to die"; Fergesson leaves in his Pontiac.
5:30 p.m. Olsen arrives with radio chassis.
5:45 p.m. "A quarter to six": Marsha arrives, half an hour early.
Eight hours "Fatigue from eight hours of work lay over him."
Three rings before he answers Ellen's call.
Seventeen-inch The Zenith table-model TV the young couple do not buy: "A lot of money for these days."
About ten years older The invented stockbroker and his wife, in the lie to Ellen.
Near the end of the month Ellen is "all out of the money you gave me." Hadley's pay, set in earlier chapters, is $250 a month plus 5 percent commission on his own sales, and July is ending.
59 cents a dozen The roadside eggs.
Two or three times How often Hadley has met Marsha: Monday night at the Golds', Tuesday lunch, Thursday evening.
An eighth of an inch The gap between Marsha and "the world of matter."
Marsha's learning against the record
Reading notes. Marsha's errors, gathered in the table below, are part of her character, not slips by Dick: the borrowed learning is name-dropped faster than it can be checked, and nearly every error bends the book toward her argument. The dwarfs get all the evil in the Ring because she is about to call them Jews; Parsifal loses his compassion because her prophet does not need it; Marx is made to say the opposite of what he wrote because her movement must stand against both the market and the Communists; Andersen's swindlers vanish because in his story the liars are the ones selling a fiction to a crowd. "Racial unconscious" bends Jung's collective unconscious toward race, using a door Jung himself left open in 1934. Her talk of soil, roots, rebirth, youth and the deed, set against the city, the machine, money and "Empty, hollow words," is the standard vocabulary of völkisch and fascist movements; it is voiced in the novel, and the narration answers it with the egg truck, the beer cans and Hadley's "I like people." "Telepathies" is probably Hadley's fumble for "telepaths" or a slip in the file, not a word Marsha would use. Where this guide could not trace a claim (the Louis Fischer anecdote, the "Scottie" radio, the Mobil and train billboards) it says so rather than guessing.
| Marsha says | The record |
|---|---|
| The incestuous parents come from "The Nibelungenlied" | They come from the Norse Völsunga saga by way of Wagner. In the Nibelungenlied Siegmund and Sieglind are the married king and queen of Xanten |
| Notung is forged "down in the smoky forges of the dwarf Mime" | Right place, wrong hand: Mime cannot mend the sword, and Siegfried "forges it himself, splits the anvil" (Met synopsis, Siegfried) |
| Alberich "had hidden himself to watch them bathe" | He woos the Rhinemaidens openly, is mocked, then "curses love and steals the gold" (Met synopsis, Das Rheingold) |
| "They put a curse on it" | The Rhinemaidens curse nothing. Alberich curses the ring after Wotan takes it |
| "The dwarfs quarreled over the gold" | The giants Fasolt and Fafner quarrel, and Fafner kills his brother |
| "Because of the gold the gods grew old and withered" | They age because the giants take Freia and her golden apples |
| "it's been said that the dwarfs represent the Jews" | A real and disputed critical reading (Adorno, Weiner), made against Wagner. No document by Wagner says it |
| In Faust, "Mephistopheles represents the Jew" | Nothing in Goethe makes him a Jew. He is a devil, "the spirit that always denies" |
| The "king" with no clothes, and the boy who says what all say "privately" | Andersen's emperor (1837), deceived by swindlers who sell a fiction to a crowd afraid to look foolish |
| Folklore is "The wisdom of the race" | Thoms's "Folk-Lore" (1846) meant customs, ballads and sayings, "the Lore of the People" |
| "Racial unconscious" | Jung's term is the collective unconscious, though Jung himself wrote of an "Aryan" unconscious in 1934 |
| Jung went "all the way to China" | He never went to China. He worked with Richard Wilhelm on The Secret of the Golden Flower (1929) and visited India in 1937 to 1938 |
| Jung "worked with classical Chinese verse" | He wrote on Taoist and I Ching texts in translation, not on poetry |
| Parsifal, "The pure child, the guileless fool" | "Durch Mitleid wissend, der reine Tor": made wise through compassion. She drops the compassion |
| Melville "was a customs inspector" | True: New York, 1866 to 1885 |
| Borodin "was a doctor" | True: a physician and research chemist who composed in his spare time |
| "Kafka worked in a bank" | He worked in insurance, chiefly at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute in Prague, 1908 to 1922 |
| "James Joyce was a Berlitz School translator" | He taught English at Berlitz schools in Pola and Trieste from 1904 |
| "The whole Communist doctrine is to get people to identify themselves with their economic function" | Nearly the reverse of Marx and Engels, whose communist could "hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon" without "ever becoming hunter, fisherman" |
| Louis Fischer's peasant woman: "Well, people talk more" | Fischer is real (The Nation, The God That Failed). The anecdote has not been traced |
| "Sartre shows that a man exists only through his actions" | A fair gloss of Existentialism ("There is no reality except in action"), minus the total responsibility Sartre attaches to choice. In 1952 Sartre was moving toward the Communists |
| A country club "Run for the rich colonels from the Presidio" | The Presidio course did serve officers and a private club, but it lies in the north of the city, not on the southern coastal approach |
| Roadside eggs at 59 cents are "Strictly sucker stuff" | BLS large-city average for 1952 was 67.3 cents a dozen, about 72.8 in mid-July; 59 cents was no rip-off |
A CLOSER LOOK: the chapter as a whole. (1) Prejudice voiced, not endorsed. This is the chapter in which the Society's creed is spelled out, and it contains antisemitism (the dwarfs, Mephistopheles), condescending racism toward Beckheim ("He is a primitive"), contempt for the poor and the crowd, and a myth of blood and soil. None of it is endorsed by the narration. Dick answers each piece with a scene: the egg truck answers the soil, the city at night answers the machine, Hadley's "I like people" answers the mass, and his "No, it's conscience" answers her contempt. The danger for a reader is that Marsha is the most articulate person in the chapter and Hadley is the least, so the argument on the page is lopsided even when the scenes are not. (2) Her errors are a portrait. Marsha is wrong about Wagner, Goethe, Andersen, Jung, Kafka, Joyce and Marx, and the errors all lean the same way. Dick seems to have meant this: the learning is a costume, like Hadley's French cuffs, and her quotations are weapons rather than knowledge. (3) Craft and weak points. The chapter's best things are its rhythms of seduction (the fairy tale at lunch, the double in her eyes, the drive at dusk) and its small observed details: bran coffee, the gray Studebaker, the egg truck, the sodium lamps. Its weakness is length and repetition in Marsha's speeches, which make the same points about the mass three or four times, and some overwritten passages (the mixed metaphor of the cocoon, the "cosmic mining operation"). For a first novel by a young writer this is forgivable, and the repetition is partly the point: indoctrination repeats. White name, the Bayshore and coast-road route, the Presidio's place, the pronoun at L1367, and the lost paragraph break at L1589. (5) Language. The prose is of its time in the words it uses for Black Americans and in its treatment of women's bodies; Hadley's view of Marsha moves between desire and disgust in a way that tells us more about him than about her.
IN PRACTICE: the script of a recruitment, and the controls built against it. Marsha's method in this chapter is a near-perfect example of what fraud and counter-radicalisation teams now call a grooming or social-engineering script, and the parallels are close enough to be useful. (1) Flatter the target's self-image. "You're an artist, of course," "Your soul," "something in him nobody else saw." Romance and investment scams open the same way, by telling the victim that someone at last sees who they really are. (2) Isolate the target. The phone left off the hook on Wednesday, the lie about the stockbroker, the jab at Dave Gold "impotent and full of words": each cuts a tie to a person who might check the story. Fraud training for bank staff lists isolation and secrecy ("don't tell your family," "your bank will try to stop you") as primary warning signs. (3) Create urgency and a meeting with authority. "Name a night," the 5:45 arrival half an hour early, "it's important that you meet him... he wants to meet you." (4) Move from words to "the deed." The final step is always an action: hand over the paintings, sign the card, transfer the money. Since 7 October 2024 the Payment Systems Regulator's mandatory reimbursement rules for authorised push payment (APP) fraud require UK payment firms to reimburse victims up to £85,000 per claim, which has pushed banks to build friction into payments that match a coached pattern. (5) The AI angle. "Maybe a man could never know who or what he was; he had to be told" is the line to keep in mind when designing personalisation, recommendation or "AI companion" systems. A system that tells a lonely user who they are, and grows more confident the more they engage, is running Marsha's script whether anyone intended it or not. Chapter 11 takes up the next stage, the vetting and the membership fee, and its lessons about data gathering are separate from these.
What the chapter sets up. (1) The meeting with Beckheim follows directly: Chapter 11 takes Hadley to Marsha's flat in Hayes Hole, where the prophet questions him, goes through his wallet and signs him up, and "Ted" turns out to be at home in her life in ways Hadley has not yet grasped. (2) The paintings are now in Marsha's car, and there they stay; they are left behind after the coast-road scene of Chapter 12 and come back to him only in Chapter 15, "The Pictures Come Back." The bundle he took from the closet at 8:10 that morning is the hostage of the whole affair. (3) The lie to Ellen, the stockbroker "about ten years older" and his wife, is a lie told straight to his wife about where he is and with whom, and Ellen's reaction to the money and to his absence will shape her part from here on. (4) Jack White as witness. White saw the tall woman come into the store and leave with Hadley, and he remembers her in Chapter 17, "I Want My Money," when he describes her to Fergesson. (5) Marsha and Beckheim. "He's staying with me" and "Ted" prepare what Chapter 12 makes plain, and her grim "We're here" on reaching the city hints at a strain that shows in Chapter 11, when she nearly breaks down as Hadley asks where Beckheim is. (6) The suburbs prophecy. "Neat little one-story houses, all alike" points to Chapter 16 and the tract houses of San Sebastian Heights. (7) The deed. Marsha's "It's action that counts" and Hadley's "slaughterhouse" are the two poles of what follows: the Society will ask for action, and Hadley's half-buried sense that he is being led to slaughter will turn out to be truer than he knows.
The Blue Card
When and where. The chapter follows straight on from Chapter 10, the same Thursday in the second half of July 1952. Marsha and Hadley left Cedar Groves after 6:15 and reached the coast road at dusk; now it is "the evening darkness" in the city, with cold fog in from the Bay. The visit lasts long enough for a drink, one side of an LP, a second side played softly, a private talk in the kitchen, coffee, a long session at the desk and a change of clothes: perhaps two hours. Chapter 12 will put the couple on the road home at "About midnight." Places: the climb through the Hayes District and down into the dip Marsha calls "Hayes Hole"; a concrete passage between two tall wooden houses into a circular parking area before a row of garages; the backyard of weeds and refuse; Marsha's kitchen, hall and living room; and Beckheim's small study with its rolltop desk. Nothing in the chapter happens outdoors after the first page.
People in this chapter. Stuart Hadley, 25, television salesman from Cedar Groves, married to Ellen, father of a baby son a month or so old, who has lied to his wife to be here. Marsha Frazier, editor of Succubus, who drives, commands and, for once, panics; she wears the "severe English summer suit" of Chapter 10 until she changes into a short suede leather jacket at the end. Theodore Beckheim, the preacher of the Society of the Watchmen of Jesus, whom Hadley heard in the Cedar Groves auditorium "last month" (Chapter 5): "old, round-shouldered, and immense," in a threadbare dark blue suit, a hat and a heavy coat, a buttoned vest in summer, a light blue shirt with frayed cuffs and a black tie, black horn-rimmed reading glasses, a heavy gold fountain pen; Hadley guesses he is "at least seventy." Tertullian, Marsha's "immense white wolfhound," who lives on a filthy mattress under the stove. Off stage: Ellen, whose name and age Beckheim asks for; Pete (Hadley says "Peter"), whose picture Beckheim sees; Marsha's children, away at summer camp in Sonoma County; an old Italian girlfriend, now in Oregon, whose snapshot is hidden in the wallet; and a woman who has written Beckheim "a long letter" in "shaky handwriting."
Edition note: the punctuation of the dialogue. As in Chapter 10, the book breaks speech with dashes where a speaker hesitates or is cut off ("I... don't know," "I... suppose so," "Please... "). The words are the book's. Where the book prints an ellipsis of its own (Beckheim's "Society business...of no interest," Marsha's "The Schönberg circle...atonality"), it is kept.
"Up to the knackers"
The chapter opens in the middle of the argument that closed Chapter 10. Marsha has just said that Beckheim wants to meet him, and Hadley turns suspicious and coarse at once: "That's a laugh! What kind of a pitch are you trying to hand me? What's in this for you? Christ, I'm not some hayseed mark to be led by the nose up to the knackers, so somebody can fleece me. I'm not walking into the slaughterhouse of my own free will... you must think I'm really in love with myself."
Marsha answers in five words, "mildly": "I'm leading you away from the slaughterhouse."
Two vocabularies. Hadley's protest is a salesman's protest, and it shows where his mind goes when he is afraid. "Pitch," "mark," "fleece," He assumes that anyone who wants something from him must be selling, and he asks the salesman's question: "What's in this for you?" The image he chooses is farmyard, not religious: a beast "led by the nose" to the "knackers," the trade that slaughters worn-out horses for hides and dog meat. Marsha takes his image and turns it round without arguing. In her version, the slaughterhouse is the life he is already living (the store, the suit, the "million bright young salesmen" she mocked a minute earlier), and she is the one leading him out. She never answers his question about what is in it for her. Note too the last line of his protest: "you must think I'm really in love with myself." He suspects that she is flattering him, and he is right. Flattery has been her whole method since Tuesday (Chapter 10). Knowing it does not stop him from riding on.
The Hayes District and Hayes Hole
"'This is the Hayes District,' Marsha said as the Studebaker reached the top of the hill, wavered, and then began creeping down the far side. 'This big dip is called Hayes Hole. I live three-fourths of the way down.'"
Cars stand on the sidewalks and in driveways. On the far slope there is life, "alive with lights and the movement of traffic": buses "nosed rapidly upward," and at the crossings "swarms of people packed tightly together pushed across to the other side." Marsha signals with "her thin arm," swerves across the oncoming lane "and into a narrow concrete passage between two towering wooden houses," comes out in "a circular parking area, in front of a row of tumbledown garages," drives off the concrete into "the tangle of moist grass and dirt" of a yard, yanks on the brake, and snaps off the motor. "'Well,' she said briskly, 'we're here.'"
Down into the hole. The geography is moral as well as physical. The car climbs out of "modern apartments" into the old city and then goes down, "creeping," into a pit; Marsha lives "three-fourths of the way down," near the bottom but not quite at it. The opposite slope, with its lights, buses and crowds, is the living city; her side of the hole is shuffling figures and pawnshops. The list of stores ("Liquor stores, shoeshine parlors, cheap hotels... pawnshops, bars") is the list of a poor district, and it answers Marsha's sermon in Chapter 10 about the cheap pleasures of the mass. The woman who despises the crowd's liquor and amusements lives among them. Her driving is in character: a hand signal and then a swerve straight through the opposing lane, off the paving and onto the grass. Rules are for other people.
Fact check: the Hayes District and "Hayes Hole." The district is real. Hayes Valley, named for Thomas Hayes, an early San Francisco county clerk and landowner, lies west of the Civic Center, in a low basin between the slope up to Alamo Square and the hills to the south, and in the early 1950s it was a district of old wooden Victorian and Edwardian houses, many divided into flats, with a working-class and largely Black population that grew during and after the Second World War. Dick's "tall old-fashioned wooden houses, joined by a common wall" is exactly the San Francisco row house of that era. The name "Hayes Hole," however, has not been traced as a local nickname; it may be Dick's, or Marsha's private name. Dick knew the city well, having lived in Berkeley and worked across the Bay, but the guide does not try to place Marsha's flat on a map. One later fact is worth knowing: the elevated Central Freeway was pushed through the neighbourhood at the end of the 1950s and cast much of it into shadow, until it was torn down after the 1989 earthquake. The squalor Dick describes in 1952 came before that blow.
The backyard
"'Not very pretty, is it?' Marsha observed."
"Hadley remembered the desolate hills between towns; this was the same abandoned ruin. He shivered and moved toward the apartment building. 'How do we get in?' he demanded impatiently."
The country comes to town. Hadley's own comparison ties this yard to the coast road in Chapter 10, where the "scorched-brown hills" were strewn with "rusty beer cans," old newspaper and refuse dumped under "NO DUMPING" signs. Now the same waste is in the city, behind the house of the woman who preached a return to "the soil." Dick piles up objects that have stopped working: a bathtub upside down and half buried, an incinerator burned out, newspapers gone soggy, a porch rotting. It is the yard of a building nobody maintains, and it is also an image of a culture's leftovers, the "abandoned ruin" that Marsha's movement claims it will clear away. The rusty beer cans are a thread through the novel: they lie by the road in Chapter 10, they lie here, and in Chapter 19 Hadley will wake in a strange room in San Francisco and see "rusty beer cans" in a backyard below his window. Marsha's "Not very pretty, is it?" is a typical move: she says the obvious unpleasant thing first, which makes it impossible for him to say it.
The kitchen
Marsha leads him "up a rickety flight of steps, past lines of flapping, mildewed washing, to a screen door," and into "a kitchen that smelled of bacon grease and rancid vegetables moldering in dark bins. A light came on overhead, naked and glaring. One side of the kitchen was a massive sink and drainboard; dirty dishes were heaped in great piles all along it. Empty beer and wine bottles filled paper sacks on the linoleum floor. The kitchen table was littered with empty glasses and stuffed ashtrays, crumpled cigarette packages, corks and bottle stoppers."
"'In here,' Marsha said, leading him firmly from the kitchen." In the carpeted hall "The odor of an ancient bathroom drifted through the hall, caught and stagnating in its corners." She strides into the living room, reaches for a light cord, and "the living room struggled fitfully into being."
The health-food creed and the bacon grease. On Tuesday, Marsha delivered her creed over orange juice and bran-meal coffee at the Health Food Store, and at the same lunch she told him "We have to get back to the soil... find the land again" (Chapter 10). Her own kitchen is a place of grease, rot, unwashed dishes and sacks of empties. The table, with its "empty glasses and stuffed ashtrays," corks and stoppers, records a good deal of drinking by more than one person. Dick does not comment; he only lists. Later in the chapter the drinks will be sent back to this kitchen on Beckheim's word, and the reader may remember the paper sacks of bottles. The phrase "struggled fitfully into being" is a small joke of creation, a room called into existence by pulling a cord, and it prepares for the strangest room in the chapter.
The blue and green room
"'Sit down,' Marsha commanded. 'I'll pour you a drink. What do you want, scotch or bourbon?'" "'Bourbon,' Hadley murmured as he gingerly seated himself on the Hollywood bed."
Below, "the tinny shrill of a radio"; outside, cars honk and swish; "A dull throbbing rattled the lamp and slate table... probably the refrigeration system of the building. The room was cold and damp."
A bohemian room, built by hand. Every object in this room belongs to the postwar bohemia of North Beach and Berkeley that Dick knew well: hand-painted walls in strong colours, asphalt tile laid by the tenant, cushions on the floor, a low table, a chessboard, a mobile in the manner of Alexander Calder, a brick-and-board bookcase, thumb-tacked prints, piles of little magazines. It is the room of an intellectual who lives on very little and has taste. That matters, because it complicates Marsha. Her politics are those of the far right, but her way of life is that of the avant-garde she claims to despise (on Tuesday she sneered at "poems about Venice and short stories about abortions in North Carolina"). The one thing in the room that is wholly hers is the box of "unassembled Succubuses," printed sheets waiting to be folded and bound by hand, the magazine as a piece of home industry. The "Hollywood-style bed" instead of chairs means there is nowhere to sit except on a bed; every conversation in this room will happen side by side on a mattress. Dick, who was married twice by the time he wrote this book, does not need to underline what that implies about who sleeps here.
Period note: the Hollywood bed and the hand-built room. A "Hollywood bed" in American usage of the 1940s and 1950s was a mattress and box spring on a low metal frame with legs, without a footboard and often without a headboard, so that it could stand against a wall and serve as a sofa by day. It was cheap, modern and associated with small flats. "Asphalt tile" was the standard inexpensive floor covering of the period, laid in squares over old boards. Neither detail is unusual; together with the slate table and the built-in hi-fi below, they show a tenant who has spent effort and some money on a rented flat in a poor building, which is consistent with Marsha's later answer that she only rents it.
Tertullian
"While he was sitting and smoking and waiting, an immense white wolfhound padded in and eyed him. The dog sniffed, and then padded back out."
"'Good Tertullian,' Marsha shouted commandingly at the dog." The dog halts and turns. "'Go back to your pallet and lie down,' Marsha ordered it." It pads into the kitchen, disappears under the stove, and "with a sigh it folded itself up on a hair-filthy mattress and gazed out sightlessly over its pale shaggy paws."
A dog named for a Church Father. The name is a small, sharp joke. Tertullian (Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus, born at Carthage about 155, died after 220) was the first major Christian writer in Latin, a brilliant and harsh polemicist who coined much of the West's theological vocabulary (he is the first known writer to use trinitas of God) and who, late in life, broke with the main Church to join the Montanists, a rigorist sect that believed in new prophecy and expected the end of the world. He is also famous for the line often quoted as credo quia absurdum, "I believe because it is absurd," which he never wrote in that form; what he wrote, in De carne Christi 5, is closer to "it is certain, because it is impossible." A wolfhound called Tertullian, in a flat that serves as the office of a prophetic sect, obeying every command of a woman who rejects mainstream belief: the reader who knows the name sees the household in miniature. The dog's life is the other half of the joke. "Immense," white, a hunting breed, it lives under a stove on a "hair-filthy mattress," comes when called, goes when sent, and gazes "sightlessly." It is the first creature in the chapter to be ordered back to its place by Marsha, and not the last.
"Is this on the level?"
Marsha returns with "two tall whiskey glasses" and sets them on the slate table. "'Okay,' she said... 'Help yourself.'" Hadley takes his "morbidly." "'This place gets me down,' he said abruptly. Restlessly, he twirled the cold glass between his palms. 'Look, is this on the level... or are you stringing me?'"
"Marsha's cold gray eyes met his. 'What do you mean? Is what on the level?'"
"'This business about Beckheim. How do I know you're not stringing me along?' His eyes strayed sullenly around the room. 'I don't see any sign of him; where the hell is he?'"
"'He's not here,' Marsha said sharply. Her voice rose. 'Why should he be here? Do you have some reason to expect to find him here?'"
"'What the hell's the matter?'" "'Nothing. I just can't have you feeling this way. Please...' Abruptly she broke off and turned her head away. 'I don't want to talk about it.'"
"Hadley was shocked; it was the first time he had really seen inside the brittle shell she had erected. Now, briefly, the underlying clinging uncertainty of the woman had emerged." "'You're terrified,' Hadley said, astonished. 'You babble on, tough and ruthless. But you're terrified of my disapproval.'"
What she is hiding, and why the question hits so hard. On a first reading Marsha's panic looks out of all proportion: he asked a fair question, and she answers with tears and "It's your fault, not mine." On a second reading, after Chapter 12, it is exact. Hadley has been told part of the truth. Earlier in the week Marsha said "He's staying with me... while he recuperates from his heart attack" (024 L1359). But ten minutes ago, in the car, she said "We'll stop at my place for a drink. Then we'll go over and see Ted" (024 L1635), as if Beckheim were somewhere else, and her two statements do not fit. What she is concealing is not that he stays here but how: in Chapter 12 she will say, "I'm living with Ted. To be more exact, he's living with me. It's my apartment; all the things are mine, except for the desk." So Hadley's careless question, "I don't see any sign of him; where the hell is he?", asked in the flat where Beckheim's desk stands, comes within one step of what she does not want him to see. Her counter-question gives her away: "Do you have some reason to expect to find him here?" Of course he has: she told him so herself. The accusation that follows ("It's in you. It's your fault") is the move of someone caught in a lie who turns the suspicion back on the suspicious. Hadley does not see the lie. He sees only the fear, and he reads it, flatteringly, as fear of his disapproval. He is half right: she is afraid of what he would think, but of what he would think if he knew.
The shell and the clinging thing inside it. This is the first time in the novel that Marsha loses control in front of Hadley, and Dick takes care to show both layers. Outside: "babble... tough and ruthless," the voice of the lunch sermon and the coast road. Inside: "clinging uncertainty," "ragged, unstable fear." The detail that follows is precise. Asking for a cigarette, she leans forward "convulsively," fingers shaking, and for a moment their faces are close; "she smelled faintly of soap and a dull woodsy scent. And of ragged, unstable fear." Then she rebuilds the shell in one long sentence of physical stage directions: she "leaned back, settled her thin shoulder blades against the wall, pulled up her legs and tucked them under her, folded her arms, inhaled from her cigarette, lifted her breasts a trifle, and smiled thinly." Every movement is a pose, chosen and placed, and the last two (the breasts, the thin smile) are the poses of a woman who uses sex as a tool of command. It is the "life-sized puppet" of Chapter 10, put back on its strings in front of him. Her first words after the rebuilding are an order: "You're going to have to learn... You can't treat people this way."
The waiting goes on. "'Take it easy,' he told her. 'You're upset; there's nothing going on. Nobody's treating you any way.'" He paces. "'I don't like this waiting, either.'" "'How long's it going to be?... How long do we have to sit facing each other? If I'm going to meet him then let's get it over with.'" Carefully, she says: "It won't be long. Try to stand my company a little longer." "'Why not now?'"
"She continued to gaze fixedly at him; there was no answer. Was he supposed to infer a cosmic process? An inexorable ritual beyond the control of man? His tension increased; her instability affected him until he was almost overwhelmed. Suddenly he cried: 'Let's call the whole thing off! I'm going back!'"
"'Sit down and drink your drink.'" "'No.' He faced her defiantly; they glared at each other with a kind of mute, rising hysteria until finally Marsha shuddered and looked away. 'Stuart,' she said wearily, 'you look so foolish standing there. Please sit down and act like an adult.'"
"Flushing, he threw himself down, back against the wall, and grabbed up his drink." "'That's better,' Marsha said, pleased at having regained the initiative."
Why he cannot leave. Hadley announces that he is leaving, and a single sentence from Marsha sits him down again. The sentence is "act like an adult," and it works because it hits his deepest fear about himself. The novel has shown since Chapter 1 that Hadley feels like a boy among men: Fergesson's protégé, the man Fergesson calls "Stumblebum" (Chapter 4), the young father whose boss tells his wife to make him fix the faucet. Marsha calls him a boy in a man's suit, and to prove he is not a boy he does exactly what she says. "Flushing" is the blush of a scolded child. The narration's dry "pleased at having regained the initiative" tells us she has scored a point in a contest, not soothed a friend. Note too the real reason for the wait, which Hadley cannot know: Beckheim is due home, and Marsha has to keep Hadley here without saying so. His guess at "a cosmic process," an "inexorable ritual," is half mockery and half hope, and it prepares for the stranger stillness that comes over him after the music.
The hi-fi in the wall
"'What do you want to hear?'" "'Hear!' he bellowed. 'What do you mean?'" Marsha points to "a section of the wall. Controls, and the outlines of recessed doors, were visible. 'Custom-built high-fidelity system.' Matter-of-factly, she slid to her feet. 'I'll show it to you; we mounted it in the wall.'"
"We mounted it." Two words give Marsha away a second time, and this time she does not notice. "We mounted it in the wall" means that someone else helped build the system into this flat, someone who lives here with her. A minute later Hadley will ask, "Do you live here alone?" and she will say "No." The clues are laid in order: the empty glasses on the kitchen table, the "we," the "No," and then Beckheim's key in the door. A television salesman is the one visitor who would understand the gear, and Dick lets Hadley's trade show through his sulk: he watches, he takes in the speaker and wiring, and he says "Fine." In 1952 a custom high-fidelity installation was a hobbyist's luxury, assembled from separate components (changer, cartridge, amplifier, speaker) rather than bought as a console of the kind Modern TV sells. Marsha has the enthusiast's version of the thing he sells to housewives.
Period check: two heads, two speeds. Marsha's description is accurate for the date. Columbia launched the 33⅓ rpm microgroove long-playing record in June 1948, and RCA Victor answered with the 45 in 1949; the old 78 rpm records were pressed in shellac and had much wider grooves. A stylus sized for the fine LP groove (about one thousandth of an inch at the tip) would ride badly in a 78 groove (about three thousandths), so serious systems of the early 1950s used either a turnover cartridge with two styli or two separate pickup heads, exactly as Marsha says. Most styli of the period were sapphire or osmium-tipped; diamond styli were the expensive, long-wearing option. "Diamond needles" is a boast, and a true one.
"Degenerate" music and a Schubert transcription
"'Most modern music is degenerate,' Marsha stated as she lifted out a handful of LPs. 'The Schönberg circle...atonality. All of the Viennese Jewish stuff.' She slid a record from its stiff jacket; carrying it by its edges, she placed it on the changer and started the mechanism. 'See what you think of this.'"
"Violently, high-pitched and metallic, the phonograph screeched out the ponderous sounds of a massed symphony orchestra."
"'A transcription of a Schubert piano work,' Marsha explained as she reseated herself. 'Schubert never lived to score it... Isn't it lovely?'" "'Beautiful.'"
A CLOSER LOOK: "degenerate" and "Viennese Jewish." Marsha's word is not her own. "Degenerate" (entartet) was the official Nazi term for modern art and music. The exhibition "Entartete Musik" opened at the Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf on 24 May 1938, organised by Hans Severus Ziegler, and pilloried jazz, the music of Jewish composers, and atonal music as signs of racial decay; Schoenberg, Berg and Webern were all featured. Her lumping of the "Schönberg circle" as "Viennese Jewish stuff" is the Nazi lumping, and it is false on the facts. Arnold Schoenberg was born into a Jewish family in Vienna (he converted to Lutheranism as a young man and formally returned to Judaism in Paris in 1933, as he fled), and he spent his last years in Los Angeles, where he died in 1951, the year before this chapter. But his two great pupils, Alban Berg and Anton Webern, were not Jewish; Webern stayed in Austria under the Nazis. "Atonality" was a musical method, not an ethnic trait. Like the "dwarfs represent the Jews" of Chapter 10, Marsha's remark takes a real argument about art and turns it into a slur, and she says it "as she lifted out a handful of LPs," in the tone of a person sorting records.
Fact check: which Schubert? Marsha does not name the work, and the guide cannot identify the record. Her description fits one famous case well. Schubert's Grand Duo in C major for piano four hands, D. 812 (1824) was thought by Robert Schumann to sound like a piano reduction of a lost symphony, and in 1855 the violinist Joseph Joachim orchestrated it, partly on that theory; the orchestral version has been recorded many times. Other piano works by Schubert were also orchestrated after his death in 1828, at 31. "Schubert never lived to score it" is therefore a fair summary of a real tradition, though it carries a claim (that he meant to score it) that is a guess. The irony of Marsha's choice is worth noting: she rejects "degenerate" modern music for the Viennese romantic, but she plays it "violently, high-pitched and metallic," at a volume that rattles the cups in the kitchen.
The ordeal of the music
At the end of the side Marsha turns the equipment off. "The noise withdrew back into the speaker, and the room was freed. Nervously, Marsha paced back to the bed; she was as taut as Hadley."
"Hadley felt that he had undergone some kind of vague and cruel ordeal, the purpose of which was unknown to him. Perhaps it was unknown to Marsha, too. In any case, it was over."
Surrender as preparation. This passage is the hinge of the chapter, and Dick writes it as an initiation without a priest. Hadley resists ("tried to tense himself"), suffers ("his head hurt and his eyes smarted"), gives up ("surrendered and gave himself over"), and finds the surrender "almost pleasant." His sight changes; objects fuse; the walls seem to move. Then the noise is withdrawn and "the room was freed," and he feels he has passed "some kind of vague and cruel ordeal." That is the structure of every rite of passage, and of the conversion experiences that a revival meeting like Beckheim's (Chapter 5) works to produce: break the will by exhaustion or overload, and the person becomes open. Dick is careful, though, to keep a natural reading in view. "Probably it was optical fatigue." Nobody planned this. "Perhaps it was unknown to Marsha, too." She played a record loudly to fill an awkward wait while she listened for a key in the door. The effect is the same as if she had planned it, and that is a theme of the whole novel: the forces that move Hadley are rarely anyone's design. The man who was shouting "I'm going back!" ten minutes ago will meet Beckheim emptied, passive and ready.
"Do you live here alone?" "No."
Hadley drinks, blinks, and asks after her children. "'They're away.' Jerkily, Marsha dusted the ash from her cigarette. 'Up in Sonoma County, at summer camp.'"
"'Do you live here alone?'" "'No.'" "'You just rent this place, don't you?'" "Marsha nodded rigidly."
The truth told in one word, and not heard. Marsha does not lie when he asks directly. "No," she does not live alone. Hadley hears it and lets it go, asking instead whether she rents (a salesman's question about property), and she nods "rigidly." She then leaps up and turns the music back on, which ends the questions. Hadley's mind has already moved to a different plane: "the inevitability of things," "things were proceeding by their own laws," "concealed dynamics." There are concealed dynamics at work, and they are very ordinary ones: a woman expecting her lover home, and a guest she has not told. Dick lets Hadley's half-mystical calm and the domestic secret sit side by side. The word "Gracefully" is a joke at Hadley's expense, and a sad one: grace is what he came here for, and what he has is a mood of waiting. Marsha's children "at summer camp" also matter to the plot. The flat is free of them for the summer, which is how Beckheim can be "staying" here "while he recuperates from his heart attack," as Marsha put it earlier in the week. They are Timmy and Pat, the boy and the sleeping little girl whom Hadley carried down to the Studebaker after the evening at the Golds'.
Beckheim walks in
"While Stuart Hadley lay listening, the door of the apartment opened and a man entered. It did not seem surprising or strange that the man was Theodore Beckheim. In a dark blue suit, a hat on his head, a heavy coat over his arm, the huge Negro latched the door after him, laid his coat and hat down on a table in the hallway, and then entered the living room."
Hadley gets up; Marsha "hastily put aside her drink to introduce them." The two men shake hands. Beckheim is "old, round-shouldered, and immense, in his antiquity; his suit was rumpled and threadbare, a hard suit, very ancient, stiff and formal, too tight around the wrists, too short at the cuffs. His old-fashioned black shoes were shiny, scuffed, dignified. He wore a vest, buttoned, in the middle of summer."
"'How do you do, Mister Hadley.'" The old man's eyes are "large and vaguely discolored. Yellow fluid swam around the intense pupils." His skin is "as rough and pebbled as leather, dried and horny, a thick hide stretched tight against the knobby bones of his skull and cheeks." His lips are "thin and chapped, drawn back from his gold-filled teeth. His hair was dark gray, short and woolen. He gave off a faint musty scent, the odor of old garments; and behind that the stale sweat of his body. He was a heavy, tired old man. It seemed to Hadley that he was at least seventy. It was hard to tell." Of the force that "streamed out of him that night in the auditorium," very little is now to be seen.
Expected, and so not strange. The entrance is quiet, and the first sentence about it is the most telling: "It did not seem surprising or strange." After the music, Hadley is past surprise. He is "lying" on the bed when the door opens, a detail that tells us how far the evening has already loosened him, and the great man simply comes in from the fog, latches his own door, and puts his own hat on his own hall table. A careful reader notices those possessive actions. A visitor knocks; Beckheim lets himself in, and nobody in the room finds it odd. The clothes say the rest: the suit is "a hard suit, very ancient, stiff and formal," too small at the wrists, the shoes "shiny, scuffed, dignified," the vest buttoned in July. It is the dress of a man of an older generation who keeps up a standard on very little money, and "dignified" is the word that governs it. Note that Beckheim calls him "Mister Hadley" and will keep doing so all evening. In 1952 a Black man addressing a young white man as "Mister" was what custom demanded; in Beckheim's mouth it also sounds like a teacher addressing a pupil, formal and a little ironic.
A CLOSER LOOK: the description of Beckheim's body. The portrait is unsparing, and parts of it are hard to read today. Dick describes the old Black preacher through a long inventory of his body (the "yellow fluid" in the eyes, the "thick hide," the "knobby bones," the "black lips," the "woolen" hair, the musty smell and the stale sweat), and later in the chapter he calls him "the great Negro," "the big colored man," "the great black man," "a hulking black man." Some of this is the ordinary vocabulary of white American fiction in 1952, and some of it leans on the habit of that fiction of describing Black people as bodies first. The guide does not soften it. But the passage does two things a caricature would not. Every physical detail is a sign of age and illness (this is a man of seventy, a few weeks after the heart attack Marsha told Hadley about), not of race as such. And the conclusion goes against the inventory, as the next paragraph shows: Hadley is "awed." The novel is moving toward a scene in Chapter 12 where Hadley, in rage, uses the worst slur in the language about this man. Dick makes the reader see first the dignity of the person the slur will be aimed at.
"Not disappointed. He was awed"
"'I heard you speak,' Hadley said." Beckheim's lips "twitched faintly; a nervous spasm that was almost a smile, almost a grimace. 'Where?' he asked." "'Down in Cedar Groves. Last month.'" "Beckheim nodded wryly. 'Oh, yes.' Vaguely, he moved away from Hadley, letting go of his hand. 'You came up with Miss Frazier?'"
Then Beckheim and Marsha draw off into a corner and talk "in low, rapid tones." "At first Hadley thought he was being discussed... Then he realized that Beckheim had not seen her for a while; he was giving her information on general topics and asking questions that had nothing to do with Hadley. For an interval the impersonal, public figure reemerged." They go out to the kitchen. "Hadley was alone."
The prophet who steps down. This passage is the reverse of what a reader expects in a story about a cult. Hadley does not fall for the preacher's charisma; the charisma is gone. What moves him is its absence. In the Cedar Groves auditorium (Chapter 5) Beckheim was "an impersonal instrument," a voice for a crowd; here he is a tired old man who might actually hear what Hadley has to say. "The gap... could be bridged... at least at this moment." Hadley has wanted, all through the novel, to be met as a person rather than as a salesman, a husband or a recruit, and for a moment he thinks he will be. Dick then lets the hope sag at once. "Where?" shows that Beckheim does not remember him. "Oh, yes" is polite and vague. He lets go of the hand and turns to Marsha, and "the impersonal, public figure reemerged." The rest of the chapter alternates between these two Beckheims, the man and the office, and Hadley is never sure which one he is talking to.
Continuity: "I've told him about you." In Chapter 10 Marsha said, "I've told him about you; he wants to meet you" (024 L1639). Beckheim's "Where?" and his vague "Oh, yes," and the fact that his first long talk is with Marsha about "general topics," suggest that Marsha's claim was at least overstated, a way of getting Hadley into the car. The text does not settle it. The narration also tells us that "Beckheim had not seen her for a while," which sits oddly with a man who lives in her flat; the likeliest reading is that he has been away for some days on Society business, which would also explain the hat, the coat, and the stack of unopened mail he goes to at once. The guide notes the tension and does not try to resolve it.
"Back they go. Ted says so"
"Embarrassed, tense, he moved aimlessly around the room, hands in his pockets, doing nothing, waiting and not looking or listening." He throws himself down on the bed and is "jerkily lighting up when Marsha reentered the room, smiling her bloodless, imperative smile down at him and reaching for the two whiskey glasses."
"'Back they go,' she said briskly. 'Ted says so.'"
The first rule of the house. The whiskey is the first thing Beckheim changes in the flat, and he changes it without a word to Hadley. Marsha passes the order on with his authority ("Ted says so"), and the narration shows her obeying it "briskly," with the same "bloodless, imperative smile" she uses to command. She commands Hadley in the name of the man who commands her. The reader who remembers the paper sacks of empty beer and wine bottles on the kitchen floor, and the table "littered with empty glasses," will guess that the rule holds when Beckheim is present and not otherwise. The details of his shirt are a second portrait, more human than the first: the frayed cuffs of a man without money, the sweat of a man who is ill, and the hunch of age. "Smiled slightly, and then again looked away" is shy, not grand.
"Society business...of no interest"
"'That's okay,' Hadley murmured huskily... He was trembling; it seemed to him that now Beckheim had really come toward him. Now Beckheim was really seeing him; he had caught the man's attention." "'Sit down.' In a kindly way, Beckheim indicated the bed, and the three of them seated themselves."
"'Coffee's heating on the stove,' Marsha said faintly, in a withdrawn, diffident voice. She sat stiff and prim; not nervous now, but silent, obedient, attentive, like a carefully trained child. 'We're going to have shortbread cookies with it. In a couple of minutes.'"
The questions
"'Yes... My wife and I live down there.' He sensed and gratefully appreciated the friendliness of the man. But he knew, at the same time, that Beckheim's attention was forced; that any moment it might be broken off. That any moment it was going to end, and never resume."
"Beckheim pondered, glanced over at Marsha with an expression Hadley could not read, and then asked: 'Are you a churchgoer?'" "With difficulty Hadley admitted: 'No. I'm not.'" "'What faith is your family?'" "'Protestant.'" "Beckheim smiled gently, understandingly. 'We're all Protestants, Mister Hadley. I meant, what portion of the Protestant faith does your family belong to?'" "'I don't know. Some kind of Congregationalists.'" "'Modernists?'" "'Yes.'"
A pastor's history, and what it reveals. Beckheim's questions are those of a minister taking down a newcomer's particulars, and in eight lines they draw out a plain little life: town, wife, child, years married, job, church. Each answer tells us something about Hadley's state. He reaches for the baby's photograph and stops, because "the time" is "slipping away": he already feels he is being given only a few minutes. He does not know how long he has been married, "at this moment," which is a sign of how far he has drifted from Ellen tonight. He admits to selling television "with much trepidation," as if it were a sin; Marsha has spent three days telling him it is beneath him, and now he is ashamed of it before the man he came to see. And he knows the faith of his family only as "Some kind of Congregationalists." Beckheim's glance at Marsha after "Television sets" is "an expression Hadley could not read," and the reader may read it for him: this is the "artist" she promised? The two details of the body work against the earlier portrait. The voice is "an ordinary man's voice," "without racial or regional accent," and the nails are luminous "as if seen through water," something fine and clear inside the rough hide. And Dick gives Hadley a lovely phrase for the moment of contact: "this thin section of time cut out of the limitless flow."
"We're all Protestants." Beckheim's gentle correction is a small theological joke and a claim. Hadley answers "Protestant" as if that were a church; Beckheim replies that it is only a family of churches, and that "We're all Protestants," which places the Watchmen of Jesus, an independent American sect, in the same broad family as Hadley's parents. "Modernists?" is a precise guess. In the American Protestant quarrels of the 1920s and after, between the Fundamentalists and the Modernists, the Modernists were the liberal wing that read the Bible historically and put ethics before doctrine, and the Congregational churches of New England were among their strongholds. To a preacher of the end of the world, a Modernist upbringing is not a recommendation; it means a young man brought up to think of religion as good manners. Hadley's "Yes" accepts the label without knowing what it means.
Fact check: Congregationalists in 1952. The Congregational Christian Churches descended from the Puritan churches of colonial New England, were governed by each local congregation, and in the twentieth century were strongly identified with liberal theology and the Social Gospel. In 1957 they merged with the Evangelical and Reformed Church to form the United Church of Christ. A family that was Congregationalist, with a son born in New York and raised in Washington, D.C. (as the birth certificate in his wallet will show), fits the type: middle-class, educated, East Coast and lightly churched.
The catechism
"After a moment Beckheim asked: 'Did you come up here to see me?'" "'Yes,' Hadley answered. He tried to put his feelings into the word." "'Why?'" "Hadley's mouth opened, but he could not think of what to say. He felt too strongly; all he could do was mutely shake his head."
The answer he was waiting for. "Why?" is the one question Hadley cannot answer, and Beckheim does not press it. He asks a better one, and Hadley seizes it "gratefully": "Are you ill?" "Yes. Very ill." This is the confession the whole novel has been building toward, the rage, the stomach pains, the drinking, the sense of being caught. Hadley adds the "very" himself, before Beckheim can ask, and says yes to "ill enough to die." Beckheim's reply turns the private confession into a doctrine: "we are all ill enough to die... a great sickness, and we are all down with it badly." That is the Watchmen's theology of Chapter 5 (a sick world near its end) said to one man, and it is also a plain truth about mortality, which is where Beckheim will take the talk next. The form of the exchange is the form of a liturgy, short questions and set answers, and Hadley feels it as both "form without content" and as the most meaningful words he has ever said. Both are true. A ritual can be empty and still carry a real feeling, and that double sense of religion, as theatre and as truth, runs through all of Dick's later writing.
"'Who do you think can make you well?' Beckheim asked, in his toneless, measured voice. 'Do you think I can make you well?'" "Hadley hesitated, shuddered in a spasm of emotion. 'I... don't know.'" "'No,' Beckheim said. 'I can't make you well.'" "Hadley agreed, nodding his head." "'But you can,' Beckheim continued. 'It's up to you.'"
"No," Beckheim said. "I can't make you well." ... "But you can," Beckheim continued. "It's up to you."
"I can't make you well... But you can. It's up to you." This is the centre of the chapter, and perhaps of Beckheim's whole part in the novel. The catechism has run like an altar call at a revival, with short questions and the expected answers, and the next answer expected is the one every preacher wants: "You can," you, the man of God, can heal me. Beckheim asks it almost in so many words ("Do you think I can make you well?"), and Hadley, honestly, says "I... don't know." Then the prophet refuses the role. Everything else in the novel offers Hadley a saviour from outside: Marsha's movement, Fergesson's store, Ellen's family, Bob Sorrell's swagger, the bottle. The one man in the book who claims to speak for God says that nobody can heal him from outside, and hands the work back. Dick keeps two readings open and the chapter supports both. It is a serious spiritual answer, close to the old Protestant conviction that each soul stands alone before God, and close to the self-reliance that the Modernists Beckheim has just mentioned would recognise too. And it may also be the answer of a tired, ill man who does not want one more dependant, and of a movement that needs members who will carry themselves and pay their own way. A minute later Beckheim will take a dollar fifty from him.
The watcher in the man. The cold, laughing "spectator" in Hadley's brain is the faculty he turned on Marsha in the car in Chapter 10, where she seemed "a spectator to her own actions," working "a life-sized puppet." Now he finds the puppeteer in himself, and "absurd puppets" is his own word for himself and Beckheim. This is one of Dick's oldest and most lasting ideas, here in a plain early form: the self split into an actor and a watcher who will not join in, so that even a moment of possible conversion is spoiled by an inner voice that laughs. Hadley "loathed" the watcher because it stops him from being saved. The reader may notice that it also protects him; it is the part of him that asked "is this on the level?" an hour ago. Dick does not say which part is right. He only shows that both are there and that Hadley cannot "excise" either.
Millions of eyes. The silence after "It's up to you" is the most frightening moment in the chapter, and it is entirely inside Hadley. Nobody tells him he must heal himself "on the spot"; he feels it as an expectation. The eyes are his invention too, and Dick's phrasing is careful: "there seemed to be millions of them," "As if he were being scrutinized." In a room with two people in it, Hadley feels watched by a whole universe, "without mercy, without any kind of emotion." The image belongs to the sect's name. The Watchmen watch for the end; here a man sitting with their prophet feels that he himself is being watched, judged from outside the world. Dick would come back all his life to this sense of being looked at from beyond reality, in forms far stranger than this one. In 1952 it is still a young man's panic in a cold flat, and it is broken by the plainest sentence in the chapter.
"The coffee's boiling"
In the kitchen the clink of dishes wakes Tertullian, who looks up "alert and avid" and lowers his muzzle as Marsha sweeps past with the tray. In the centre of the tray is "a glass plate of pale cookies... a circle of pasty store-bought dough taken from some cardboard and cellophane package, each cookie exactly like the next."
"Fascinated, Hadley watched the man eat. Beckheim took a second cookie, and then a third. He inserted each into his mouth, chewed and swallowed, took another, as mechanically as a machine. Visibly, Beckheim did not taste the food. He ate without pleasure or interest; it was a functional process of no special importance to him."
From the universe to the percolator. Dick cuts the trance with the most domestic sentence he can find, and the bathos is deliberate. The prophet whose silence made Hadley feel the eyes of the universe notices that the coffee is boiling over, and tells the woman of the house. Marsha's "Oh," said "guiltily," and her "Cream and sugar?" are those of a hostess caught out, and also of a woman used to being reminded of her kitchen by this man. Hadley comes "up to the surface," like a diver, and does not know where he has been ("if down was the proper term"); the narration will not tell him either. Then he is "dismissed": Beckheim takes out a newspaper. The cookies complete the turn. Store-bought, "pasty," from "cardboard and cellophane," "each cookie exactly like the next," they are the mass-produced food of the mass society Marsha sneered at on Tuesday, served in her house to her prophet, who eats them "as mechanically as a machine" without tasting them. The man who seemed a moment ago to speak for eternity now looks like an automaton. Dick will not let Beckheim be simply holy or simply hollow.
Napalm and a quiet domestic couple
"'I see,' Beckheim said, reading from the newspaper, 'that American fliers complain there are no targets of importance left in North Korea. They complain it is useless to try to bomb one Chinese carrying an armload of ammunition over a mountain.' He closed the newspaper and added: 'Napalm has taken care of the villages and crops.'"
"Hadley said nothing. He sipped mutely at his coffee, all of him a spectator now, withdrawn and detached from the two people in the room with him. Like a quiet domestic couple, Beckheim and Marsha sat drinking coffee and reading the newspaper, a closed circle from which he was excluded. He did not protest, however; he accepted his place without agitation."
The real apocalypse, read over shortbread. Beckheim's comment is three flat sentences, and the last one is devastating precisely because it is said without emphasis. The bombers have run out of targets because the villages are gone; what is left to bomb is a single man carrying ammunition over a mountain; "Napalm has taken care of the villages and crops." Beckheim reads it as a preacher reads a sign of the times. His talk of "a great sickness" and, soon, of "The torch, the sword" is not fantasy; it is commentary on the front page. Note too that the spectator in Hadley has now taken over completely: "all of him a spectator now." The part of him that was laughing during the catechism is the whole of him over coffee.
"Like a quiet domestic couple." Here Dick all but tells the reader, and Hadley does not hear it. The narration's simile is literal. Beckheim and Marsha are a domestic couple, sitting with coffee and the paper "a closed circle," and the reader has now been given the whole chain of clues: the drinks for several on the kitchen table, "we mounted it in the wall," "Do you live here alone?" "No," the man letting himself in and putting his hat on the hall table, "Back they go. Ted says so," the pair walking out of the kitchen "without touching," the agreed formula of "Society business," Marsha as an obedient child, and "The coffee's boiling." Hadley "accepted his place without agitation." Chapter 12 will give him the fact in the car, and his reaction will be the opposite of calm.
A CLOSER LOOK: "no targets of importance left in North Korea." The newspaper's complaint matches the historical record. On 25 June 1951, testifying to the Senate committees inquiring into General MacArthur's dismissal, Major General Emmett "Rosie" O'Donnell, who had commanded the B-29s of Far East Air Forces Bomber Command in 1950, said that "almost the entire Korean Peninsula" was "just a terrible mess. Everything is destroyed... There were no more targets in Korea" (Military Situation in the Far East, Hearings before the Senate Committees on Armed Services and Foreign Relations, 82nd Congress, 1951). United Nations aircraft, overwhelmingly American, dropped large amounts of napalm on North Korean towns and villages, and in 1952 the campaign turned to dams, power stations and supply routes, including the heavy raids on the Sup'ung (Suiho) hydroelectric complex on the Yalu in June 1952, a few weeks before this chapter. The man "carrying an armload of ammunition over a mountain" is accurate too: the Chinese People's Volunteers moved much of their supply by porters, pack animals and bicycles at night, and the American interdiction campaign of 1951 to 1952 (Operation Strangle) failed to cut it. Dick puts the most destructive bombing campaign of the period into three sentences read over cookies, and leaves the judging to the reader.
The study
"Marsha arose and hurried after him. 'You want the letters?' she asked. She burrowed among great cardboard boxes of printed pamphlets; Hadley recognized the cheap throwaways that the Society distributed on every street corner." "'You went through them?' Beckheim asked in his low rumble."
The prophet at his desk. The rolled-up sleeves and the "expression of deep meditation" belong to a man going to his real work, and his real work, it turns out, is the post. The furniture of the study is that of a small-business office of the 1930s: the "ancient rolltop desk," the gooseneck lamp, the wooden swivel chair, cardboard boxes of printed "throwaways," a ledger. The Society of the Watchmen of Jesus, which preaches the end of the world to auditoriums, runs on mail-order donations opened and recorded by one old man under a lamp, with the woman of the house as his secretary. Marsha's two questions ("You want the letters?" "You went through them?" is his) tell us she screens his mail, which is another sign of how the household works. "A full-time job, keeping accounts straight" is what she says, tearing an envelope to shreds "mechanically," and it is the language of Fergesson's store, not of prophecy. The reader who remembers Fergesson at the start of the novel, tired and overworked, keeping his own books after hours, will see the likeness.
The checks, the pen and the picture. Dick gives us the inside of the operation in a single sentence: letters opened, the money taken out and put in a "square metal box," each letter read "slowly" and marked off. Two things stand out. The first is that Beckheim reads every letter, and reads it with care; he is not a man who throws away the words of the people who send him money, and the "long letter in a woman's shaky handwriting" he is reading a little later suggests the kind of correspondent he has: old, poor, devout. The second is the "heavy gold fountain pen," the one costly object he owns in a room of frayed cuffs, wicker chairs and an old sweater. It will be the instrument of the chapter's climax. The print above the desk is described with open contempt by the narration ("ubiquitous," "fatuous," "imaginary, romantic"), and the contempt is Dick's, or Hadley's, not Beckheim's. The preacher works under the most sentimental image of Christ in America; the narrator, here, is a sceptic.
Fact check: the "ubiquitous bearded youth." The picture is not named, but the description ("bearded youth," "half-parted lips, eyes upturned," "ubiquitous") fits the most widely reproduced religious image in the United States in 1952, the Head of Christ painted by Warner Sallman of Chicago in 1940, which shows a young, fair, long-haired Christ in profile with his eyes raised. Church and publishing sources commonly say it has been reproduced more than five hundred million times, and during the Second World War copies were handed out to American servicemen by church groups. It hung in countless Protestant homes, offices and Sunday schools. An alternative is one of the German painter Heinrich Hofmann's popular Christ images, such as Christ in Gethsemane (1890), also with upturned eyes. The guide cannot be sure which Dick meant, and so flags the identification as probable. What matters is the narration's tone: the picture is a cliché, and the novel says so.
Ellen, twenty-two; Stuart, twenty-five
"Without raising his massive head or looking around, Beckheim said: 'Mister Hadley, what is your wife's name?'" "'Ellen,' Hadley answered, coming quickly to life." After "half a dozen letters": "'How old is she?'" "'Twenty-two.'" "'How old are you?'" "'Twenty-five.'"
"For a while Beckheim continued working in silence; the only sound was the scratching of his pen and the rustle of paper. 'Had you thought,' he asked presently, 'of joining the Society?'"
"Hadley became critically tense. His mouth dry, his vision swimming, he gazed down at the floor and answered: 'I hadn't thought much about it. Not that way. It was more that I wanted to meet you...as a person.'"
Nothing more is said. Hadley gets up and goes to stand behind Beckheim in the study, "hands in his pockets, licking his dry lips." "'I never paid much attention to religion,' Hadley said clumsily. 'I really don't know anything about it.'" "Beckheim nodded slightly and went on with his work. In the other room, Marsha sat alone on the Hollywood bed, her cup of coffee between her fingers, face blank and expressionless. Outside the apartment building the noises of a big city at night clanged and jarred dully. Cold fog, rolling in from the Bay, drifted around the warped frames of the windows."
Questions between letters. The method of the interview has changed. On the bed Beckheim looked at Hadley and spoke to him; now he asks his questions "without raising his massive head," between letters, with gaps of "half a dozen letters" between them. Hadley "comes quickly to life" at each one, like a pupil called on, and waits through the silences. The questions are the facts that a membership card or a pastoral file would need: wife's name, her age, his age. Ellen is twenty-two, Stuart twenty-five; the figures fix the couple's ages for the reader and remind us how young they are to be the parents of a new baby in a two-room flat. Then the question the evening was always going to come to: "Had you thought... of joining the Society?" Hadley's answer is the truest thing he says all night: "It was more that I wanted to meet you... as a person." He wants a man, not a membership. Beckheim does not reply. Hadley's next speech ("I never paid much attention to religion... I really don't know anything about it") is a confession of ignorance offered almost as an apology, and Beckheim lets it go with a nod. Meanwhile Marsha sits "alone," "face blank," shut out of this part of the evening, and the fog of Chapter 10 comes "rolling in from the Bay" through warped window frames. The flat cannot keep the weather out.
Peter and Ellen in celluloid
"'Do you have a picture of your wife?'" Again the wallet comes out. "After a time Beckheim peered over at it, pen held above a long letter in a woman's shaky handwriting. Behind the stained, almost opaque celluloid folder, the snapshot of Ellen Hadley lay exposed for the old man to see."
"'She's attractive,' Beckheim said. 'Ellen Hadley... Stuart Hadley. I've seen many young couples like you.' He put down his pen and spun around on his chair to face Hadley. 'But not alike; everybody is different. You're unique... Every man is a new combination, in some way or other. Haven't you felt that about yourself?'"
"Pete" and "Peter." On the bed Hadley called the baby "Pete"; at the desk, asked "What is your little boy's name?", he says "Peter." It is a small change and a real one. "Pete" is the family name, the one Ellen uses at the kitchen table; "Peter" is the name for an official record, the one you give a minister or a clerk. Without being told, Hadley has understood that the second set of questions is a registration. His "We're keeping our fingers crossed, of course" is the nervousness of every new father in the polio summers of the early 1950s, and it is the only moment in the scene where his own family is present to him as people. The photographs are "behind the stained, almost opaque celluloid": Ellen is barely visible in his wallet, as she is barely visible in his evening. Beckheim's line ("I've seen many young couples like you... But not alike") moves from the general to the particular in one breath, and turns at once into the argument he has been leading up to: the uniqueness of each soul.
"Could there be another Stuart Hadley?"
"'What would happen if Stuart Hadley died? What would come along to take Stuart Hadley's place? Could there be another Stuart Hadley?' Behind the horn-rimmed glasses the dark, large eyes bored upward at Hadley. 'I think there could not be. What do you think?'" "'No,' Hadley admitted." "'Do you mean that?'" "'Yes.' Hadley nodded. 'I've felt that.'"
The argument from uniqueness. Beckheim's reasoning is old and simple, and he puts it as a puzzle rather than a sermon. Every person is unique, "a new combination"; no one could replace Stuart Hadley; yet Stuart Hadley will die. "What's the answer to that paradox?" The answer he wants is the immortality of the soul: if what is unique in a man cannot be replaced, it cannot simply cease. He will not give the answer himself. "Open the gates inside your mind" is a striking phrase for a revival preacher, closer to the language of mysticism than of hellfire, and "Your brain is rusty" is a teacher's rebuke. The last exchange ("There isn't much time left." "No... there isn't much time.") joins the two clocks of the chapter. Beckheim means the end of the world. Hadley, agreeing, may mean the end of his evening, or his marriage, or his youth.
"This is Stuart Hadley"
"Beckheim picked up Hadley's wallet. 'This is Stuart Hadley,' he said, holding the corroded package of leather and paper and celluloid in his hands." Then the inventory, item by item:
"'Money,' he said, examining the paper bills stuffed into the money pouch. 'Change.' He emptied out some dimes and quarters from the little compartment. 'This is a woman's wallet; do you know that?'" "'No,' Hadley said, astonished." "'Only women's wallets have change compartments.'"
The business cards: "'Stuart Hadley: television salesman, Modern TV Sales and Service. 851 Bancroft Avenue, Cedar Groves, California.'" Then "a stained, rumpled card on which was printed a crude drawing of a braying donkey," lettered with a smutty pun invitation to a "donkey roast." "'What is this?'" "Mortified, Hadley muttered: 'Just a joke. A trick thing; doesn't mean anything.'"
"A crushed pack of slips of folded paper, on which were written, in lead pencil, names and addresses and phone numbers. 'Customers,' Beckheim guessed. 'Prospects for sales.'" "'Yes,' Hadley agreed. 'And personal friends.'"
"'Keys.' Beckheim laid out a car key and two door keys. 'One to your apartment. The other to your store?'" "'That's right... And the car key's for the store truck; sometimes I have to pick it up at the garage.'"
"'What's this?' Beckheim laid out a dingy flat disk of uncertain metal. Punched in the center was a square hole." "'My good-luck charm,' Hadley answered, embarrassed. 'A Chinese coin; I found it on the beach when I was a kid.'"
| In the wallet | What Beckheim says | What it tells the reader |
|---|---|---|
| Paper bills in the pouch; dimes and quarters in a change compartment | "This is a woman's wallet; do you know that?" | Hadley has never noticed what he carries. A man's billfold of the period had no coin purse; a man kept change loose in his pocket. The first item already unmans him a little. |
| Business cards: "Modern TV Sales and Service. 851 Bancroft Avenue, Cedar Groves, California" | "These are to give to customers?" | The public self, the salesman, with an address. Bancroft Avenue is the store's street, and the card is the only place in the novel so far where the full address is printed. |
| A "donkey roast" joke card with a braying donkey and a dirty pun | "What is this?" | The locker-room humour of the sales floor. Hadley is "mortified" in front of the preacher; it is the one item he disowns. |
| Pencilled slips with names, addresses, phone numbers | "Customers... Prospects for sales." | Hadley adds "And personal friends." In his life the two lists are one pack. |
| A car key and two door keys | "One to your apartment. The other to your store?" | His whole world is two doors. Even the car key is not his own; it is the store truck's. |
| A square-holed coin, "a Chinese coin; I found it on the beach when I was a kid" | "What's this?" | His one superstition, kept since childhood. A Chinese coin in the pocket of a man about to hear Beckheim talk of war with China. |
| Social Security card, driver's licence, draft card | "You're 4-F?" | "Liver trouble." Rejected for military service in a year of war in Korea. The state's three records of him. |
| Elks membership | "Membership in the Elks." | The joiner; a fraternal order of the respectable white business class. |
| Photostat of his birth certificate | "You were born in New York?" | "I grew up in Washington, D.C." The East Coast origin of a man now selling sets in a California suburb. |
| Library card; Blue Cross card; Regal Gasoline "Lucky Prize" stubs | Read out in a list | Reading, insurance, and the small gambles of a man who hopes to win something at the petrol station. |
| Photographs of Peter and Ellen | Passed by without comment | The family has already been seen and registered. |
| A hidden snapshot of a former girlfriend, a shy, smiling Italian girl, "now in Oregon" | "Not your wife, is she?... And you still carry this picture around with you?" | The secret self, "jammed out of sight" behind the other papers. "I never threw it away" is the defence of a man who keeps a door open to another life. |
A man reduced to his papers, and read. This is the best scene in the chapter and one of the best in the novel. Beckheim says "This is Stuart Hadley," holding "the corroded package of leather and paper and celluloid," and then proves it. In a few minutes, by reading the wallet in order, he learns more about Hadley than Hadley told him on the bed: his job and the address of his store; his humour; his doubling of customers and friends; his two doors; his childhood charm; his rejection by the army; his clubs, his origins, his reading, his insurance, his little lotteries; his family; and his secret. The order is a descent, from money and cards on the outside to the hidden photograph in "the last glassine envelope." Each item is ordinary and the sum is a person. Hadley's replies are all small embarrassments ("astonished," "mortified," "embarrassed," "begrudgingly," "defensively"); he is being stripped in front of a stranger, and the stranger is gentle about it and misses nothing. The Italian girl is the one item that is not part of his public or family life, and Beckheim goes straight to it. "And you still carry this picture around with you?" has no reproach in it. It simply states the fact that Hadley's wallet holds, in the same folder, his wife, his son and the woman he did not marry.
Fact check: the papers in a 1952 wallet. The items are true to the date. The Social Security card dated from the Social Security Act of 1935, with the first numbers issued in late 1936. The draft card: under the Selective Service Act of 1948 every man registered had to carry his registration certificate and his classification card, and in 1952, during the Korean War, the obligation was enforced. 4-F was the classification for men found physically, mentally or morally unfit for service. Blue Cross plans began with the hospital prepayment scheme at Baylor University Hospital in Dallas in 1929 and by 1952 covered tens of millions of Americans; a Blue Cross card was the mark of a regular employee with group cover. A photostat was a photographic copy made on a Photostat machine, the usual way of copying a birth certificate before xerography; Haloid's first commercial copier came in 1949, and the plain-paper office copier only in 1959. The "Regal Gasoline Lucky Prize" drawing has not been traced; petrol stations of the period ran many such promotions, and the brand may be invented. The square-holed coin is the classic form of the Chinese cash coin, cast with a square hole for stringing, made in China for some two thousand years until the early twentieth century; such coins did turn up on Pacific beaches and in Chinese American communities, and were sold as charms.
A CLOSER LOOK: the Elks card in a Black preacher's hands. Beckheim reads out "Membership in the Elks" without comment, and the novel gives him none. The reader of today should know what that card meant. The Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, founded in New York in 1868, restricted its membership to white men by its own constitution, and kept the "whites only" clause until the early 1970s. Black Americans had formed their own order, the Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the World, in 1898, and the white order had sued, for years, to stop them using the name and regalia. So the old Black preacher is holding the membership card of a club that would not have admitted him, in the wallet of a man who will, within the hour, call him by the worst word in the language. Dick does not underline it. He may not have meant it. It is there all the same.
Edition note: the donkey card. The printed joke on the card is a crude sexual pun, quoted in the book in full; it is paraphrased here. The book also prints it with a typesetting slip, "apiece" run together as one word (024 L1979), which the guide notes and does not copy. Hadley's embarrassment is the point of the item, and the paraphrase keeps it.
"Isn't there something that won't burn?"
"Beckheim had come to the end of the wallet. He put back the contents, closed it, and handed it back to Hadley. 'And all this,' he said, 'can be wiped out, destroyed in an instant. And after that... what?'" "'I don't know,' Hadley said."
"Beckheim's face darkened angrily. 'You do know! Why do you keep saying you don't know? What don't you know? Do you think you can be wiped out like those papers? Do you think fire can destroy everything that makes you up? Isn't there something that won't burn, that fire can't consume?'"
"'I guess so. I don't know.' Confused, Hadley shook his head. 'I don't know what to think.'" "Harshly, Beckheim demanded: 'Then you're just going to stand there and wait? Doing nothing?'" "'I... suppose so.'" "The old man smiled wryly and spread his big gray hands. 'Well, my friend, then there's nothing anyone can do for you. Do you really want help?'" "'Yes,' Hadley said quickly."
The sermon of the wallet. Now we see why Beckheim went through the wallet at all. Everything in it, the money, the cards, the keys, the papers that the state and the store and the club have issued, is "Stuart Hadley" in one sense, and all of it "can be wiped out, destroyed in an instant." The fire he means is the fire of the bomb as much as of the Last Judgment; the war news is ten minutes old. So the question the wallet forces is the question about uniqueness put another way: if a man is his papers, he burns with them; "Isn't there something that won't burn, that fire can't consume?" It is the old Christian image of the soul refined by fire (Paul's "the fire shall try every man's work," 1 Corinthians 3:13 to 15), turned on a salesman's billfold. And Beckheim's anger at "I don't know" is the anger of a teacher who believes the student knows the answer and will not say it. Then he gives up on him with a shrug, "Well, my friend, then there's nothing anyone can do for you," and asks the question that matters most: "Do you really want help?" Hadley's quick "Yes" is the only answer he gives all night without hesitation.
How Beckheim's interview works: the method, in order. The chapter shows Beckheim's method as clearly as Chapter 10 showed Marsha's, and they are very different.
- Take a plain history. Town, child, marriage, job, church. No flattery and no promises.
- Find the confession. "Are you ill?" lets Hadley say what he came to say, and say it himself.
- Universalise it. "We are all ill enough to die." The private trouble becomes the human condition and the sect's doctrine.
- Refuse to be the saviour. "I can't make you well... It's up to you." The work goes back to the man.
- Show him what he is made of. The wallet, item by item: "This is Stuart Hadley."
- Threaten it with fire. "All this can be wiped out." What is left?
- Demand the answer, then withdraw. "You do know!" and then "there's nothing anyone can do for you."
- Ask for consent. "Do you really want help?" "Yes."
- Enrol and charge. A blue card with his full name, put "With the rest of Stuart Hadley," and a dollar fifty in the ledger.
Where Marsha flatters ("You're an artist"), Beckheim strips; where she tells Hadley what he is, Beckheim makes him look at what he carries. Both methods end with a commitment. The difference is that Beckheim's leaves the hard part with Hadley, and gives him nothing he can lean on but a card.
"The torch, the sword"
"Hadley said nothing."
A pastor's arithmetic. Beckheim's lament is not a prophecy of doom so much as a complaint about scale. "So many people, and so little time": he is a man with a desk full of letters thinking of the millions he will never reach. The war with China comes into it as a fact from "the newspapers," and his response to the atomic bomb is chilling in its flatness, "Of course, atomic bombs will cut down that number," said as if he were reducing a figure in the ledger. The rest follows in the order of a strategist's map: China, "the rest of Asia," "the rest of the world." Then the phrase that sums up his theology: "The torch, the sword." Fire and war, the instruments of the end. What makes the speech disturbing is that it is not madness. In July 1952 a wider war with China was a real possibility, debated in Congress and in the press, and atomic weapons had been openly discussed for Korea since President Truman's remark at a press conference on 30 November 1950 that their use was under "active consideration." Beckheim's apocalypse is the news, carried one step further.
A CLOSER LOOK: "Four hundred and fifty million." Beckheim's figure for China's population was the standard round number of the 1930s and 1940s, and by 1952 it was out of date. The first modern census of the People's Republic of China, taken in 1953 (with the reference date of 30 June 1953), counted about 583 million people on the mainland, and with Taiwan and the overseas Chinese the published total was about 602 million (National Bureau of Statistics of China, communiqué on the 1953 census, published 1954). The census surprised Western demographers, most of whom had used figures in the 400 to 500 million range. So Beckheim underestimates China by well over a hundred million, as most Americans of 1952 would have. His number is the newspapers' number, which fits a man who says "I see by the newspapers."
The blue card
"'Open the drawer by you,' Beckheim said without looking up. 'The top drawer.'" Hadley pulls it open: "bottles of ink, paper clips and pencils, heaps of cards tied with rubber bands, booklets and pamphlets and scratch pads." "'What did you want?'"
"As he wrote, Beckheim said: 'You have interesting hands... Do you know that?'" "'I guess so,' Hadley answered." "'Get me one of those blue cards, there. In the front of the drawer, by the glue bottle.'" Hadley plucks one out. "'This?'"
"Beckheim pushed the drawer shut and reached up for the card. With his heavy gold fountain pen he wrote the name Stuart Wilson Hadley in the blank space in the center of the card, a firm flow of black ink in the middle of the ornate printing. Carefully, with measured dignity, he selected a blotter and blotted the writing. He handed the card back to Hadley."
"Turning it over in his hands, Hadley discovered that it was a membership card in the Society of the Watchmen of Jesus."
"'Put it in your wallet,' Beckheim said. 'With your other cards. With the rest of Stuart Hadley.'"
"Put it in your wallet," Beckheim said. "With your other cards. With the rest of Stuart Hadley."
Beckheim does not ask whether Hadley wants to join; he asked that once, and Hadley said he had come to meet him "as a person." He asked "Do you really want help?" and Hadley said yes. He treats that yes as consent. Hadley fetches his own card from the drawer, which makes him a little complicit, and only "turning it over in his hands" discovers what it is. The writing is a small ceremony, the only one in the evening: the "heavy gold fountain pen," the "firm flow of black ink," the "ornate printing," the full name "Stuart Wilson Hadley" (the formal full name the narration gave him once before, on the night he decided to go and hear Beckheim: "Stuart Wilson Hadley would be there," 023 L467), the blotter chosen "with measured dignity." Then the sentence that answers the whole sermon of the wallet. "With the rest of Stuart Hadley" can be read two ways and Dick means both. Read kindly, it says that the card is the one thing in the wallet that will not burn, a token of the part of him that fire cannot consume, filed beside the things that will. Read coldly, it says that the Society is one more card among the Elks, the library and Blue Cross: one more membership, one more organisation that has Hadley on its books. "You have interesting hands" is the strangest line in the scene. It may be palmistry, flattery, or a painter's eye; it may be Beckheim remembering Marsha's report that Hadley is an "artist." The text does not say, and Hadley's "I guess so" gives nothing away.
"A dollar fifty"
"He did so, with numb fingers. For a moment he stood by the desk, but Beckheim continued working. Presently Hadley gave up and started aimlessly from the study, toward the door."
"'A dollar fifty,' Beckheim said over his shoulder." "Hadley came back. 'What did you say?'" "'A dollar fifty. For your membership.'"
The receipt. This is where the chapter has been going, and Dick lands it with perfect deadpan. Hadley, who came for a revelation, has been given a card and is walking away "aimlessly," waiting perhaps for some last word. The last word is a price. "A dollar fifty... For your membership." Hadley flushes "crimson," digs out the money, "clutched them, then convulsively dropped them": the gestures of a man paying for something he is ashamed of buying. Notice that the quarters are those Beckheim emptied out of the "woman's" change compartment a few minutes earlier, so that the item which first embarrassed him is the one that pays. The money goes into the same metal box as the widows' checks, and the ledger entry is the most bathetic line in the novel: his soul is "misc. received." And yet nothing about the transaction is dishonest. Beckheim told him nothing false, promised him nothing, refused to be his healer, and recorded the money properly in a book. A church that charges dues and keeps accounts is not a con. What wounds Hadley is not the price, which is small, but the fact that the evening ends in bookkeeping, and that "Beckheim resumed his work" as if Hadley had been one more letter.
The dollar fifty in numbers. A membership fee of $1.50 in 1952 was a modest sum. By the United States consumer price index (annual average about 26.5 in 1952, against about 314 in 2024), it is equal to roughly $18 in 2024 money (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, CPI-U). For comparison within the novel, Ellen is "all out" of money near the end of the month in Chapter 10, and a television set of the kind Hadley sells cost two hundred dollars or more. The fee is about what a young man might spend on drinks for two in a bar. The ledger heading "misc. received" tells us that membership dues are not even a category of their own in the Society's books: new members are rare enough, or unimportant enough, to be lumped in with miscellaneous income.
"He has to work"
"When Hadley reentered the living room, Marsha was collecting the cups and saucers. She smiled at him fleetingly, apprehensively. 'More coffee? Do you want something to eat?'" "'No,' Hadley said curtly."
"Marsha opened the door to the front hall; the grim odor of stopped-up drains filtered into the living room, along with the tinny blare of radios and human voices."
"As the door closed after them, Hadley caught a last glimpse of Beckheim. The black man did not look up; he continued working, silent and intent, elbows resting on the desk, solemnly going through the heaps of letters."
The exit, prepared in advance. Marsha's change of clothes is the last clue and the most practical one: "while he was talking to Beckheim she had changed her clothes." She knew before Hadley did that the visit was over and that she would be driving him home. Her "apprehensive" smile and her offer of food are those of a hostess who fears the guest will make a scene; her "He has to work" is said to Hadley, but it is also said about the man in the next room as a wife says it about a husband. Hadley's "I see that," "thick and stricken," is the voice of a man who has been given what he asked for and finds it was not what he wanted. The drains, the radios and the voices of the building come in when the door opens, the poor district reclaiming the room. The chapter's last image belongs to Beckheim, and Dick makes it dignified: the old man "did not look up," "silent and intent," "solemnly going through the heaps of letters." The prophet of the end of the world is answering his mail. Read one way, that is the most damning picture of the Society in the book. Read another, it is a picture of faithfulness, an old, ill man doing the dull work that keeps his people together, at night, after a visitor who wanted more than a card. Dick leaves both readings standing, and so should we.
How the evening turns
The shape of the chapter. The diagram traces Hadley's course through the evening. He arrives suspicious and coarse ("hayseed mark," "knackers"), is broken down first by Marsha's panic and her order to "act like an adult," then by the music, until he is "purged" and waiting "gracefully." He meets the man, not the prophet, and feels the gap "could be bridged." He confesses ("Very ill") and is told he must heal himself. He is read through his wallet, threatened with the fire that consumes papers, and asked whether he wants help. He says yes and is given a card, and a bill. The loop at the end is the chapter's bitter joke: the card goes back into the wallet "With the rest of Stuart Hadley," so that the thing that was meant to stand outside the wallet is filed inside it.
Characters and relationships after Chapter 11
| Person | Where they stand at the end of the chapter |
|---|---|
| Stuart Hadley | A paid-up member of the Society of the Watchmen of Jesus, card in his wallet, "thick and stricken." He has lied to Ellen, confessed he is "very ill," been told no one can heal him but himself, and been charged a dollar fifty. He still does not know what Marsha's relation to Beckheim is. |
| Marsha Frazier | Has shown fear for the first time, then obedience. In her own flat, with Beckheim present, she is secretary and hostess, "a carefully trained child." She changed clothes to drive Hadley home before he knew he was leaving. |
| Theodore Beckheim | Seen at home for the first time: old, ill, poor, formal, educated in speech, conscientious with his mail, harsh when Hadley will not think, and unwilling to be anyone's saviour. Lives in Marsha's flat; the desk is his. |
| Ellen Hadley | Off stage, "Twenty-two," "attractive," a snapshot behind almost opaque celluloid. She believes her husband is visiting a stockbroker. |
| Peter (Pete) | "Healthy-looking," "full of pep," a month or so old; a photograph in the wallet that Beckheim registers and passes. |
| The Italian girl | A photograph "jammed out of sight" in the last envelope of the wallet; "living someplace up in Oregon now." The secret life Hadley never threw away. |
IN PRACTICE: the wallet as a data profile. Beckheim's reading of the wallet is a small, exact picture of what is now called inference from data. Hadley's spoken answers on the bed say very little ("Several years," "Some kind of Congregationalists"). His wallet says almost everything: employer and address, credentials, military status and a health condition ("Liver trouble"), memberships, birthplace, insurance, habits of small gambling, his family, and the one relationship he hides. None of the items is secret on its own, and together they are a profile. A bank's know-your-customer file and its transaction history (who a customer pays, which clubs, which pharmacies, which bars) can reveal health, religion, politics and private relationships that the customer never disclosed, and machine-learning models trained on such "data exhaust" can infer them at scale. European data protection law treats health, religious belief and sex life as special categories of personal data that need explicit legal grounds to process (GDPR, Article 9), and its principle of data minimisation (Article 5(1)(c)) says to collect and keep only what a purpose needs. The practical lessons are concrete. Collect less; separate identity data from behavioural data; test models for whether they can reconstruct sensitive traits from innocent features; and log who looks at a customer's full profile. Beckheim at least handed the wallet back. A database does not.
IN PRACTICE: one man, the mail and the cash box. The other practical lesson of the chapter is about controls. In Beckheim's study one person opens the mail, takes out the checks and cash, decides what each letter is, records what he chooses in a single ledger under headings he invents ("misc. received"), and keeps the money in a box on his desk. Nothing in the novel suggests he is dishonest, and the chapter goes out of its way to show him careful. But this is exactly the arrangement that auditors call a failure of segregation of duties, and it is the classic setting for skimming and "lapping" frauds in churches, charities and small firms. Banks handle the same problem in their payment and lockbox operations with maker-checker (four-eyes) rules: the person who receives or keys a payment is not the person who approves or reconciles it, incoming cash is logged by two people before it is counted, and income is coded to specific accounts rather than to a catch-all. A dollar fifty under "misc. received" is harmless. A whole organisation whose income runs through one man's pen and one unlocked box is a risk, however good the man.
Open questions and flags for this chapter. (1) "Hayes Hole" has not been traced as a real nickname. (2) The Schubert transcription is unnamed; the Grand Duo D. 812 in Joachim's orchestration is a likely candidate, not a certainty. (3) The Christ print is probably Sallman's Head of Christ (1940); not certain. (4) Regal Gasoline has not been traced. (5) Marsha's claim in Chapter 10 that she had "told him about you" sits awkwardly with Beckheim's "Where?" and "Oh, yes." (6) The narration's "Beckheim had not seen her for a while" sits awkwardly with his living in her flat; the guide reads it as an absence on Society business. (7) Beckheim writes the full name Stuart Wilson Hadley, which the narration has used before (023 L311, L467), so he has it from Hadley or from Marsha; the text does not show Hadley giving it. (8) The book's typesetting slip "apiece" (024 L1979) and the double full stop "room.." (024 L1889) are noted and not copied.
Takeaways from Chapter 11.
- The chapter is a conversion scene that fails, or half succeeds: Hadley confesses, is told to heal himself, and comes away with a membership card and a receipt.
- Beckheim at home is not the prophet of the auditorium. He is old, ill, poor, courteous and exacting, and he refuses to be anyone's saviour.
- The wallet scene is the heart of the chapter: a man read through his papers, and asked what in him fire cannot burn.
- Marsha shows fear for the first time, and in Beckheim's presence becomes obedient. Every detail of the flat points to the fact that the two live together, which Chapter 12 will make explicit.
- The war news (napalm, "no targets," war with China, atomic bombs) is the real apocalypse behind the sect's preaching, and Dick sets it inside a domestic evening of coffee and cookies.
- The last image is double: the Society reduced to a ledger, and an old man faithfully doing its dull work at night.
Night on the Coast Road
When and where. The chapter runs on without a break from Chapter 11: the same Thursday in the second half of July 1952, the day Hadley told Ellen he was visiting "Customers I know," a couple "about ten years older than us" ("He's a stockbroker," Chapter 10). It begins late in the evening, after the visit to Marsha's flat in "Hayes Hole," and passes a fixed point at "About midnight," Marsha's own estimate, when she stops the car. The scene in the parked car lasts long enough for two cigarettes each, several rounds of whiskey, an argument, a struggle and a breakdown, so the drive home that follows ends well after midnight, perhaps between one and two in the morning. Hadley has to be at work at Modern TV "tomorrow," which is now today. Places, in order: the parking lot of "a vast neon-lit supermarket" somewhere in San Francisco; Market Street and the Tenderloin; "deserted factories and industrial warehouses"; the freeway, lit by sodium vapour lamps, with a turnoff planned at San Mateo; a darker highway with fewer cars beside "a long, extended ridge"; a gravel road between towns, among dry shrubbery, crickets and "a vague opaque presence that might have been a building," "a mile or so" from home; then back to the highway, past "a glowing Standard gasoline station," "a roadhouse and a Shell station," a traffic light, and into Cedar Groves, where Marsha parks across the street from Hadley's apartment house. The title's coast road is the guide's name for the return leg, echoing the coast road the couple drove in Chapter 10; the book chapter itself has no title.
People in this chapter. Only two people are on stage, and the chapter never leaves them. Stuart Hadley, 25, salesman at Modern TV in Cedar Groves, husband of Ellen and father of the infant Pete, who has spent the evening with Beckheim and carries a new blue Society card in his wallet; he is tired, then drunk, then violent. Marsha Frazier, editor of Succubus, who drives the grey Studebaker coupe, now in "slacks and leather jacket" (she changed out of her English summer suit at the end of Chapter 11), "slim and boyish," her "reddish hair tousled by the wind." Off stage but present in every exchange: Theodore Beckheim, the preacher of the Society of the Watchmen of Jesus, whom Marsha calls "Ted" and who, she finally says, lives with her; Ellen, Hadley's wife, remembered as she was "a few years" ago in his Ford coupe; Wakefield, the Society member Hadley met in Chapter 5, whom he imagines carrying "an identical card"; and an old lady who stands outside Modern on Saturdays with "Prepare for the Day of Judgment!" pamphlets.
Edition note: dialogue punctuation and the slur. As in Chapters 10 and 11, the book marks broken-off speech with dashes ("Were[dash]you disappointed?", "Stuart Hadley[dash]", "I'll yell[dash]for Christ's sake!"). Ellipses that the book prints itself are kept. One racial slur in Hadley's mouth is quoted once, in full, near the end of the guide to this chapter, because the plot turns on it and because Dick makes the reader hear it; elsewhere it is referred to, not repeated.
The supermarket: "He felt cheated"
The chapter opens on a small domestic errand. "Before they left San Francisco, Marsha pulled the Studebaker into the parking lot of a vast neon-lit supermarket and locked the parking brake." "'Wait here,' she instructed Hadley, sliding from the car. 'I'll be right back.'" She "skipped into the rear entrance of the supermarket, slim and boyish in her slacks and leather jacket." Hadley "sat glumly waiting for her, watching the other shoppers coming out and going in, getting into their cars, driving off down the dark streets."
While he waits, Dick gives his state of mind in one long movement. "It was hard to believe. He had met Beckheim, talked to him, and then been ushered out. The moment was over; already it had begun to sink into the past, like an object slowly settling into gray, leaden water."
Awe and grievance in one breath. Dick refuses to let Hadley's reaction be simple. He is not "disappointed," a word that would mean Beckheim turned out smaller than expected. He is "awed," which means Beckheim turned out as large as he hoped, and "cheated," which means the largeness was not put at his service. That pairing is the emotional key to the chapter. A man who thought the old preacher a fraud could shrug and go home. A man who believes the power is real, and that it was "withheld" from him personally, has a grievance, and a grievance needs someone to pay. Beckheim is not available, so the person who pays is the one in the driver's seat. Note also the image of the past as a sinking object in "gray, leaden water": the interview is only an hour or two old and already Hadley experiences it as lost. Throughout the novel his good moments pass from present to memory almost before he has lived them.
"Passed through the fire of Armageddon." Hadley's picture of Beckheim joins the two strands of Chapter 11. The old man's physical decay ("hunched," "horny skin," "stale sweat and musty closets") is read as a sign that he has already been through the end of the world the Society preaches, and survived it. It also answers Beckheim's question at the desk in Chapter 11, "Isn't there something that won't burn, that fire can't consume?" Hadley could not answer for himself; he answers for Beckheim. The old man is what is left after the fire. What Hadley wants is for that survival to be transferable, a gift handed across a desk, and the card was all he got.
Marsha comes back fast. "Brooding over this, Hadley watched Marsha's knife-sharp silhouette hurry from the supermarket and across the dark parking lot." She slips in "breathlessly behind the wheel," and "a bulging paper bag was deposited in his lap; it clinked moistly as he took charge of it." "'What's this?' he demanded, opening it. In the paper bag was a fifth of John Jameson blended scotch whiskey."
"'That's for us,' Marsha explained as she started up the car. 'You never got your drink; God, I can use a drink now myself.'"
The drink Beckheim sent back. Marsha's explanation points straight back to Chapter 11, where she poured two tall whiskeys in her flat and then, after Beckheim arrived and spoke with her in the kitchen, came back for the glasses: "Back they go... Ted says so." In the flat, under the old man's eye, Marsha was obedient; out of his sight, her first act is to buy the forbidden bottle, a whole fifth, and to say she needs it "now myself." The errand tells us how much the evening has cost her too. It also sets the scene that follows: two tired people, a bottle, a dark road. The phrase "That's for us" makes them a pair, and Hadley will hear more in it than she meant.
Fact check: "John Jameson blended scotch whiskey." Jameson is Irish whiskey, not Scotch. The firm takes its name from John Jameson, a Scot from Alloa in Clackmannanshire, who took over the Bow Street distillery in Dublin in 1780; production moved to the new Midleton distillery in County Cork in 1975. In 1952 it was sold in the United States as Irish whiskey, and Irish distillers, unlike Scotch ones, then favoured single pot still whiskey rather than blends; the modern blended Jameson came later. So "blended scotch" is wrong on both counts. Whether the slip is Dick's or a deliberate mark of Hadley's (or the narrator's) ignorance cannot be settled from the text; the guide does not correct the quotation. The word "fifth" means a fifth of a US gallon, about 757 millilitres, the standard American spirits bottle before the metric 750 ml took over in 1980.
Market Street, the Tenderloin, the freeway
The route out of the city is given in a few quick strokes. "She drove across the streaming band of light that was Market Street and plunged into the Tenderloin beyond. Tiny shops pushed together in uneven rows, spread out on both sides of the narrow streets; crowds of men milled aimlessly between the cheap bars and cafés. Marsha turned off, past deserted factories and industrial warehouses; a few moments later the car entered the broad strips that made up the freeway."
"'We'll make better time this way,' she explained as the little Studebaker gained velocity. Sodium vapor lamps flashed past them; beyond the dividing strip endless headlights glowed and slithered. 'I'll turn off at San Mateo.'"
Fact check: the route. Two details do not quite fit the San Francisco of July 1952, and both are flagged, not corrected. (1) The Tenderloin lies north of Market Street, on the same side as the Hayes District, so a car leaving Hayes Valley and crossing Market would enter South of Market, the district of "deserted factories and industrial warehouses" that the next sentence describes, not the Tenderloin. Either the supermarket stood somewhere else (the text never says where), or Dick has put two neighbourhoods in the wrong order. (2) The freeway itself was barely there. The Bayshore route south to San Mateo existed as the four-lane Bayshore Highway, finished between San Francisco and San Jose in 1937 and nicknamed "Bloody Bayshore"; its conversion into a divided freeway had only begun. The first San Francisco unit, about 1.3 miles from Augusta Street to 25th Street, opened on 1 June 1951; further city sections opened in 1953 and later, and the San Mateo stretch south through San Carlos was finished in 1954 (California Highways and Public Works; Wikipedia, "Bayshore Freeway"). So "the broad strips that made up the freeway" with "the dividing strip" is accurate for a short stretch, and generous for the rest. Dick was writing in 1952 and 1953 and may have had in mind the road as it was being rebuilt. Sodium vapour lamps, with their orange-yellow light, were in use on American highways from the 1930s.
Marsha's "I'll turn off at San Mateo" matters for the geography of the whole novel. Cedar Groves, Hadley's town, is fictional, and the novel never places it exactly. The route in this chapter, south out of the city on the Bay side, off at San Mateo, and then on darker roads to a town reached from the highway past a Standard station and a Shell station, puts it somewhere down the Peninsula or across toward the coast, consistent with the coast road of Chapter 10. Later chapters speak of a freeway "from San Francisco to San Jose" (025 L1291) near the town, which fits the same picture.
Through the city's underside. The drive repeats in reverse the descent into Hayes Hole in Chapter 11. On the way in, Marsha took Hadley down past "liquor stores, shoeshine parlors, cheap hotels... pawnshops, bars." On the way out she takes him through more of the same: "crowds of men milled aimlessly between the cheap bars and cafés." Then the city falls away into factories and warehouses, "deserted" at night, and finally the freeway, all speed and light, with no people at all, only "endless headlights" that "glowed and slithered." The verb "slithered" is the first of many snake words in the chapter; later Marsha's body will seem "snakelike" to Hadley. The modern road, which Marsha loves and Hadley does not, is a place where nobody is anybody, and the next stage of the drive will take even the lights away.
"Where did he come from?"
"They drove for a time without speaking. Finally Hadley asked: 'Where did he come from?'"
"'Beckheim? He was born in Alabama; I told you that.'"
She did tell him: in Chapter 9, at the Health Food Store, she gave him Beckheim's life in a paragraph, beginning "Theodore Beckheim is fifty-five years old, although he isn't sure that's exact. He was born in Vinegar Bend, Alabama" (024 L979). Hadley, who in Chapter 11 guessed the man was "at least seventy," says now: "I didn't realize he was that old." Marsha corrects him: "He's not so old. He's tired...
Fifty-five or seventy. The two estimates of Beckheim's age have run through three chapters, and here Marsha holds her ground. "He's not so old. He's tired" is the defence of someone who lives with a man and sees him every day, and it is a small sign of the secret that the chapter will soon reveal. She knows how he looks in the morning; Hadley only knows how he looked at a desk at night. Vinegar Bend is a real place, a small community in Washington County in south-western Alabama, a timber and railway settlement in the piney woods. To a reader in 1952, "born in Alabama" also meant born under the full weight of Jim Crow, and Alabama's ban on marriage between Black and white people will matter by the end of this chapter.
Then she asks the question she has been waiting to ask. "She turned curiously to him. 'What did you think of him?'" And Dick, unusually, lets Hadley read her: "'It's hard to say.' He felt that she was worried about his reaction, unsure of herself until she knew how she felt; as if her own opinion hung in the balance, too."
"'Were... you disappointed?' she asked."
"'No. Of course not...' Hadley broke off moodily. 'I resented all those questions. What business is it of his, all those things he asked me? About Ellen and Pete. Looking through my wallet that way.'"
Two people waiting for each other's verdict. This is a quiet but telling moment. Marsha, who has been sure of everything since Chapter 9 (art, politics, the mass, the coming fire), is suddenly "unsure of herself until she knew how she felt," as if her own opinion of Beckheim "hung in the balance" on Hadley's answer. It suggests a woman whose faith in the old man is less settled than her speeches, and who brought Hadley to Beckheim partly to test something in herself. Hadley, for his part, cannot say what he thinks, and what comes out first is a complaint about privacy. "All those questions," "Looking through my wallet": the most personal part of the interview in Chapter 11 (Beckheim's reading of the wallet as "Stuart Hadley") is the part he resents most. He wanted to be helped without being known.
"A seed slipped in close to his flesh"
Out of the window, the night changes. "He glowered out the window at the dark countryside beyond the freeway. Neon signs beamed here and there. The night sky was vaguely purple. A few stars sputtered fitfully; the fog lay behind them now. Hadley rolled down the window, and warm night wind promptly whipped in around him. Fresh wind that smelled of baked fields and sagging wooden fences."
The fog of the city is behind them; they are in the warm inland summer. And Hadley's mind goes back to the man. "He wondered if he would ever see Beckheim again. The Negro's words faded and blurred together when he tried to remember them. What had Beckheim actually said? What had he meant? Hadley touched his wallet; the membership card was there, but what did it signify?"
Seed, sacrament, receipt. The paragraph turns the card over three times. First it is a seed, alive, "warmed by his body," that might "take root and grow": the language of the parable of the sower, and of grace planted in a man. Then it is something buried in his body and "received... for better or worse," which is the language of the marriage service: Hadley has, in a sense, taken a vow. Then it shrinks to "a thin blue pasteboard card," a receipt for "a dollar and fifty cents," the same one handed to "thousands of others." The last turn is a snob's turn, and it shows how fast Hadley's pride recovers when he is hurt: if everyone has one, then it means nothing, and "everyone" is described in the contemptuous words of the class he fears to sink into ("workmen and Negroes, the lowest elements," "riffraff and cranks"). The image of Marsha's card, once stiff, "taken in long ago," now "limp and soiled," is sexual as well as religious. He pictures her faith as something used up by long handling, and that picture is the first sign of the contempt for her that will break out in the car.
The irony Hadley cannot see: the card is not common. Two chapters later (Chapter 14, 025 L481-919) Hadley learns from Wakefield and Betty at the Health Food Store that only Beckheim himself gives blue cards, that there are "only a few dozen" of them, and that Wakefield's own card is white. So Hadley's guess here, "Wakefield carried an identical card, no doubt," is wrong, and so, probably, is his picture of a limp blue card in Marsha's purse. The card was a mark of selection after all, which is what he wanted to believe a few minutes later in the dark ("He had been selected"). The reader who comes back to this chapter after Chapter 14 sees that Hadley will tear up, at the end of this night, the one sign of being chosen he ever received, because he cannot believe he was chosen, and because the woman who brought him belongs to the man who chose him. Dick builds the irony slowly, and it works only in hindsight.
A closer look: the contempt in the free indirect style. "Workmen and Negroes, the lowest elements of the cities and towns. Aimless, unsatisfied riffraff and cranks" is Hadley's thought, given in free indirect style, not the narrator's judgment, and it fits a character who has been sliding between snobbery and self-contempt since Chapter 1. But the novel does not answer it within this chapter, and readers should notice that it lumps Black Americans with "the lowest elements" as a matter of course. The same pages call Beckheim "the Negro" and "the black man" as if those were his names. Dick's portrait of Beckheim is in many ways the most respectful in the book (he is the one figure of real dignity), yet the narration keeps describing him by his race and his body. The guide flags this rather than smoothing it over.
"It's like flying"
Beside him, Marsha is happy for the first time that night. "Beside him the woman sat gripping the wheel with one hand, her left arm resting on the sill of the open window. She leaned back against the seat, chin up, reddish hair tousled by the wind. The suede leather jacket flapped back and forth; Marsha turned suddenly and smiled at him, teeth white and even in the faint light of the sodium vapor lamps."
"'Nice,' she observed. 'The wind, the motion of the car. This little car is so smooth... It's like flying.' She pressed down on the accelerator; the car seemed to float forward over the dips and rises of the road. There was no sound or presence of the motor, only the roar of the wind as it entered the cabin and rushed around the man and woman."
The lights go, one kind after another. "Presently the sodium vapor lights ceased and the highway became dark. There were fewer cars now. Marsha leaned forward and clicked off the dashboard lights. The luminous numbers, letters, dials, faded away; the cabin was totally dark. Ahead of them the bright swath of headlights was a circle of orange in the summer night."
Driving blind on purpose. The detail of the dashboard lights is small and alarming. Marsha switches off the speedometer and gauges so that neither of them can see how fast they are going: what is left is the wind, the dark, and "a circle of orange" thrown ahead by the headlights. It is a perfect picture of how she lives, by sensation and will, with the instruments turned off. It also recalls her driving on the way into Hayes Hole in Chapter 11, when she stuck out her thin arm and "swerved across the line, through the left-hand lane" to park. For Hadley, who senses "the dangerous murmur of motion" and know "without seeing" that they are going too fast, the dark cabin is both thrilling and frightening, the same mixture as the evening with Beckheim. The phrase "like flying" will come back, darkly, in Chapter 16, when Hadley himself drives Marsha's Studebaker at seventy in the "suicide lane."
Hadley sinks back. "Conscious of the gradually increasing velocity of the car, Hadley closed his eyes and lay back against the seat. He sensed the dangerous murmur of motion under him; he knew without seeing that the car was going too fast. But there were no other cars; there was nothing else in the world but the little Studebaker and the slim figure beside him. He was tired. The interview with Beckheim had exhausted him. Now that he could look back at it he was conscious of the tension that had held the two of them; in the few words they had exchanged there was a tight ordeal of discovery and investigation."
"He had been selected"
Half asleep, his thoughts turn again. "He wondered vaguely if Beckheim was as curious about everyone as he had been about him. He wondered if Beckheim probed and needled everybody who came into his sphere. Hadley's thoughts wandered off groggily. Perhaps Beckheim had taken a special interest... The giving of the card might signify something momentous. A sign. He could ask Marsha if it was common. Beckheim had singled him out... He yawned and relaxed. He had been selected."
From "cheated" to "selected" in twenty minutes. The arc of Hadley's feeling about the card, inside a single car ride, is the whole of his character in small. At the supermarket he was "cheated." On the freeway the card was a living seed, then a cheap pasteboard shared with "riffraff." Now, drowsy, it is "a sign," "something momentous," and "He had been selected." He thinks of asking Marsha "if it was common," and never does. If he had asked, he might have learned what Chapter 14 tells him. Instead, within the hour, Marsha will say "He sized you up," and he will hear the opposite, that he has been judged and found wanting. Hadley's sense of his worth has no keel. It swings with fatigue, drink, and the last thing anyone said to him.
The drowsy thought becomes a vision, and Dick writes it with a strange tenderness. "In the nebulous confusion of his thoughts the image of Beckheim arose briefly, large and heavyset, black horn-rimmed glasses, sleeves rolled up. In the warm night air Hadley smelled the presence of the black man, as if the summer mists settling over the fields and roads were perspiration collecting on the ancient black body."
The giant in the hills. This is one of the strangest passages in the novel and one of the most characteristic of the later Dick. The old man's body becomes the land itself: the mist is his sweat, the ridge is his face, and "Beckheim lay all around." It is a pagan or mythic picture (the sleeping giant whose body is the hills) set inside a Christian sect's story, and it is also a child's picture: the comforting presence of a father who is everywhere and can be touched. Hadley, who never had a father he could reach (his family lives far away in New York, and in Chapter 19 he tells a hotel keeper only that his father "was a doctor"), has found one in a man he met for an hour. The wish to "reach up and touch the dark, horny cheek" is the most tender thing Hadley feels in the chapter, and it is felt for Beckheim, not Marsha. Readers of Dick's later novels will recognise the move: the divine as a presence diffused through the world, a theme he would return to for the rest of his life. Here it lasts a paragraph, and then the car stops.
A closer look: the racialised body. The vision is affectionate, but it is built out of race and smell: "the presence of the black man," "perspiration collecting on the ancient black body," "the dark, horny cheek." Earlier in the same chapter Beckheim is "blackened," with "horny skin" and the smell of "stale sweat and musty closets." Dick seems to mean the earthiness as a kind of holiness, the opposite of Marsha's "polished stone" and "parchment," but the result is that the novel's one Black character of stature is rendered again and again as flesh, odour and texture. This is a familiar pattern in white American writing of the period, even sympathetic writing, and the guide notes it rather than reading the passage as simple praise.
"About midnight"
"'Where are we?' he murmured, pulling himself together and collecting his thoughts. 'What time is it?'"
"'About midnight.' Marsha struck a match in the gloom; it flared up briefly, and then glowed down to the dull red of a cigarette."
He asks again. "He could see nothing outside the car, only the outline of bushes and the rock-strewn surface of the road. To the right was a vague opaque presence that might have been a building. Apparently they were between towns, out in the open country. He didn't enjoy the feel of it one bit."
"'We're almost there,' Marsha assured him. 'A mile or so more. You fell asleep.'"
Why has she stopped? The text never says, and the question hangs over everything that follows. Marsha has driven off the highway onto a gravel road, "a mile or so" from Cedar Groves, and turned off the engine while Hadley slept. She is "almost there" and could simply drive him home. Instead she lights a cigarette and, a minute later, opens the whiskey. Possible readings: she wants the drink she said she needed and cannot have at home with Beckheim; she wants to talk about Beckheim before handing Hadley back to his wife; she is half inclined to the intimacy that Hadley later imposes, and later says "Maybe later... If you had got going quicker... or if you had waited awhile." Dick leaves it open, and the openness matters, because it is exactly the kind of uncertainty that Hadley, in his rage, will resolve in the worst way. Whatever she intended, nothing she does excuses what he does.
Hadley is ill at ease in the open country; "He didn't enjoy the feel of it one bit." "From his pocket Hadley got out his crumpled package of cigarettes. He leaned over to get a light from Marsha. 'I know. That business with Beckheim wore me out.'"
The lighting of the cigarette is written as the closest moment of the night. "In the darkness the woman's cigarette glowed against his own; he inhaled deeply, his hand on the seat behind her shoulder, accepting light and warmth from her. The pungent smell of smoke mixed with the presence of her hair and skin; he could see her close to him, invisible and alive, leaning forward until their foreheads met."
"'Thanks,' he said, drawing away. A certain kind of tight stricture hardened around his chest; he breathed carefully and slowly, forcing himself to take things easy."
"Accepting light and warmth from her." Here light and warmth pass at their smallest scale: one cigarette lighting another. Hadley takes "light and warmth" from Marsha, their foreheads touch, and something in his chest "hardened." The word Dick chooses is "stricture," a medical word for a narrowing, not a word for desire. What Hadley feels is constriction, the start of the "cold ache" the chapter will name later. The tenderness and the menace arrive together.
The glass from the glove compartment
"After a moment Marsha said: 'Get a glass out; there's one in the glove compartment.' From her purse she got the key and handed it to Hadley. As he opened the glove compartment and fished around inside, she began on the bottle."
"'See it?' she asked."
"He found the glass and brought it out. Marsha filled it, and the two of them sat passing it back and forth, the car doors open, letting the night air swirl around them."
A locked glove box with a glass in it. Marsha keeps a drinking glass in a locked glove compartment, and the key in her purse. The detail is precise and quietly characterising: this is a woman who drinks in her car, perhaps often, and who locks things up. The same glove box will be locked again, with "a sudden metallic click," when she takes the bottle from Hadley. One glass passed between two people is also an intimacy, a shared cup, the kind of thing a couple does. The doors stand open. Everything about the setting says "lovers' lane," and both of them know it.
Now Hadley can see her, and his eye turns her to stone. "Now Hadley could make out the woman's figure. In the faint starlight Marsha's features were sharp and small, translucent as old parchment. Her warm bodily processes had calcified; she was hard as polished stone, her face faintly luminous, eyes and lips without color. Half smiling, lips apart, chin tilted up, she sat gazing off into the distance, a demure, thoughtful figure in leather jacket and slacks. Presently she kicked off her shoes; in the dim light her feet were bare and pale, ghostlike."
Parchment, stone, ghost. Every image Hadley finds for Marsha in this scene is an image of something no longer alive: "old parchment," "calcified," "polished stone," "without color," "ghostlike." It is the opposite of the vision of Beckheim a page earlier, all sweat and warmth and "ancient black body." Hadley's imagination is already sorting the two of them: the old man is earth and life, the woman is bone and death. The guide's notes in earlier chapters traced Dick's habit of seeing Marsha as a mechanism (the "life-sized puppet" of Chapter 10). Here she is a relic. The reader should keep in mind that these are Hadley's perceptions, and that Dick lets the reader see what Hadley does not: that she is tired, frightened, and "demure," a woman sitting barefoot in a car at midnight with a man she brought along on her own errand.
The Ford coupe in the hills
The car, the dark and the crickets call up another night. "Somewhere, a long time ago, he had sat in the darkness and quiet of a car, beside a woman. His mind focused, and he remembered. It was not a woman; it was a girl. Ellen and he had sat this way, in his little old Ford coupe, up in the hills at night. Dreaming and murmuring, exchanging plans and extravagant hopes. It seemed like a long time ago, but it was only a few years. Very much like this; the same crickets creaked in the shrubbery, the violet summer sky, the baked woolly smell of the car's upholstery. But then there had been beer and potato chips, and the Andrews sisters on the radio. The jeans and T-shirt of adolescence...the plump, ripe body of his fiancée, flesh instead of polished bone. The woman beside him now was cold and hard and mature. The tempered skeleton, chipped and refined by experience."
| Detail | Ellen, "a few years" ago | Marsha, tonight |
|---|---|---|
| Who | "a girl," "his fiancée" | "a woman," "cold and hard and mature" |
| Car | "his little old Ford coupe" | her "little Studebaker," grey coupe |
| Place | "up in the hills at night" | a gravel road "between towns" |
| Sounds | crickets; "the Andrews sisters on the radio" | crickets "a long way off"; no radio |
| Food and drink | "beer and potato chips" | lukewarm Jameson from one glass |
| Clothes | "The jeans and T-shirt of adolescence" | leather jacket and slacks, shoes kicked off |
| Body | "plump, ripe," "flesh" | "polished bone," "The tempered skeleton" |
| Talk | "plans and extravagant hopes" | doom, salvation, Beckheim |
| Time | "games of chase and capture... until dawn" | "Outside of time, perhaps" |
Fact check: the Andrews Sisters. LaVerne, Maxene and Patty Andrews were the most popular female vocal group of the swing era, with hits from "Bei Mir Bist Du Schön" (1937-38) and "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" (1941) on. If Hadley's courtship of Ellen falls "only a few years" before 1952, around 1949-50, the radio would have been playing their biggest postwar record, "I Can Dream, Can't I?" (recorded 15 July 1949 with Gordon Jenkins; No. 1 on Billboard's Best Sellers chart for four weeks from 14 January 1950), and "I Wanna Be Loved" (No. 1, June 1950). Dick names no song. The book spells the group "the Andrews sisters," lower case, which is kept in the quotation. Note that the Ford coupe is "his," not Ellen's: the earlier guide's shorthand of "Ellen's Ford coupe" refers to the courtship, not to ownership.
The comparison runs on into a thought about time. "It seemed impossible that Marsha could ever have been a girl, young like his wife, foolish and silly and full of expansive nonsense. Giggling and murmuring and playing elaborate erotic games of chase and capture, teasing and fooling until dawn. The elaborate ritual of love... Marsha was bleak and austere, with an unchanging finality. Outside of time, perhaps. Not subject to the laws of development and decay."
The past as the only living time. The memory of Ellen is the warmest passage in the chapter, and Hadley does not act on it. He has a wife at home who was once that "plump, ripe" girl and is now the mother of a month-old baby, and he is sitting in another woman's car at midnight comparing the two in favour of the memory. What he mourns is not Ellen but youth, "plans and extravagant hopes," the time before the store. Note the irony of "only a few years": Hadley is 25, and he already lives as if his life were behind him. His fantasy that Marsha is "Outside of time... Not subject to the laws of development and decay" is part awe and part fear. It is how he saw Beckheim too, as someone who had "already passed through the fire." Chapter 15 will give Marsha a past full of development and decay: a daughter born when she was eighteen, a husband killed in the war, England, a second marriage. Hadley's "impossible that Marsha could ever have been a girl" is precisely wrong.
"The worried old lady is you"
Marsha breaks the silence with tenderness. "'Mulling away,' Marsha said softly. 'Aren't you, Stuart Hadley? Mulling and brooding and worrying your life away.' She reached out and touched his arm. 'You worry so...all the time. You know, you have wrinkles; your forehead's like an old man's.'"
Hadley answers with a joke that is not quite a joke. "He grinned. 'It's you prophets of doom that make me worry. When I come to work on Saturday, there's an old lady with a bunch of those 'Prepare for the Day of Judgment!' pamphlets.'"
And Marsha turns the joke inside out. "Marsha reflected. 'No...it's the other way around. The worried old lady is you, Stuart Hadley. All the worried old ladies go out, sooner or later, with their pamphlets. They're standing out there because people are already afraid.'"
Who causes the fear. This short exchange states one of the novel's central ideas about apocalyptic religion. Hadley's theory is the common one: the "prophets of doom" make people afraid. Marsha's theory reverses the arrow: the pamphleteers are on the street "because people are already afraid," and the frightened person, sooner or later, becomes a pamphleteer. On her account the Society does not create the dread of 1952 (the bomb, Korea, the draft, the treadmill of the store); it gives the dread somewhere to go. And she places Hadley, not the old lady, at the start of the chain: "The worried old lady is you." The reader who has followed him since the first chapter, sleepless, sick, inventing reasons to leave the store, has to admit she has a point. It is also a cruel thing to say to a young man about his manhood, and the next lines show it lands.
Continuity: the Saturday old lady. No earlier chapter shows a pamphlet-seller outside Modern TV on a Saturday; she enters the novel here, in Hadley's remark, as a regular figure he knows. A different old lady, a repair customer, appears near the end of the book: in Chapter 21 the scarred Hadley thinks that "No old lady would ever come again, carrying her radio, wanting to have it fixed." The guide treats the Saturday pamphleteer as new information, not a slip.
"'I was just kidding,' Hadley said. With the close, personal intimacy of a woman's body nearby him, he did not particularly feel like discussing abstract topics. He wanted to think about what lay close at hand, the immediate reality of the car."
"'You don't like being called an old lady, do you?'"
"'Of course not.' He shrugged. 'It doesn't matter.'"
"'I don't mean to hurt your feelings. Did Ted hurt your feelings?'"
"'No.' Hadley dismissed the subject."
"Did Ted hurt your feelings?" The question is maternal: she asks it the way one asks a child after a visit to a stern relative. She is also, without saying so, speaking as someone on Beckheim's side of the desk, who knows how he can be. Hadley, who wants "the immediate reality of the car," hears neither the name nor the tone. The private name "Ted," which she used in the flat in Chapter 11 ("Ted says so"), is the clue that he keeps missing, and which she will finally spell out for him.
"The water of life"
He drinks. "He sipped more of the whiskey; it was thick and alive as it felt its way down his throat. A furry, fluid shape without distinct form...the water of life. He choked a trifle; he wasn't used to straight whiskey. And it was lukewarm."
"He yawned sleepily. 'I'm tired. But not in the same way I was. I'm relaxed... This stuff unfastens.'"
Two meanings of "the water of life." The phrase is an old name for spirits. The English word "whiskey" comes from the Irish uisce beatha (Scottish Gaelic uisge beatha), "water of life," a translation of the Latin aqua vitae used by medieval distillers; the French eau de vie is the same idea. So the phrase is exactly right for a bottle of Jameson. But in a chapter soaked in the language of the Society, it also points to the Bible: "And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God" (Revelation 22:1, King James Version), and "whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely" (Revelation 22:17). The last chapter of Revelation, the book of the end of the world, offers its water free to anyone who wants it. Hadley went to Beckheim for that and came away with a card; now he takes the substitute, from a glass in a glove box, lukewarm. "This stuff unfastens" is his own little theology: what the old man would not loosen, whiskey does.
Marsha reminds him of the morning. "'Remember, you have to go to work tomorrow.' Her voice sounded a long way off. Remote and small. 'It's late.'"
"'Maybe I won't go to work,' Hadley said boldly."
"'What instead?'"
"He hadn't worked that out. So many things... The world faded off into infinite being. But nothing specific, only the vague sense of futility that tomorrow at work brought him. 'Anything,' he said lazily. 'Picking apples down in the valley. Shoveling gravel on a road gang. Sailor. Truck driver. Forest fire-fighter.'"
"'You're a romantic little boy,' Marsha said gently."
The list of escapes. Hadley's fantasy jobs are all outdoor, physical, masculine, seasonal or roving: the apple harvest in "the valley," a road gang, the sea, the long-haul road, a fire line in the forests. They are the jobs of the American folk hero of the 1930s and 1940s, from Steinbeck's migrant pickers to the wanderers of the coming Beat writers (Kerouac's On the Road, drafted by 1951, was not published until 1957, so this is the mood, not the book). They are also, every one of them, the opposite of standing behind a counter in a tie. Hadley has no plan, only "the vague sense of futility that tomorrow at work brought him," and the list is a child's list of what grown men do. Marsha's "romantic little boy" is accurate and gentle, and it is the second time in a few minutes she has made him small: first an old lady, now a little boy. The last of her names for him tonight will be "woolly-headed little boy."
Practical angle: the fantasy exit. Anyone who has worked inside a large organisation will recognise the list. A person stuck in a role that has stopped meaning anything often imagines not a better version of the same job but its complete opposite, something manual, solitary and free of customers. It is a symptom, not a plan. Managers who hear it from a good employee ("maybe I'll go and do something real") should read it as a sign of disengagement rather than a career goal. Chapter 13 will show Hadley's employer, Jim Fergesson, answer exactly this restlessness with money and a title.
"The chain of Stuart Hadleys"
The whiskey takes him out of time. "He peered stupidly forward, out into the darkness, his mind fuzzy with fatigue and the fumes of the John Jameson. The unbinding warmth made him sink easily down; it was no longer easy to place himself in time and space. He wondered dully where he was...when he was. Which Stuart Hadley was it, along the chain of Stuart Hadleys? Child, boy, adolescent, salesman, middle-aged father... Dreams rustled drowsily in his mind. Stirred from corners and compartments, blends of ambitions and fears drifted here and there, eddying currents that had always been a part of him."
"'Go away,' he muttered. 'Not you,' he explained to Marsha. 'The inside bees.'"
"She smiled. 'Inside bees? You're a strange one, Stuart Hadley.'"
"Annoyed, he scowled. 'Why do you always call me Stuart Hadley? Either Stuart or Hadley, not both.'"
"'Why not?'"
Beckheim's question, answered drunk. In Chapter 11 Beckheim asked, "Could there be another Stuart Hadley?" and held up the wallet: "This is Stuart Hadley." Here, an hour later, Hadley sees not one Stuart Hadley but a "chain" of them, "Child, boy, adolescent, salesman, middle-aged father," and he is no longer sure which link he is. Note that the list runs into the future: "middle-aged father" is a self he has not reached, and the chain already includes him. It is a picture of identity as a sequence of selves rather than a fixed core, and it is the question the whole novel puts to its hero. Chapter 21 will add a startling link: Hadley, blinded in one eye and scarred, thinks he is "not Stuart Hadley at all," and that the name is just "something to answer to."
"A bunch of toadstools"
The failure to answer breaks him open. "He concentrated, but nothing came. Irritably, he swept the question away. 'For God's sake, what kind of a person are you? I don't understand any of you...a bunch of toadstools popping up. Preying on us... what are you after?' He pulled angrily away from her. 'What am I supposed to do, get down on my hands and knees and pray?' His resentment surprised him; it boiled up in and around him, carrying away his tongue. 'I came all the way up here... what's he want me to do? He tells me it's up to me; you think if I knew what to do I'd be here?'"
"Listening intently, soberly, Marsha said: 'I didn't realize you were so angry.'"
"'Of course I'm angry! I came all the way up here for nothing...' His voice blurred off in baffled confusion. 'I don't think it's fair. He didn't do anything; he just sat there working.'"
Toadstools. Hadley's image for the Society is a good one, and it is the mirror of the seed. A seed, in the card passage, was planted and might grow into something living. A toadstool is a fungus that springs up overnight on rot, feeds on what is dead and may be poisonous. "Popping up. Preying on us" is the view of the cult held by the Golds and Fergesson and every sensible person in Cedar Groves, and Hadley adopts it the moment his own hopes are disappointed. The sentence also makes Marsha one of "you," a member of the cult rather than his guide, and "us" the ordinary people preyed upon. In ten minutes he has gone from "He had been selected" to "Preying on us." Dick says the resentment "surprised him," that it was "carrying away his tongue": the words come out of him before he knows he thinks them.
"He just sat there working." The complaint is the heart of Hadley's disappointment. What he saw in Chapter 11 was an old man with a heavy gold fountain pen answering letters, extracting "checks or money" from them into "a square metal box," asking questions without looking up. The work was the point of the scene: Beckheim is the administrator of a mail-order ministry as much as a prophet. Hadley wanted the performance he saw in the auditorium in Chapter 5, and got a man at a desk. It is a very modern disappointment. People who come to a leader for meaning are often let down to find that the leader's day consists of correspondence, money and scheduling, and that they have been fitted into it for twenty minutes.
"'What did you want him to do?'"
"'I don't know.'"
"'Miracle healing?' Gently, she continued: 'He's not a saint; he can't raise the dead and multiply bread.'"
"'At least he could have listened to me!'"
"Queerly, she asked: 'What did you have to say?'"
"What did you have to say?" Marsha's two questions in this passage are the sharpest in the chapter. "What did you want him to do?" gets "I don't know." "What did you have to say?" gets nothing at all ("Hadley shook his head dumbly"). He wanted to be listened to and had nothing to say; he wanted to be told what to do and could not say what he wanted. Her reference to the miracles of Jesus (raising Lazarus, John 11, and feeding the five thousand with five loaves and two fishes, Matthew 14 and John 6) marks the limit of Beckheim's claim: he is a preacher, not a messiah, and the Society asks its members to act, not to be rescued. The word "Queerly" (strangely, in the older sense) tells us she finds his demand odd. It is the demand of a man who has never had to state what he wants.
"He sized you up"
"Hadley shook his head dumbly. 'He should have known. I thought he would know. I wanted his help... I didn't get a damn thing except a blue card. And it cost me a dollar and fifty cents.'"
"'Maybe,' Marsha said, 'it's too late to help you. I don't know, either. Probably he understands you better than I do... I'll ask him.'"
"'How could he? He only glanced my way a couple of times!'"
"Marsha's even white teeth flashed in laughter. 'He sized you up, Stuart Hadley.'"
"Shocked fear swept over Hadley. 'Oh, you mean I didn't measure up?' His voice shook. 'I'm not worth saving? I'm not part of the select group, is that it?'"
How a compliment becomes a sentence of damnation. "He sized you up" is said laughing, and it can mean several things: he took your measure quickly; he saw what you are; he knew more about you than you told him. Nothing in it says "and found you wanting." Hadley supplies that at once, with "Shocked fear": "I didn't measure up," "not worth saving," "not part of the select group." The habit of hearing every judgment as a rejection is the deepest flaw in him, and the novel has shown it from the start. The irony, as noted above, is that Beckheim did select him: the blue card is rare. Hadley has the proof of his election in his wallet and is sure he has been damned.
"'Stuart Hadley...'"
"'Stop calling me that!'"
"The woman's nostrils flared. 'Nobody decides who can be saved. Nobody selects, like a draft board picking eligible men. You're saved for the same reason a ball rolls downhill... because of natural laws.'"
"Hadley grunted sullenly and subsided. 'It doesn't make sense. Predestination... I remember that stuff. The saved and the damned.' His voice rose bleakly. 'Damn it, I'm not going to sit around. It isn't fair. I have to do something; I thought he'd tell me what to do...' He broke off."
"'You'll have to decide for yourself,' Marsha said. 'He told you that; remember? You're the only one who can decide.'"
Three theories of selection, and a fourth that Hadley hates. Read closely, the argument sets out several different ideas of how a person comes to be "saved," and the characters slide between them without noticing.
- Selection by a judge (Hadley's fear). Someone with authority looks you over and decides: "like a draft board picking eligible men." The image is pointed, because a draft board has already judged Hadley. In Chapter 11 Beckheim found his draft card and asked "You're 4-F?", and in Chapter 13 Hadley's certificate is said to make him "permanently ineligible" (025 L147). Under the Selective Service Act of 1948 local boards classified every registered man; 4-F meant not acceptable for military service. Hadley has been rejected by one board and now imagines a second, heavenly one.
- Selection by natural law (Marsha's doctrine). "Nobody selects... You're saved for the same reason a ball rolls downhill." Salvation is not a verdict but a process, the outcome of what a person is, as rolling is the outcome of gravity. This is closer to a scientific or Stoic picture than to any church's teaching, and it fits the Society's talk of the coming fire as something that will simply happen, sorting what burns from what does not.
- Predestination (Hadley's memory). "Predestination... I remember that stuff. The saved and the damned." This is the Calvinist doctrine, set out in the Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chapter 3: "some men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting life, and others foreordained to everlasting death." Hadley told Beckheim in Chapter 11 that his family were "Some kind of Congregationalists" (024 L1837). New England Congregationalism grew out of Puritan Calvinism, and its Savoy Declaration of 1658 kept the Westminster teaching on predestination, though by the twentieth century most Congregational churches had left it far behind. Hadley remembers it as "that stuff," a Sunday-school fragment.
- Self-decision (Beckheim's message, repeated). "You'll have to decide for yourself... You're the only one who can decide." This is the one theory Hadley cannot bear, because it puts the burden on him. He wanted to be chosen or refused; he was told to choose.
Marsha's "natural law" and Beckheim's "decide for yourself" sit uneasily together, and she does not notice. If you are saved as a ball rolls downhill, what is left to decide? The tension is old in many religious traditions (grace and free will), and Dick leaves it unresolved. For Hadley the practical result is simple: every theory leaves him with nothing to do but wait or act, and he chooses to act.
Pouring out the glass
"'Forget it.' Hadley gulped down more of the John Jameson. He was beginning to feel sick; his stomach turned over queasily, and a raw, metallic deposit rose thickly in the back of his throat and gagged him. Lumberingly, he turned around and poured out the contents of the glass onto the dark pavement."
"'What are you doing?' Marsha asked sharply."
"'Urinating.'"
"She laughed. 'You've had enough; give me the bottle.' She took the fifth and jammed the lid over it. A sudden metallic click; she had stuffed it and the glass into the glove compartment and locked it."
"Urinating." The crude joke is the first sign that the tone has turned. Pouring out "the water of life" onto the road and calling it urine is a rejection of the whole evening's offering: the drink, the sacrament it stood for, and the woman who bought it. Marsha laughs and takes charge, as she took charge of the drinks in the flat in Chapter 11, this time with a lock and "A sudden metallic click." For the second time tonight, Hadley's drink has been taken away by someone who decides what is good for him. The "dark pavement" here sits oddly with the "rock-strewn surface" of a gravel road; Dick's word is loose.
"'Maybe I will do something,' Hadley asserted after a while."
"'What sort of thing?'"
"'I don't know yet. Let's not talk about it.' The night wind was beginning to turn chill; he reached out and pulled the door shut."
"'Do you want to leave?' Marsha held up her thin wrist and examined the dial of her watch. 'It's getting late; I'll take you home.'"
"'Wait.' Convulsively, he grabbed her hand as she reached to push the ignition key into the lock. 'Not yet.'"
"For a moment she held her hand there; then she smiled and put the key away. 'The man of action asserts himself.'"
The first grab. The first physical act of force is small: Hadley seizes her hand to stop her starting the car. Marsha's response, a smile and a mocking line, "The man of action asserts himself," treats it as a game, which is perhaps how she has treated the whole drive. "Maybe I will do something" has just been said about his life; the next thing he does is take hold of her. Dick lets the reader see the threat build in small steps: hand, arms, elbows, the struggle on the road, the car. Each step is something Marsha might have read as playful, and each goes further than the last.
"'I don't want to go back yet. And I don't like to be driven around by a woman.' He added: 'I'll drive the rest of the way.'"
"'Can you?'"
"'Of course. I drive the store truck all the damn time.'"
"Marsha shrugged indifferently. 'Whatever you want. But we can't stay here much longer... It's getting cold and I have to go all the way back to S.F.'"
"Driven around by a woman." Hadley's pride finds its target. All evening Marsha has driven: in the city, in Hayes Hole, on the freeway with the lights off. He has been the passenger and, in Chapter 11, the one left to wait while she talked to Beckheim in the kitchen. "I don't like to be driven around by a woman" is about the car and about everything else. "I drive the store truck all the damn time" is a sad credential: the most manly thing he can claim is the Modern TV delivery truck. Hadley will get his wish in Chapter 16, when he drives Marsha's Studebaker himself at seventy in the "suicide lane." "I have to go all the way back to S.F." is one more clue: she has to go home, and somebody is there.
The walk on the gravel
What follows is a drunken exit that turns into an assault. "Abruptly, Hadley pushed the car door open and stepped unsteadily out. He slammed the door after him and moved a few uncertain, wavering steps into the darkness."
"'Where are you going?' Marsha called shrilly."
"'Home. You go on back... I'll walk.' He stumbled over the rising shoulder of the road, managed to regain his balance, and began systematically tracing his way along the edge of the gravel."
"'For God's sake,' Marsha snapped excitedly. She leaped out of the car and raced after him. 'You don't know which way it is; you don't know what you're doing!' Exasperated, she caught hold of him and shook him furiously. 'Get back in the car and behave like an adult!'"
"'Let go of me.' Muddled and embittered, Hadley tore her small cold hands loose from his coat and shoved her away. 'I know where I live; I'll find my way back. I've walked longer walks than this.'"
"'You damn fool.' Half laughing, her voice trembling with cold and rising hysteria, Marsha hurried along beside him. 'You'll pass out and some car'll run over you.'"
"'Not me,' Hadley said. Brooding as he stumbled along he mumbled: 'Why not? Get it over with. After all, it won't be long. Beckheim says so; listen to the Master.' He stepped from the road into the dry shrubbery at the edge of the shoulder. 'All right, I'll walk along here. Off the goddamn road.'"
"Why not? Get it over with." The first open hint of a death wish in Hadley appears here, drunk, on a dark road: if a car runs him over, so what, since "it won't be long" before the end anyway. "Listen to the Master" is sneering, and it shows how the Society's apocalypse can feed despair rather than hope in someone like him: if the world is about to burn, nothing matters, including staying alive. The same mood returns in the last third of the novel, in the delirium and falls of Chapters 18 and 19, where the old German couple use the word "Selbstmord," suicide. "Behave like an adult" is Marsha's third diminishing name for him in a different key: old lady, little boy, child.
"Running around in front of him, Marsha furiously blocked his way. 'Stop it!' she gasped. Hands digging into his shoulders, she pushed him back toward the car. 'Get in and I'll drive you home. For God's sake there're houses around here... somebody'll hear you.'"
"A functioning machine." Again Hadley's perception reduces Marsha to an object, this time to a mechanism of "cords and ligaments and muscles" with "no excess flesh." The phrase is worth marking, because the guide's notes for Chapter 14 record the same idea applied to the Society's hall on a weekday: the organisation as a functioning machine of envelopes, maps and volunteers. Woman and church are seen with the same eye, as apparatus. It is easier to hurt a machine than a person, and the sentence that follows, in which he lifts her by the elbows "until she winced with pain," is the first real violence of the novel against a woman. Marsha's "somebody'll hear you" is about scandal as much as safety: even now she is thinking of who might see.
"He was a force, impersonal and beyond reason"
The point of view shifts, briefly, into Marsha. "'Stop it,' she whispered, turning her head away. Suddenly she was terrified of him; she sensed the deep violence and hatred in him. He no longer was a human being. He was a force, impersonal and beyond reason. 'Please,' she whispered."
"He stepped down onto the highway beside her. In the night stillness her breathing was audible: harsh and rapid, very close to him. Awareness that he still had hold of her came to him. There wasn't anything she could do. Silent, biting her lip, she stood waiting, hoping he would relent and let her go."
The same words for two men. "He was a force, impersonal and beyond reason" echoes what Hadley felt about Beckheim in Chapter 11, remembering the auditorium: "That night, Beckheim had been an impersonal instrument speaking to an auditorium of people" (024 L1783). In Marsha's eyes, for one moment, Hadley has become what he wanted Beckheim to be, a force, and it is a force for harm. The narrative here does something it rarely does: it leaves Hadley's head and tells us what she feels, "terrified," and what she hopes, that he will "relent." "There wasn't anything she could do" is told from his side, and the reader should be clear about what it describes: a man holding a woman by force on an empty road at night, knowing she cannot get away.
Then comes the paragraph that most needs reading carefully.
"It was not a sexual thing he was doing. He felt no desire or passion, only a cold ache, a growing bitterness. Her body repelled him; the nearness of it made his flesh crawl. Dry, faintly warm, her body was snakelike... It was loathing and disgust that rose up in him, and a gathering drive for revenge."
"'Goddamn it,' he snarled, 'it isn't fair.' All his disappointment was coming to the surface, his deep-rooted frustration. He had been cheated again, and it was her fault. 'It isn't right!' he shouted, and in his pain he clutched her tighter and tighter."
Revenge, not desire. Dick's statement is plain and, for a novel written in 1952-53, unusually clear-sighted: what Hadley is doing is "not a sexual thing"; it is "loathing and disgust" and "a gathering drive for revenge." He has been "cheated again" (the word from the supermarket, now at full strength) "and it was her fault." Beckheim withheld his power; Beckheim is out of reach; the woman who belongs to Beckheim's world is in reach. This is a precise account of how sexual violence often works, as an act of power and punishment rather than of appetite, and Dick wrote it long before that understanding became common. The novel goes further down the same road in Chapter 16, at the motel, where Hadley rapes and beats Marsha; this chapter is the first, interrupted version of that act. The guide does not soften it: Chapter 12 shows an attempted sexual assault, driven by grievance, by the hero of the book.
"'No weeds,' he said thickly. 'Not in the rubbish and weeds.'"
"Not in the rubbish and weeds." The strangest line in the scene, and a revealing one. Hadley drags Marsha back to the car because he will not do whatever he means to do in the weeds by the road. Even in his rage he keeps a rule of decency, a snob's rule: not among "rubbish," not like the "riffraff" of the card passage, not in the dirt. The words also look ahead to the end of the chapter, where the pieces of the blue card end up in the gutter "along with the other night debris, the littered newspapers and rubbish." Hadley refuses the weeds for himself and throws the card into them. The phrase sums up his class anxiety: what he fears most is not doing wrong but doing it somewhere low.
"I give up"
"Marsha stopped fighting. 'I give up,' she grated. 'Will you let me go? All right, I'll do it. Come on, let go of me!'"
"Abruptly, he released her, and she sat up, brushing her hair back and fumbling around on the seat. Now, at least he had brought it to a level she understood; his drive had finally channelized in a recognizable form. Or so she imagined. She thought it was sexual desire he felt, physical longing generated by her presence, the dark night, and the liquor; but she was wrong."
The narrator corrects Marsha. This is a rare moment where Dick's narrator states outright that a character is mistaken: "Or so she imagined... but she was wrong." Marsha surrenders because she believes she knows what he wants; sexual desire is something she can manage, a "recognizable form." The narrator says it is not that. The effect is chilling. Her surrender is not consent; it is a frightened woman choosing what she thinks is the lesser harm ("Will you let me go?... All right, I'll do it"), and the reader is told that even that choice rests on a misreading. "Channelized," a word for directing water into a channel, belongs to Marsha's analytic vocabulary; the narrator lends it to her thoughts.
"'I think I dropped my purse out there,' she said shakily, beginning to recover a trifle."
"'Here it is.' He found her purse on the floor of the car and brusquely handed it to her."
"'Thanks.' Trembling, she groped in it. 'The keys are in here, thank God.' For a moment she sat leaning back against the steering wheel, getting her breath. 'Look, do you know what you're doing? Or are you drunk?' She was stalling for time."
"'I know.' And he did know; it was true. She was the one who was mistaken... He could sense the easy misevaluation in every line of her thin, proud body. And his ruthless hostility grew."
"The keys are in here, thank God." Her first thought, once she can think, is of the car keys: escape. "She was stalling for time." Dick shows her doing what people in danger do, buying minutes, talking, checking the way out. Hadley, for his part, "knew" what he was doing and sensed her "easy misevaluation," and his "ruthless hostility grew." That he sees she is wrong and is angered by it, rather than stopped, is the worst thing the chapter says about him.
Then, as her fear eases, Marsha softens, and blames herself. "'You really want to? You're crazy.' Her voice softened wearily. Fear was going; she sensed him as a person again, not possessed any longer. It, whatever it was, had left. For the time being, he was an ordinary man again. 'It's late and I'm exhausted,' she said. 'Not here... oh, you're so completely off base on everything. You would think this is just the place. And all this big pushing-around.' Her voice broke miserably. 'It's my fault. This is a hell of a place, Stuart Hadley. It just won't do... It's all wrong.'"
"It's my fault." Marsha, who has just been hurt and frightened, is the first person in the chapter to accept blame, and the blame she accepts is for the setting, "a hell of a place." "It, whatever it was, had left" uses the language of possession: for a while he was "possessed," now he is "an ordinary man again." The scene is a study of how a person in danger manages an aggressor by taking responsibility and talking him down ("all this big pushing-around," as if it were a boy's roughness). It also begins the novel's long sequence of sayings about fault, traced below at the kerb.
"'It's okay,' he said stubbornly; a grim kind of determination had overcome him. He meant to finish what he had started. 'Come on, let's get going.'"
"'You damn fool. Please... oh, what the hell. I give up.' She pushed his grasping hands away. 'Let me do it, at least.' Quivering with cold and unhappiness, she slid out of her leather jacket and tossed it into the backseat. 'Is that what you want?'"
"'Fine.'"
Dick then describes, at length, Marsha undressing in fury and tears: the shirt "snatched... off" and thrown "violently away," the bra dropped "onto the floor." "'Now what?' she demanded. 'The rest? All right!' Half sobbing, she savagely kicked her shoes off." She has to stand outside the car to get out of her slacks, in "The night mist," "leaning against the damp side of the car." Hadley's gaze follows: "Her body was as he had expected: pale and firm, without excess flesh or lines. A slender, competent body, tall and graceful, almost totally hairless, breasts small and sharply pointed." "'What now?' she demanded breathlessly, teeth chattering with cold. 'Come on... for God's sake, let's get going if we're going to!'"
A closer look: the male gaze in a scene of coercion. The undressing is narrated in detail from Hadley's eyes, and the description of Marsha's body is an inventory, the way a buyer looks over goods ("as he had expected"). That this comes in the middle of a scene the narrator has defined as revenge, with the woman "Half sobbing" and "teeth chattering," is deeply uncomfortable, and it may be meant to be: the reader is placed in Hadley's position and made to feel its ugliness. But the next paragraph also lingers on her body's responses in a way that serves a male reader's interest more than the story's. Readers should not take those physical reactions as consent, and the text, read carefully, does not ask them to: she stops, changes her mind, and fights him off.
"It won't work"
"He eagerly followed her into the car." What follows is told in sensations: her body under him, "her fingernails digging into his back," "Gasping and panting, she fought to pull herself up..." and then "she was gone, away from him."
"'Come back here.' Futilely, he grabbed her by the wrist and dragged her into the car. She collapsed over the edge of the seat, bent knees stark and bony in the faint starlight."
"'It won't work,' she snarled, eyes wild and darting, body slippery with mist. 'No, I'm not going to.'"
Inconsistency: "not a sexual thing" and "eagerly followed." A page earlier the narrator says flatly, "It was not a sexual thing he was doing. He felt no desire or passion," and that Marsha was "wrong" to think it was. Now Hadley "eagerly followed her into the car," and the next lines are written in the language of arousal. The two statements do not fit easily. One reading is that his drive changed once she gave in, so that revenge took a sexual form after all, which is close to what the narrator said she "imagined." Another is that the eagerness is itself part of the revenge, the eagerness of a man about to win. A third is that "eagerly" is simply a slip in a scene written at speed. The guide records the tension and does not resolve it.
"Aren't you even going to take off your shoes?" The line is the turning point of the scene, and it works on two levels. On one, it is a detail of humiliation: she has stripped, shivering, in the mist, and he has not taken off so much as his shoes. What she sees in that "split, tortured second" is that this is not lovemaking but use, which is what the narrator has told us. On the other level, it is a woman reclaiming her refusal. Her "No, I'm not going to" is unambiguous, and Hadley's response is to grab her by the wrist and drag her back. That he stops after that is not because he relents; it is because she is crying.
Continuity: the colour of Marsha's hair. On the freeway, earlier in the same night, Marsha's hair was "reddish" ("reddish hair tousled by the wind," 024 L2101). Here it is "her dark tumble of hair" (L2311). Dark red hair could fit both phrases in starlight, and "dark" may describe the light rather than the colour, but the two pull different ways. Flagged, not corrected.
"'I'm sorry.' Nervous and pleading, Hadley touched her bare shoulder."
"'Let's go somewhere else; a motel or something. Where we can talk and...' He broke off impotently. 'Where it'll be all right, not like this. Not out here in this godforsaken hole.'"
"She shook her head. 'I'm sorry, Stuart Hadley. It's not your fault.'"
The motel, proposed and refused. Hadley's "a motel or something" is the first mention of the motel that Chapter 16 makes real: the motel near the San Sebastian Heights tract, $4.50 a night, where he signs them in as "Mr. and Mrs. Hadley," and where he says he brought girls years before, Ellen among them. Here the motel is offered as decency ("Where it'll be all right, not like this"), the same instinct as "Not in the rubbish and weeds." He has just been told "No," and his answer is to suggest a better room. Marsha's "It's not your fault" is the opposite of the truth, and she says it in tears to the man who caused them. She takes the blame and gives him absolution, which tells us a good deal about her, and about how women of 1952 were expected to manage the anger of men.
She dresses and asks for a cigarette. "'While I'm dressing,' she managed to say, 'will you light me a cigarette?'" "He did so, and put it between her slack lips." "'It's freezing... I'll turn on the car heater.'"
"'The heater won't work, will it?' he mumbled. 'Without the motor running?'"
"'No,' she said, laughing thinly. 'Of course it won't. Well, what the hell, we'll be going soon.'"
The heater. A small mechanical fact, and Hadley the appliance man gets it right. Car heaters of the period passed hot engine coolant through a small radiator (the heater core) behind the dashboard, with a fan to blow the warmth into the cabin; with the engine off there is no heat. The moment is almost comic and very sad: after everything, the two of them discuss the heater, as if the night were an ordinary breakdown. Nothing warm will come out of this car tonight.
"I'm living with Ted"
There is one more moment of tenderness. "For a moment she halted her swift motions. After a pause she leaned forward and reached up to him. Her small cold hand traced itself across his face; briefly, she ran her fingers into his hair, turning her face up to him and peering unhappily at him, lips quivering, mouth close to his own. Her breath was warm and rapid against his cheek."
"'I don't understand,' he said dismally. 'Why not? Because of Ellen?'"
"Because of Ellen?" The only reason Hadley can imagine for her refusal is his wife, which means he imagines Marsha refusing out of loyalty to another woman, not out of fear of him, or her own wishes, or another man. It is the only time Ellen's name is spoken in the chapter, and it is spoken by Hadley, at the moment he has been trying to betray her, as a puzzle rather than a reproach.
"Marsha finished buttoning her shirt; she grabbed her cigarette from the ashtray and sucked on it until it glowed bright and orange. 'Stuart, I should never have got mixed up with you. It's got to stop... I'll take you home and leave you off, and that's that. I don't want to see you again... I can't see you again. Go back to your television shop and your family.'"
"'What are you talking about?' he shouted, stricken. 'What is this?'"
The clues he missed. "Anybody else would" have figured it out, she says, and the reader has had the clues since Chapter 11: Beckheim arriving at her flat late at night and going straight to work at his desk in the study; "Back they go... Ted says so"; the two of them coming from the kitchen "walking as a pair"; the coffee and the newspaper, "Like a quiet domestic couple"; and tonight "Did Ted hurt your feelings?", "I'll ask him," "I have to go all the way back to S.F." Hadley missed them because he could not imagine a white woman of Marsha's kind living with an elderly Black preacher, and the novel makes his blindness the measure of his world's prejudice. The details of her confession are exact and proud: "he's living with me," "all the things are mine, except for the desk." The desk, where Beckheim "just sat there working," is the only thing in the flat that is his.
"Maybe later... If you had got going quicker... or if you had waited awhile." The most unsettling line in her confession. Marsha says that at another time she might have said yes. It complicates any simple reading of the night: she was drawn to him, may have meant some of this when she stopped the car, and the coercion destroyed whatever might have happened. It also shows how torn she is between Beckheim and the world outside him, which Chapter 15 makes explicit when her note says she has broken with Ted and is through with the Society. None of this changes what Hadley did. It explains why she blames herself.
Fact check: "in some states you can't." In July 1952 a white woman and a Black man could marry in California. The California Supreme Court had struck down the state's ban on interracial marriage in Perez v. Sharp, decided 1 October 1948, the first state high court of the twentieth century to do so; the majority opinion noted that 29 other states still had such laws. Many kept them. When the US Supreme Court ended them nationwide in Loving v. Virginia on 12 June 1967, 16 states still had bans. Beckheim's birthplace, Alabama, kept its constitutional ban in the text until voters removed it with Amendment 2 in November 2000, by about 59.5% to 40.5%, the last state to do so. Marsha's "in some states you can't" is accurate and understated.
Inconsistency: "Maybe we'll get married." Marsha speaks as if she were free to marry Beckheim. In Chapter 15 (025 L1205) she tells Hadley that her daughter's father, Don Frazier, was killed in the Second World War, and later chapters treat her as still legally married to another man, so that "Frazier" is not even her legal name (Chapter 18). If she is still married, "Maybe we'll get married" is loose talk or implies a divorce to come. The text does not reconcile the two, and the guide leaves the tension in place.
The slur and the slap
Hadley's answer is the moment the chapter has been moving toward. Dick prepares it with a sentence that separates the words from the man: "Hoarsely, Hadley demanded: 'You mean you're... sleeping with him?' His body, his lungs and vocal cords and throat and tongue and palate, formed the words: 'You're living with that big black nigger?'"
"After she slapped him he sat back against the door and stared out at the night darkness."
A closer look: the slur. This is the one place where the guide quotes the slur, because the plot turns on it: it is the sentence that ends Hadley's relationship with Marsha and, in effect, with the Society, and it names the prejudice that has run under the whole evening (the "riffraff" passage, the dwelling on "the ancient black body," the blindness to the obvious). Dick's framing is deliberate. The words are formed by "His body, his lungs and vocal cords and throat and tongue and palate," as if no mind were involved: the slur comes up out of him like the "raw, metallic deposit" that gagged him earlier. That framing can be read two ways. It may say that the racism is in his body, in his upbringing, below thought, and so more frightening; or it may excuse him, as if his tongue rather than he had spoken. The novel does not let him off: the slap is immediate, and the rest of the chapter is consequence. A white writer in 1952-53 puts the ugliest word in the book into his hero's mouth at the moment the hero is most exposed, and makes that word the end of his hopes.
Why the slap comes now. It is worth noticing what Marsha excuses and what she does not. She excused the grabbing, the dragging and the coercion: "It's my fault," "It's not your fault." She does not excuse the slur. The order says something about her, about the man she lives with, and about where the novel draws its line: the insult to Beckheim is the act she answers with her hand. Readers today may feel the order is wrong, that what Hadley did to Marsha was at least as bad. The text lets both judgments stand, and Chapter 16 shows that Hadley has learned nothing from either.
Seventy miles an hour
"Marsha finished dressing, tossed her cigarette into the weeds, and started up the car motor. She drove rapidly back to the highway, turned in a wide, shrieking squeal of tires toward Cedar Groves, and brutally drove the car up to seventy miles an hour."
"Neither of them said anything. Finally the bleak countryside of hills and shrubbery and fields gave way; the lights of houses flickered here and there. Presently a glowing Standard gasoline station appeared beside the highway, and after that a roadhouse and a Shell station."
"At a traffic light Marsha slowed. They were in Cedar Groves. A few cars came out on the highway beside them. Soon they were passing dark houses and closed-up stores."
The numbers of the night.
- $1.50: what the blue card "cost me," Hadley says, "A dollar and fifty cents' worth of membership in the Society." In 1952 that was roughly an hour of a typical American factory worker's pay (average hourly earnings in manufacturing were about $1.65 to $1.70, Bureau of Labor Statistics).
- A fifth: one fifth of a US gallon, about 757 ml, of Jameson.
- "About midnight": the stop on the gravel road.
- "A mile or so more": the distance to Cedar Groves, Marsha says, from the place she stopped.
- Seventy miles an hour: the speed at which she drives him home, "brutally," at night. California in 1952 had no fixed maximum speed for cars; it used a basic speed law (no faster than is safe) with prima facie limits, and the general prima facie limit on open highway was 55 mph. A fixed 65 mph maximum took effect on 1 January 1960. So seventy was well above the presumed safe speed, in the dark, after drinking. Hadley will drive the same car at seventy in Chapter 16.
- Two gasoline brands: Standard (Standard Oil Company of California, whose stations sold Chevron gasoline) and Shell, two of the biggest names on Bay Area roads in the period, set like milestones on the way home.
Driving as punishment. "Brutally" is the narrator's word for her driving. Marsha turns the car into the instrument of her rage, as earlier she used it as an instrument of joy ("It's like flying"). The silence and the speed together are a punishment he cannot answer: she is in control again, and he is the passenger again, "driven around by a woman," at a speed that frightens him. The return through "the bleak countryside" to lights, gasoline stations and a roadhouse is a return to the commercial world where Hadley lives, the world of Modern TV. The last landmarks are brand names.
"It's over!"
"'Here we are,' Marsha said curtly. She parked the Studebaker across the street from Hadley's apartment house. The motor running, she shoved the door open for him. 'Good night.'"
"He hesitated, unwilling to get out. 'I'm sorry,' he began."
"'Good night.' Her voice was clipped, empty of emotion. She gazed straight ahead, one hand on the shift, her toe on the accelerator, breathing rapidly, in dry, short gasps."
"'Listen,' Hadley said to her. 'Stop acting this way; try to understand how I feel. If you had any sense you'd know...'"
"'It doesn't matter. Go back to your wife and your television store.' The car edged forward; the open door swung back and forth."
"Slowly, Hadley stepped onto the sidewalk. 'You really mean it. You're really that crazy. As far as you're concerned, it's over.'"
"Try to understand how I feel." Hadley's one apology, "I'm sorry," is cut off, and what he says instead shows that he has understood nothing. He asks the woman he has assaulted and insulted to "understand how I feel," and tells her "If you had any sense you'd know." The self-pity is complete, and so is the reversal in "You're really that crazy": she is the mad one. Her reply repeats what she said on the gravel road: "Go back to your wife and your television store." Said twice, the phrase is the chapter's sentence on Hadley. He wanted to leave both, wife and store, for something larger; he is sent back to both, and the next time we see him, in Chapter 13, he is back inside both.
Then her composure breaks. "For an instant the calcified mask that was the woman's face remained intact. Then, as if split from inside, it suddenly caved in and dissolved. A thin, high-pitched wail rose up out of her, a pain so sharp that it paralyzed him."
"'That's right!' she screamed in his startled face. 'It's over!' She reached to slam the door after him, tears welling up in her eyes and spurting down her cheeks. 'I'm sorry; it's nobody's fault. I made a mistake... you made a mistake. Everybody was wrong.'"
"'Everybody?' Hadley demanded. He shoved quickly forward, trying to get at her, trying to force his way into her crumbling personality. 'Was he wrong? Don't sit there and lie to me; are you trying to make me believe...'"
"The car roared up and was gone into the darkness. The words hung on his lips, baffled and unspoken. There was nobody to ask; he was alone. He could shout the question out at the top of his lungs: it made no difference."
The mask breaks. All night Hadley has seen Marsha as stone, parchment, bone, a "calcified" figure "Outside of time." At the kerb "the calcified mask" literally "caved in and dissolved," and what comes out is "A thin, high-pitched wail," "a pain so sharp that it paralyzed him." It is the moment Hadley's picture of her is proved wrong: she is not a relic or a machine but a person in pain. Even now he wants to "force his way into her crumbling personality": the verb is the same as the night's.
The fault chain begins here. The novel returns again and again to the question of whose fault things are, and this chapter starts the chain. Marsha says, in order, "It's my fault" (on the gravel), "It's not your fault" (in tears), and "it's nobody's fault" (at the kerb). Alice Fergesson will say "I feel it's my fault" and "It's all our faults" (Chapter 14), and Hadley that day will say of Beckheim, "It isn't his fault; he did what he could." Ellen will say "your fault and everybody else's" (Chapter 17). The voices around Hadley lying in the street mutter "His own fault" (Chapter 18). The old German couple whose truck hits him cry "It was your fault!" and he answers "Sure... My fault" (Chapter 19). Fergesson says "It's my fault" in Chapter 20. And in the last chapter Hadley himself says "It isn't anybody's fault," calling it "The result of natural law," which is Marsha's own phrase from this road ("because of natural laws") come home. Dick never settles it. What he shows is that each character uses fault to manage the others: Marsha takes it to calm Hadley, hands it back to free herself, and then dissolves it so she can leave.
The card in the gutter
"For a time he stood on the sidewalk, looking helplessly after the car. Then he turned and crossed the street to his apartment, fumbling automatically for his key."
"As he got his wallet out, the stiff blue edge of the Society card grazed his hand. He pulled it out, stood holding it, and then tore it furiously apart. The bits fluttered down onto the pavement; a gust of night wind picked them up and whisked them away."
"By the time he had the front door of the apartment house open, the bits were scattered across the gutter, along with the other night debris, the littered newspapers and rubbish, the empty beer cans and cigarette packages. Trash to be swept up and collected by the city."
From seed to trash. The card has made a complete journey in one night. It was "a seed slipped in close to his flesh," something "alive" that might "take root and grow"; then "a thin blue pasteboard card"; then the sign that "He had been selected"; then, in his complaint, all he got for "a dollar and fifty cents." Now it is "Trash to be swept up and collected by the city," lying among "the empty beer cans and cigarette packages." The "stiff blue edge" that "grazed his hand" is the last time it touches him. Hadley throws it where he refused to take Marsha, into "the rubbish." The irony that only Chapter 14 reveals (blue cards are rare and given only by Beckheim) makes the destruction a real loss, and in Chapter 17 the lack of a card keeps him out of the Society's meeting at the moment he most wants to get in.
Practical angle: tearing up the credential. Hadley destroys the card because of what it means about the people who gave it to him, not because of what it does. Yet it is a credential, a proof of membership that opens a door (literally, in Chapter 17). People in organisations do the equivalent: resign a role, walk out of a programme, throw away an access they will need later, because they are angry with whoever granted it. The lesson the plot draws is blunt. The emotion passes; the door stays locked.
The pictures left behind
"He stiffly mounted the bleak carpeted steps to his own floor, his body heaving with cold. It wasn't until he was actually opening the door and entering the dark, lifeless apartment that he remembered his pictures. He had left them in Marsha's car."
"It was too late to get them back now."
The end of Part Two. The paintings Hadley brought to show Marsha in Chapter 10, the work that let her tell him "Deep down inside of you, you know you're not a television salesman" (024 L1553), are in the back of her car, heading for San Francisco and the flat she shares with Beckheim. They were his only claim to be something other than a salesman, and leaving them behind ends that claim for now. "It was too late to get them back now" is flat and final, and it closes the second of the novel's four parts. The pictures will in fact come back in Chapter 15, left at the apartment by a visitor described as "Tall, thin, an older woman... about thirty," with a huge dog, together with a note from Marsha. So the last line is not quite true; but at this moment, for Hadley, everything he hoped for from the evening is gone. He calls them "pictures," not "paintings": even his word for his art is modest.
Continuity: "the dark, lifeless apartment" and the missing morning. Ellen and the baby are presumably asleep inside; it is the middle of the night, and Hadley told Ellen he was visiting customers. "Dark, lifeless" is how the apartment feels to him, not a statement that it is empty. Chapter 13 jumps forward to August, and the novel never shows the morning after: we do not learn what he told Ellen, or how he got through the next day at work. The gap belongs to the design of the parts; the guide notes it so the reader does not look for a missing scene.
How the night turns
The existing diagram traces the night from Hadley's side, from awe at Beckheim to the torn card. A second chain follows the same night from Marsha's side: the driver who bought the bottle, switched off the dashboard lights and stopped the car, and who ends the night in a wail at the kerb.
The shape of the chapter. Put the two chains side by side and the chapter shows its structure: two people moving in opposite directions through the same hours. Hadley's feeling swings (cheated, selected, damned, enraged) and ends in destruction. Marsha's runs steadily from confidence to fear to collapse: she starts the night in command of the car, the bottle and the doctrine, and ends it unable to keep her face together. The turning points line up. Her laughing "He sized you up" is his "Shocked fear"; his grip on her elbows is her terror; her "I'm living with Ted" is his slur. The loop in the second chain marks the return to speed: after the slap she drives at seventy in the dark, as she drove on the freeway with the dashboard lights off, only now there is no joy in it. The chapter is a shared journey with no shared meaning.
The characters at the end of the chapter
| Character | Start of the night | End of the night |
|---|---|---|
| Stuart Hadley | Awed by Beckheim and "cheated"; a blue card "close to his flesh"; his pictures in Marsha's car | Has tried to force himself on Marsha, used a slur, been slapped and sent home; has torn up the card; pictures gone; alone at his door after midnight |
| Marsha Frazier | Confident driver; buys the whiskey "for us"; "It's like flying"; teasing and maternal | Terrified, then humiliated; has confessed she lives with Beckheim; "It's over!"; drives off toward San Francisco with Hadley's pictures |
| Theodore Beckheim (absent) | The man who "had power...but he had withheld it"; a face in the hills | Revealed as Marsha's partner; insulted by Hadley; the unanswered question "Was he wrong?" |
| Ellen Hadley (absent) | The girl in the Ford coupe, remembered with longing | "Because of Ellen?", the only time she is named; asleep in "the dark, lifeless apartment" |
| The Society | A seed, a sign of selection, a $1.50 membership | "a bunch of toadstools popping up"; the card "Trash to be swept up and collected by the city" |
In practice: decisions without reasons
Beckheim looked through Hadley's wallet, asked a few questions, wrote his name on a blue card and sent him away. He said nothing about what the card meant. In that silence Hadley supplies every possible reading in turn: a seed, a cheap receipt, a mark of selection, and finally (after "He sized you up") a verdict of rejection. He was in fact approved, and he leaves convinced he has been damned. Lending has rules aimed at this gap. In the United States the Equal Credit Opportunity Act and its Regulation B (12 CFR 1002.9) require a lender that takes adverse action to give the applicant the specific principal reasons. In Europe, Article 22 of the GDPR limits decisions based solely on automated processing and, read with Article 15, gives people a right to "meaningful information about the logic involved," and the EU AI Act (Regulation 2024/1689) adds in Article 86 a right to an explanation of certain decisions taken with high-risk AI systems.
The lesson the chapter adds: explain approvals too. The rules above focus on refusals, sensibly. Hadley's case shows the other half. A bare approval with no reasons can be just as unsettling: a customer granted a lower credit limit than asked, an employee promoted with no feedback, a supplier cleared by a risk model without being told why, will each build a story to fill the silence, and many will build the anxious one. For anyone designing decision systems (credit scoring, fraud flags, access reviews, AI triage), the practical rule is to attach reasons to every consequential outcome, positive or negative, in language the person can use. Beckheim's "You'll have to decide for yourself" is honest, but without the reason behind the card it leaves the man alone with his fear, and the fear, on a dark road, turns into harm.
The Society runs an access-control scheme with two credential levels, a single issuer, no published criteria and no reissue process. When Hadley destroys his card there is no way back in. Architects will recognise the pattern: a privileged credential granted on one person's judgment, undocumented and unrecoverable. It works while the issuer is in the room and fails badly the moment he is not.
Open questions and flags
Open questions and flags for this chapter.
- "John Jameson blended scotch whiskey": Jameson is Irish whiskey (Bow Street, Dublin, 1780), not Scotch. Kept as written.
- The route: crossing Market Street "into the Tenderloin" does not fit a drive out of Hayes Valley, since both lie north of Market; and the "freeway" south to San Mateo was mostly the older Bayshore Highway in July 1952, with only a 1.3-mile freeway unit open in the city (from 1 June 1951).
- Why Marsha stopped the car a mile short of Cedar Groves is never said; her "Maybe later... If you had got going quicker" suggests she was not wholly unwilling before the coercion began.
- "Not a sexual thing" versus "He eagerly followed her": the narrator's two statements about Hadley's drive pull against each other.
- Marsha's hair: "reddish" on the freeway (L2101), a "dark tumble" in the car (L2311).
- "Maybe we'll get married": later chapters treat Marsha as still legally married, with "Frazier" not her legal name.
- The blue card: Hadley assumes Wakefield and Marsha carry the same card; Chapter 14 shows blue cards are rare and Wakefield's is white. The irony depends on a fact the reader does not yet have.
- The Saturday old lady with "Prepare for the Day of Judgment!" pamphlets appears here for the first time, as a regular sight outside Modern.
- Racialised description: Beckheim as "The Negro," "the black man," "the ancient black body"; "workmen and Negroes, the lowest elements" in Hadley's thoughts; the slur at the climax. The guide quotes the slur once.
- The male gaze in the undressing passage sits uneasily with the narrator's own account of coercion.
- The missing morning: Chapter 13 jumps to August; the night's aftermath with Ellen is never shown.
- Speed: seventy at night was far above California's 55 mph prima facie highway limit of the time; there was no fixed maximum until 1960.
- "dark pavement": Hadley pours the whiskey onto "pavement" on what was a "rock-strewn" gravel road.
Takeaways from Chapter 12.
- Hadley leaves Beckheim both "awed" and "cheated": he believes the old man's power is real and that it was "withheld" from him, which turns hope into grievance.
- The blue card makes a full journey in one night, from "a seed slipped in close to his flesh" to "Trash to be swept up and collected by the city." Only Chapter 14 shows how rare it was.
- Marsha's doctrine, "You're saved for the same reason a ball rolls downhill," and Beckheim's "decide for yourself" leave Hadley nothing to lean on; he hears "He sized you up" as damnation.
- Dick names Hadley's assault on Marsha precisely: "It was not a sexual thing... a gathering drive for revenge." It is the first, interrupted version of what happens at the motel in Chapter 16.
- The truth Hadley has missed all evening, "I'm living with Ted," draws out the prejudice under his snobbery, in the slur that ends everything.
- Marsha moves from "It's my fault" to "It's not your fault" to "it's nobody's fault," the first links in the novel's long chain of fault.
- Part Two ends with Hadley alone, his card in the gutter and his pictures gone: "It was too late to get them back now."
Dinner at the Fergessons'
When and where. An evening in August 1952 ("This is August!" Fergesson shouts), dinner "not yet eight o'clock," at the Fergessons' big house in Cedar Groves, then the walk home along High Street after dark. It is a weeknight: Fergesson must "get up at five thirty" to drive "up to the city" to see wholesalers, and Hadley says he will open the store as manager "Tomorrow morning." The chapter that follows (Chapter 14) is set on "a hot day late in August," a Thursday, so this dinner falls some days or weeks earlier in the month. The novel never shows what passed between Hadley and Ellen after the night with Marsha.
Who is here.
- Alice Fergesson: the hostess, through whose eyes the first half of the chapter is seen; flushed, organised, wry, and the quiet author of the evening.
- Jim Fergesson: owner of Modern TV Sales and Service and now of O'Neill Appliance; "small, heavyset," cigar in his teeth, "meditating" all week over his two stores.
- Stuart Hadley: 25, salesman at Modern, the guest of honour without being told so; full of ideas.
- Ellen Hadley: his wife, slim again after the birth, nervous, selling her husband in the kitchen.
- Pete: their baby, born in late June and so six weeks to two months old, asleep in a "blue bundle of blankets and apparatus."
- Named but absent: Jack V. White, his wife Peggy and their two children; Joe Tampini and his "cute redhead"; Olsen, the repairman, and his wife; Bud O'Neill; H. R. Basford and the Basford salesman; the Leo J. Meyberg people; Mason & McDuffy, the landlords; a red-haired schoolgirl called "Joan something"; and, in Hadley's memory, Marsha.
Edition note: dashes and slips in the book. As in earlier chapters, broken-off speech that the book marks with dashes is given here with ellipses ("They're so... serious"). (surely "cut down"), "The riling, all the paperwork" (surely "filing"), "commission able items" (for "commissionable"), "all day-nothing but soap operas" (a hyphen where a dash belongs), and a stray inner quotation mark in Ellen's "'Alice, you have such a lovely house..." Fergesson's speech includes ethnic and sexual slurs ("Chinamen," "Orientals," "queer"); they are quoted where the plot or the character turns on them and flagged.
Part Three: Evening
The book marks the new part with its own heading, "Part Three: Evening," the third of four ("Morning," "Afternoon," "Evening," "Night"). The day-cycle titles track Hadley's life: Part One (Chapters 1 to 5) was the bright start of a June week, Part Two (Chapters 6 to 12) the long July afternoon of the baby, the Golds, Marsha and Beckheim, and Part Three is evening, the time of settling down. It opens with a long scene told from Alice Fergesson's point of view, and the change of eyes matters. We see Hadley from outside, as the boss's wife sees him: "a big strong boy," "healthy and well fed as a pig," with "the aimless, hopeful, trusting smile of a child."
Why the view moves to Alice. After the long, feverish inside view of Hadley in Chapters 10 to 12, Dick steps back. Alice does not know about Marsha, Beckheim or the night on the road, and neither, in this scene, does anyone else at the table. The reader does. The dinner's comedy of manners (the clock, the silver, the swordfish) plays over a secret, and the reader watches Hadley act the part of an eager young salesman for people who think that is all he is. Alice's view also lets Dick show what Hadley cannot: that the promotion is being arranged around him by two women, and that the boss is as anxious as the employee.
Alice in the kitchen
"Alice Fergesson, her face flushed and hectic from the heat, hurried back and forth, satisfying herself that the big house was ready for guests," that each stage of the dinner was on schedule, and that it was "not yet eight o'clock."
In the living room her husband stands "gazing moodily out the window." When she asks for help he waves her away. "He was meditating again; for the past week he had been meditating constantly. His red, wrinkled, prunelike face was twisted into a worried scowl; he stuck his stump of a cigar between his teeth and abruptly turned his back to her." Alice feels "A pang of pity" for "the little round worried man, chewing on his cigar and trying to keep all his plans and problems straight in his mind."
The menu is given in full, and it is ambitious for a hot night:
- Swordfish steaks "broiling in the oven," with "drops of bacon fat" burning "across the hard gray surface," served on a heavy platter with lemon slices.
- Béarnaise sauce, already made.
- Frozen peas lying "in their damp carton, melting and oozing."
- A salad.
- Baked potatoes that "reposed like inert lumps in the top of the oven, refusing to cook rapidly or evenly."
- Wine gelatin and shortbread cookies, "accomplished the night before."
- Coffee in a Silex, the vacuum coffee-maker of the period.
Fergesson comes up behind her: "What time is it?" He asks twice, "blunt and noisy, with the almost childlike directness that dominated when he was worried," and then: "Damn it, where'd you put that electric clock? It used to be over the sink." Alice will not tell him while he shouts. He howls: "I have a right to know what time it is! ... You women, you're never satisfied. Didn't I spend a whole afternoon running BX cable around there for that clock?"
The clock and the cable. The first thing Fergesson wants is the time, and the first thing he boasts about is wiring. BX cable is armoured cable, insulated wires inside a flexible spiral steel sheath, then the common way to run household circuits. The detail sets up the long passage later about everything he has built into the house with his own hands. It also shows his worry: a man who has spent a week "meditating" on a decision wants to know exactly how long he has before the guests arrive and the decision has to be made.
She hands him plates and sends him for "the good silver; it's in that old green-felt box... you know, your mother's."
"'Why? For Stumblebum?'"
"'Because it's company.'"
Fergesson's nickname for Hadley, used since Part One, comes out at once. He resents the fuss: "Don't make such an occasion out of this... what are you women up to, anyhow?" He glares "fearfully" at his wife. "Have you and Ellen Hadley got your damn heads together again? This whole thing is rigged!" He is right, and the chapter ends with him saying so again.
"This whole thing is rigged!" The chapter is framed by two outbursts with the same content. Here, before the guests come, Fergesson suspects the women of arranging the evening. At the end, after Hadley accepts, he roars "you had this all arranged!" Both times he is right, and both times he goes along with it. The joke is that the decision he has been "meditating" over all week, and that he will present at the end as his own, has been prepared for him by his wife. Dick lets the reader see that Fergesson half knows this and does it anyway: the silver comes out.
Alice kneels to check the fish. "Well, fish fillets were nice on a warm summer evening. Nice for the cook, at least; the oven didn't have to stay on all afternoon." She wonders whether Stuart eats fish; "according to Ellen there were so many things he wouldn't eat." Her verdict: "fresh saltwater fish never hurt anybody... Stuart was a big strong boy; it was time somebody sat him down at the table and made him eat. On the outside, at least, he was healthy and well fed as a pig; in fact, he was beginning to bulge a trifle at the middle."
"On the outside, at least." Alice's phrase is the most perceptive thing anyone says about Hadley in the chapter, and she says it only to herself. Everyone at the table sees a healthy young man. Hadley's own story is all sickness: the liver, the 4-F certificate, the stomach that cannot take onions (Ellen's warning in Chapter 10), the sleeplessness of Part One. "On the outside, at least" leaves room for what is wrong on the inside, which the walk home will show.
Then she takes stock of the evening's real work: "So many things to keep in mind: an evening of trying to keep Fergesson and Hadley from arguing; trying to keep Ellen from curling up on the couch like a sick cat, demanding that everybody wait on her; trying to keep the conversation from degenerating into redundant shoptalk and commonplaces about the weather and the state of the Union. Trying to mix four people no two of whom mixed, let alone the whole group."
The hostess as manager. Alice's list is a manager's list: keep two men from fighting, keep one guest from withdrawing, keep the talk off the two subjects it will certainly drift to. She fails at all three (they argue, Ellen hides in the bedroom, the talk is shop and politics) and still gets the result she wanted. It is a useful picture of what the evening is: not a social occasion but a negotiation, with Alice as its unseen chair.
She looks for a longer apron; there is none; "Probably Ellen had borrowed her long blue plastic apron..." The thought opens out into a reflection on the young: "She could understand Fergesson's impatience at Hadley; youth seemed to stand with its hands out, a silly, weak smile on its face, the aimless, hopeful, trusting smile of a child. Stuart and Ellen. Borrowing, asking, depending on...but then, her mother had said the same thing about her, and so on back."
"And so on back." Alice corrects her own irritation in the same sentence. The complaint about the young is as old as the young, and her mother said it of her. It is a small moment of fairness, and it sets Alice apart from her husband, who will lecture Hadley on "growing up" without any such second thought. The passage also echoes, gently, the chain of Stuart Hadleys in Chapter 12: one generation after another, each the same.
In the dining room Fergesson has found the silver and "dumped it onto the table." She can "sense him pacing restlessly, mulling over his two stores, his burgeoning responsibilities." Her silent outburst is the frankest line about him in the book: "Why the hell did you buy it? she wanted to yell at him in exasperation. If all you're going to do is worry about it, then for heaven's sake sell it back!"
The cost of O'Neill's. In Chapter 4 Alice warned that if he bought O'Neill Appliance he would "have to work twice as hard," and asked why he did not "leave the money in the bank," where it earned "two and a half percent." He bought it. Now the second store is the reason Modern needs a manager, and the reason Fergesson is worried. Hadley's promotion is a by-product of the boss's expansion, not a reward chosen for its own sake.
The guests arrive
The costume of the eager employee. Compare Hadley at Beckheim's door in Chapter 11, in "a light blue shirt and black tie" with "visibly frayed" cuffs. Here he is pressed, powdered and bow-tied, early for dinner. Alice notes the height difference "and then totally dismissed it," which is what everyone in the chapter does with what Hadley might be: he is taller than his boss, and the evening is arranged so that it does not matter.
Ellen holds "the blue bundle of blankets and apparatus in which Pete slept." "Her face glowed round and radiant, suffused with sleek pride in her bulging armload. As long as possible she paraded her child; it seemed as if she were never going to put him down." They settle Pete in the downstairs bedroom. Ellen's voice drifts out: "...not too drafty, is it?" Fergesson: "This is August!" ("as if she had insulted the construction of his house"). A window is shut anyway.
In the living room's "cool yellow light" Ellen turns "this way and that, displaying her returned slim figure, her pretty summer dress. Tumbling brown hair, and the graceful flow of her green silk skirt, the flash of her smooth legs..." Alice "couldn't repress a whirr of envy." In the kitchen Ellen is all brightness, "Eyes bright, lips half parted," and Alice's eye is unsparing: "It was amazing what an expensive bra could do."
Ellen admires everything: "This is so wonderful..." She runs her hands over "the chrome and tile sink Fergesson had personally installed. 'I wish we had this. And these nice faucets.'" She looks up at the ventilation pipes: "Jim put those in?" Alice: "He put everything in." Ellen: "Alice, you have such a lovely house... I'm so jealous! All the wonderful hardwood floors...and they're all polished." Alice: "Waxed." Ellen: "How do you ever find time to keep up a big house like this? And the garden...it's practically a mansion!" Alice, "her mind on the dinner": "It's all routine. You get it down to a discipline."
Two women, one house. The exchange sketches both. Ellen, who lives in a cramped apartment and has just had a baby, sees the house as a dream of the life she wants for Stuart: chrome, faucets, a garden, "practically a mansion." Alice corrects her twice, gently ("Waxed"; "It's all routine"). The house is not magic but work, much of it Fergesson's own. Alice's "discipline" is the key to her: a woman who gets things "down to a discipline," including this dinner and, it turns out, her husband's decision.
The female gaze, and the male one. Alice's view of Ellen ("the flash of her smooth legs," "Her high, trim bust quivered excitedly... It was amazing what an expensive bra could do") is written in the same appraising register the narrator uses for women seen by men elsewhere in the novel. Here it comes from an older woman's envy, and Dick makes the envy explicit ("a whirr of envy"). Readers may still find the body detail more than the scene needs. Noted, not judged.
Shop talk in the living room
The men have gone straight to business, "in loud, assertive voices. Facing each other, legs crossed, settled back in their chairs, they were going over the items of the previous day."
"'That Leo J. Meyberg shipment come in?' Fergesson was asking."
"'It came by Trans-bay. Most of it's away.'"
"'Much back order? I'm going to cancel our back orders; we're building up too much. That's a racket... they know that stuff gets duplicated. We got fifty 5u4's, twice what we can use. I'm sending half of them back.'"
Real names on the invoices. Leo J. Meyberg Company was a real San Francisco firm, the RCA distributor for the region (it had even run an early radio station, KDN, from the Fairmont Hotel in 1921 to 1923). The 5U4 was a common rectifier tube, used in the power supplies of television sets and large radios, so a repair-heavy store would keep many in stock; fifty is still a lot. Fergesson's complaint about back orders ("they know that stuff gets duplicated") is a small-business gripe that rings true: an order left open with a supplier can be filled twice, once now and once when the back order clears, and the shop is left with stock it cannot sell.
"'We finally moved the big Zenith combo,' Hadley said."
"'I noticed the tag. Your sale?'"
"'White and I split it... I talked to them first, but he closed it. They came back.'"
"'You should have closed it the first time,' Fergesson said sourly."
"'Nobody puts out four hundred dollars the first time.'"
"'Let them out the door,' Fergesson said angrily, 'and you've lost them. You got their names?'"
"The conversation died down into a hostile mumble."
Two theories of the sale. In four lines the whole conflict between the two men appears in miniature. Hadley thinks a $400 purchase needs time: let the customer go home and come back. Fergesson thinks anyone who leaves is lost. Here the customers did come back, and the sale went to White, who closed it. Hadley "talked to them first" but did not finish, which is what Fergesson will say of him again tonight ("you should finish what you start"). $400 in 1952 was a large sum, more than a month and a half of the $250 Hadley says he makes.
In the kitchen Ellen listens. "They get right at it," she observes "fatuously." "They're so... serious." Alice, resigned: "It's going to be that way all through dinner." Ellen, awed: "I'm so glad when he wakes up and takes an interest in things... He's usually so sort of..." She shrugs. "You know. Always dreaming around." Then, quickly: "He has a lot of ideas, of course. I hope he gets a chance to tell him about his idea on new counters; he sketched out some designs and they're really swell. Alice, you know he has ability. He should have been an architect or something."
"Always dreaming around." Ellen's view of her husband has two halves that she does not join up. He is a dreamer, and she is glad when he "wakes up"; and he is a gifted designer who "should have been an architect." Both are true, and the novel is about the fact that the store needs neither. Ellen will spend the evening trying to turn the dreamer into a manager by advertising the designer.
Ellen asks to put Pete's bottles in the refrigerator ("Certainly," Alice says). On her way back through the living room she smiles at the men, and Alice sees "the wrinkled tension of her forehead." "Relax," Alice says. "The sweet, aimless smile spread like honey over the girl's face. 'Oh, Alice... you're so used to these social things. I wish I had your savoir faire.'"
Dinner: the draft and Korea
The swordfish comes out "smoking hot," and Alice bustles "breathlessly back to the kitchen after the bowls of peas, the béarnaise sauce, the baked potatoes, the salad, the Silex of coffee, the rolls." Hadley approaches "the massive oak table with its solemn display of old silver and china and linen napkins in horn rings." "'Looks great,' ... He grinned appreciatively. 'A real feast.'"
"Without formality, Fergesson seated himself and began pouring steaming black coffee into his cup. 'Come on,' he said, 'let's get started.'" He takes cream and sugar while Hadley seats his wife and Alice runs for the butter.
Who is nervous. The table is a study in who knows what is at stake. Alice and Ellen know a promotion is meant to happen tonight, and both are tense. Fergesson knows he has to offer it, and eats like a man refuelling. Hadley, the one person the evening is about, eats happily, "devoid of guile." Either he does not know the plan, or he has trained himself not to show it. Ellen's later whispered conference with him in the bedroom suggests he knows something.
At last Fergesson breaks the silence, "to no one in particular": "Well, I see they raised the draft quota again."
"'It's always going up,' Hadley responded, his mouth full. He swallowed some coffee. 'They'll never get me, not with my liver trouble.'"
"Fergesson eyed him. 'You're sure proud of being sick. You don't look sick to me; there's nothing wrong with you.'"
"'For the Army, there is,' Hadley answered haughtily."
"'I volunteered in World War I,' Fergesson growled. 'Marine Corps... Second Battle of the Marne, Belleau Wood. It never hurt me any.'"
"'You weren't married,' Alice reminded him. 'It's different when you're married.'"
"'No,' Ellen said quickly. 'He's got a certificate that says he's permanently ineligible.'"
Fergesson's war. The record he claims is coherent. The Marine Corps' 4th Brigade, part of the Army's 2nd Division, fought the battle of Belleau Wood in June 1918, and the 2nd Division took part in the Allied counteroffensive of July 1918 (at Soissons) that belongs to the Second Battle of the Marne (15 July to 6 August 1918). If he volunteered at eighteen or so, he was born around 1899 or 1900 and is in his early fifties in 1952, which fits the "little round worried man" with a bald spot. His creed ("pay back his country some of what he owes it") is that of a man who believes in debts and their settlement; the same habit of mind runs through his business.
Alice tries to steer: "With the peace talks, the war should be over soon."
"'Never,' Fergesson said flatly. 'Those Reds are stalling; they'll never sign. You can't talk to them; the only kind of language they understand is military strength. The Democrats are going to hand Korea over to them... what we need is a clear-cut military victory. Any child knows that!'"
"Hadley said: 'You want to fight Red China?'"
The politics of August 1952. Fergesson's speech is a fair sample of one side of the American argument that summer. Armistice talks had begun in July 1951 and moved to Panmunjom in October 1951; they dragged on over the exchange of prisoners, and the armistice was not signed until 27 July 1953. The presidential campaign of 1952 (Eisenhower against Stevenson) turned partly on Korea, with Republicans attacking the Truman administration's limited war; Eisenhower's pledge "I shall go to Korea" came in October 1952, after this dinner. General MacArthur had been dismissed in April 1951 after pressing to widen the war against China, and the use of atomic weapons in Korea was openly discussed in the press. Fergesson's "One atomic bomb" is the bar-room version of that debate. Dick sets it at a dinner table: the threat of the bomb, which haunts Hadley's world in the Society's preaching, is here a talking point over swordfish.
Prejudice: "Orientals" and "Chinamen." Fergesson's words for the Chinese are the casual slurs of the period, and he uses them with contempt ("a bunch of Orientals"). They belong to the character, who will also use "queer" later in the evening, and the narrator does not endorse them. The guide quotes them because they show the mind of the man who is about to judge Hadley's maturity.
Then Fergesson turns the finger on Hadley: "It wouldn't hurt you to do a little less talking and a little more work; according to what I hear you spent most of yesterday standing around chewing the fat with the Basford salesman."
"Hadley flushed. 'I was trying to save you a couple of bucks; I was turning down that package deal they've got rigged up for the Christmas market.'"
"'You let me worry about that,' Fergesson said. 'I already told H. R. Basford we're not taking any package deal; we'll get the regular discount and return, none of that lump stuff. Where's that order book they sent around? I'm cutting it up for scratch pads.'"
"Words, words, words" at home. The move from Panmunjom to the Basford salesman is the comic hinge of the dinner. Fergesson's complaint about diplomats ("all they do is talk") becomes, in the same breath, his complaint about his employee. Hadley's defence is that he was doing the boss's job for him, turning down a bad deal; Fergesson's reply ("You let me worry about that") makes clear that decisions are his. Note "the regular discount and return": distributors of the period gave dealers a trade discount and the right to return unsold stock, and a "package deal" (a fixed assortment at a lump price for Christmas) would trade that flexibility for a lower price. Fergesson wants to keep the right to send things back, as with the fifty 5U4s.
"'All right,' Alice reproved. 'Wait until after dinner.'" "There's dessert." "Well, trot it on." Around the table everyone has stopped eating; Ellen's plate is half full. Alice feels "momentary compassion for her; it was enough to discourage anybody," and stops Ellen from jumping up to help: "Don't get up. I can do it."
The pitches
When Alice returns with the wine gelatin, Fergesson is on the store's lighting: "It's that overhead skylight. Get that damn thing covered and you won't get too much glare. Or turn the sets around the other way."
"'They've got to be visible from the street,' Hadley answered. 'People come along and see the TV going; they stop and watch; they drift in without knowing it.'"
"'Put one in the window,' Fergesson grunted."
"'That's bad! Makes it too much like a free show; you know, something you pay admission for, like a movie. We want the sets where people can come in and handle them... get the idea they're for sale, something for the home.'"
"'I suppose so,' Fergesson admitted. 'Personally, I wouldn't have one around the house.'"
The television dealer who won't own a television. Fergesson's admission is a small bombshell, delivered flat. He sells televisions; he would not have one in his house. Hadley, by contrast, thinks like a modern merchandiser: the set in the window becomes a "free show," like a movie, while the set inside, which people can "handle," becomes "something for the home." He understands that the product is a way of life being sold into homes, which is exactly what Fergesson distrusts. In 1952 television was still spreading fast; roughly a third of American households had a set, and the Bay Area had only a few stations (KPIX from 1948, KGO-TV and KRON-TV from 1949).
Fergesson pokes at the dessert "with suspicion": "What's this?" Alice: "Eat it with the cookies." "Gingerly, Fergesson poked at the shimmering dark yellow mound. 'It's got wine in it?'" Ellen tastes it and turns "rapturously" to Alice: "It's just wonderful... It's so sort of... so continental." (The book has her hunting "for the word.")
Hadley, "Earnestly," goes on. "I don't think you've got the right idea about TV. You can't merchandise it like fifteen-dollar radios." The ads are "nothing, just a couple of boxes in the throwaway Shopping News." What they want is "one of those full-page mats every week... from Emerson and Zenith and RCA, all the big companies. In the S.F. Chronicle or the Oakland Trib, not the San Mateo Times; that hasn't got any circulation." The best customers "ought to be those big estates out of town, the people with plenty of money to spend. We ought to get in some of the custom-built TV combinations, something better than Admiral and Philco. At least DuMont."
Mats, co-op money and brands. A "mat" was a papier-mâché matrix from which a newspaper cast a printing plate; manufacturers supplied dealers with ready-made ad mats, often with the cost shared under a cooperative advertising scheme, so a full-page mat would put the dealer's name under a national brand's artwork. Hadley's ladder of brands is accurate for the period: Admiral and Philco were mass-market makers; DuMont (Allen B. DuMont Laboratories) was known for premium sets. His geography is also telling: he wants the big San Francisco and Oakland papers, not the local San Mateo Times, which places Cedar Groves on the Peninsula, near San Mateo.
"'I'm not going to tie up my inventory in a bunch of those thousand-dollar combinations,' Fergesson answered sourly."
Hadley's arithmetic.
- "Markup is about thirty percent": on a table-model Admiral costing perhaps $200 retail, a 30% markup on the selling price means about $60 gross margin.
- "you net maybe twenty bucks": after overhead and the salesman's commission (5% of $200 is $10), Hadley's estimate leaves about a third of the margin as profit. The figures hang together.
- A "thousand-dollar" combination: at the same 30% margin, about $300 gross, perhaps $100 net or more, for the same hours of selling. That is Hadley's "gravy."
- The risk Fergesson sees: a $1,000 set on the floor is $700 of his cash sitting in inventory until a rich customer comes. Five of them is $3,500, more than the $2,400 a year he will shortly name as the cost of a girl at the counter.
- "fifteen-dollar radios": small table radios did sell for around $15 to $25.
Stonestown in August 1952. Hadley's example is up to the minute. The Stonestown shopping centre in southwest San Francisco was brand new: its anchor, a branch of The Emporium department store, opened on 16 July 1952, and the centre was formally dedicated on 6 November 1952. To a salesman in a suburb to the south it would have been exactly the "swank" competition drawing rich customers away. The detail is a neat check on the novel's dating: it fits an August 1952 dinner.
"'I'm no big-time operator,' Fergesson said grumpily. 'I just want my share.'"
"I just want my share." Fergesson's reply is his whole philosophy in six words, and it is why the guide marks it. He does not want to grow without limit; he wants a fair, safe return for hard work, earned in a shop he understands. Hadley wants scale, class, the "gravy." The tragedy of the chapter is that Fergesson is about to give Modern to a man whose idea of it he does not share, and Hadley is about to accept a job whose limits he despises. Neither says so. In Chapter 4 Fergesson's purchase of O'Neill's was presented, half in irony, as proof of "the essential spirituality of his soul": his love of the store is real, but it is the love of a craftsman, not a tycoon.
After dinner
"The meal was finished in uncomfortable silence." Ellen excuses herself as soon as her dish is empty and does not come back from the bedroom; Hadley follows. The Fergessons are left alone.
"'You old bear,' Alice said. 'Muttering away.'"
Consignment stock. Goods held on consignment stay the property of the supplier until they are sold; the dealer pays only for what moves. When Fergesson bought O'Neill's business, the wholesalers evidently claim that some of the stock on the shelves was theirs on consignment and never paid for. Fergesson insists he paid for it. It is a real and common dispute in the purchase of a going concern (what exactly was bought, and who owns the inventory), and it shows the second store already costing him early mornings and arguments. "I paid for that stuff; it's mine" is also the voice of the owner Hadley is about to work for: the store, and everything in it, belongs to Fergesson.
From the bedroom come low voices; "The conversation abruptly ended; Ellen appeared at the door, glanced at Alice, and then rushed up to her. 'I'll wash,' she pronounced breathlessly." She ties on "a dainty white apron" and starts clearing. Hadley "came slowly after her and stood."
"Fergesson arose. 'Let's get out of this,' he said to Hadley. 'All this activity.'" "Good idea."
The house Fergesson built
The men sit facing each other across the living room. "The room was cool; Fergesson had installed an elaborate air-conditioning system down in the basement. A faint breeze licked around them. Outside the house the August night was hot and close; a few people moved listlessly along the sidewalks, men in their undershirts, women in sweat-stained shorts and drooping halters."
"'What do you think of my air-conditioning system?' Fergesson asked."
"'Seems to work.'"
A house built by hand. The list is impressive: new foundations, a dug-out basement, ten tons of earth turned into a patio, home air conditioning (still rare in 1952), and radiant floor heating, with hot-water pipes laid under tile. Radiant floors were a fashionable modern feature of the time; the Bay Area builder Joseph Eichler put them in his post-war tract houses. Fergesson is the opposite of Hadley in this: a man who has made his surroundings with his own hands and is in control of them, down to the temperature. "Glare off the Bay" in the morning means the house faces east over the water, which again fits a Peninsula town.
After a moment he asked: 'What does it give you? A sense of permanence?'"
"Fergesson shrugged. 'Any job worth doing is worth doing well. You ought to know that... instead of piddling around, you should finish what you start. You're always leaving half-finished jobs around the store. Everybody cleans up after you.'"
"Ignoring him, Hadley made a gesture that took in the room, the floor, the whole house. 'You feel more rooted? Fixing this up gives you a sense of being anchored? Having a center?'"
"Fergesson frowned. 'I don't know what you're talking about.'"
"'Let it go,' Hadley said."
"'It gives me a feeling of pride. When you can look around and know you did things yourself...you know you're not dependent on somebody else.'"
Two languages. This is the quietest and best exchange of the evening. Hadley asks, three times, the questions that matter to him: "permanence," "rooted," "anchored," "a center." These are the words of a man who has none of those things and has spent the summer looking for them, in Marsha, in Beckheim, in the Society. Fergesson does not understand the questions. He answers with a proverb ("Any job worth doing is worth doing well"), a criticism ("half-finished jobs"), and finally with his own value: pride and independence, "not dependent on somebody else." The two men are both talking about the meaning of work, in languages that do not meet. "Let it go" is Hadley giving up on being understood, as he gave up at Beckheim's.
"Hadley licked his lips and said: 'When you're on your own you have a chance to work out ideas...you can get something accomplished.'"
"'What sort of things?' Fergesson demanded doubtfully."
"A glow crossed Hadley's face, an expression of feverish need. 'You can set things into motion.' He raised his hands in a compulsive gesture. 'Now you take Modern; there's a lot of improvements that have to be made. Modern... that's a laugh. Modern has one of the oldest fronts on the street.'"
"'It's good enough,' Fergesson answered shortly."
"'Twenty years ago, maybe. But things have changed! Things have to expand! You can't sit still...'"
"'I'm not sitting still,' Fergesson interrupted. 'I just took over O'Neill's place; you call that sitting still?'"
Hadley's hands move "spasmodically." "You don't see Modern the way some guy barreling through town in a big yellow Cad sees it. Here's this narrow old store, and all these modern places; naturally he's not going to stop and park and go into a dingy, dirty store; he wants a tilt-front window; he wants good modern lighting..." Then the vision, "beginning to warm to a fever pitch":
The shop front as a temple. Hadley's design is good, and it is the style of the period: low brick or stone bulkheads, planters, canted ("tilt-front") glass that cuts reflections, recessed uplighting, an interior that rises like a stage. What gives the speech its charge is the language: "not a glaring spot but a sort of radiance," the merchandise that "sweep[s] up." This is the light imagery of the whole novel (Beckheim's light, the store's neon, the lighters on the road) turned into architecture. Hadley wants the store to glow. Ellen is right that he "should have been an architect"; she is wrong that the store is the place to be one.
"'Spending my money! You know what that sort of stuff costs? Thousands of dollars... and you know I don't own the premises! Mason & McDuffy owns that; I'm just throwing it away. All I've got is a five-year lease; if they don't renew...'"
"'In two years you'll make it all back,' Hadley interrupted impatiently. 'Look, a front like I'm describing is the coming thing; you've got to have it. You haven't improved the front since I've been there; only that coat of white paint.'"
Landlord's improvement, tenant's risk. Fergesson's objection is sound business. Money spent on a building one does not own becomes, in the end, the landlord's: if the lease is not renewed, the new front stays behind. With five years on the lease, the cost has to be recovered well inside that term. Hadley's "In two years you'll make it all back" is a payback claim with no numbers behind it. The landlord's name is close to a real one: Mason-McDuffie Company was a long-established Berkeley real estate firm (founded 1887, renamed in 1905), developer of Claremont and St. Francis Wood. Dick, writing in Berkeley, may have borrowed it; the spelling "McDuffy" is his.
Ellen sells her husband
In the kitchen, washing up, Ellen speaks "rapidly": "I couldn't get him to bring the sketches he made; if Jim could see them he'd understand what Stuart means. It's so hard to explain... People just look at you blankly when you're trying to create an ideal... and that's what Stuart has: an ideal he wants to put over. He's really creative, Alice. Most people are so... well, so sort of ordinary... They don't have that spark; you know. They're just sort of clods...they don't see things; they don't see how things can be improved and made lovely."
She goes on: Stuart "could work with materials, like stones and building woods, and with flowers... he could work with plastics and fabrics. He has a real eye for color." And then, "Blissfully, desperately": "Stuart's a real artist, Alice. He's got such wonderful sensitive hands..."
"Such wonderful sensitive hands." Ellen's praise is sincere, and the reader hears in it what she cannot. Marsha in Chapter 10 told Hadley "Deep down inside of you, you know you're not a television salesman," and admired his paintings; those paintings are at this moment somewhere with Marsha. Ellen speaks of "an ideal he wants to put over" with the same hope Marsha had, and calls "most people" "clods" in a small echo of Hadley's own contempt for the ordinary. The wife and the other woman agree about him. Both want him to be an artist; Ellen wants him to be an artist inside Modern TV, which is a contradiction she does not see.
"'I know,' Alice said sympathetically. 'But if you get a chance, tell him to go easy. You know how suspicious Jim is when anybody does a lot of talking. He thinks they're trying to sell him something.'"
"'But he has to understand!' Ellen cried, agonized. 'I mean, Stuart could do so many things for that store... he really could, Alice. He could just transform it. It wouldn't be the same store.'"
"'That's what I'm afraid of,' Alice said tartly. 'Tell him to pipe down.'"
"That's what I'm afraid of." Alice's dry line is the chapter's best joke and its most exact judgment. Ellen offers transformation as the selling point; for Fergesson it is the danger. The store is not a canvas but a livelihood, and its owner wants it to remain "the same store." Alice understands that the way to get Hadley the job is for Hadley to say less, which is advice Hadley, "a salesman," cannot take: he sells ideas to the one man who distrusts all salesmen.
Alice gives one more piece of advice: "Sometimes it's better not to try too hard. Just relax and take it easy. We'll sit around for a while...try to keep them from turning this into a debate on store policies." And: "Especially a debate on how to deal with the Meyberg salesman." They finish the pots and pans, remove their aprons, "and strolled tautly into the living room."
"Have you finished?"
"'Penny for your thoughts,' Ellen said nervously to her husband. She sank down on the arm of his chair and put her soft arms around his neck." Alice sits on the couch: "Have you two finished yelling at each other? Or is there more?"
"'We weren't yelling,' Fergesson explained. 'We were discussing business problems.'"
"'Have you finished?' Alice repeated."
Fergesson stirs "fitfully" and the pressure comes out of him: "What do you mean by that? Of course we haven't finished. How could we be finished? What do you want me to do, lie down and go to sleep, and let the stores fall apart? What kind of a businessman would I be? How long do you think we'd be able to pay our bills, and you could afford those damn frilly dresses and shoes and hats and things..." Then: "His voice trailed off dully. 'I'm tired. I've got to get to bed early tonight.'"
The worried owner. For a moment the gruff boss shows what the week of "meditating" has cost him. "How could we be finished?" is a cry about the work itself: for a small owner with two stores, the business is never finished, and every bill rests on him. "I'm tired" is the most honest thing he says all evening. It is also the opening Alice has been waiting for: a tired man with two stores needs a manager.
"Ellen blanched; her arms tightened convulsively around her husband's neck. Hadley gently disengaged them." He covers with work: "Sure. And I've got those Philcos coming through the door. I've got to clear room for them downstairs."
"'Make sure the cartons are up off the ground,' Fergesson warned gloomily. 'It's okay now, but in a couple of months that whole damn back cellar will be dripping wet. Make sure there's nothing touching the cement.'"
"'We could make the city reroute that slough,' Hadley said. 'It's seepage into the soil; that's why it starts so early. It's not rainwater; it's flow off the hills.'"
"'Nonsense,' Fergesson contradicted. 'Those pipes are sealed; my God, they go under fifty stores and a thousand houses... the whole town! If there was any leakage...'"
"'Now look here,' Alice broke in, exasperated. 'We're not going to sit here yelling back and forth about city sewer mains.'"
The wet cellar. Even the small talk follows the pattern. Hadley has a theory, about seepage from a slough fed by "flow off the hills," and a large solution: make the city reroute it. Fergesson has a practical rule, keep the cartons off the cement, and a flat denial of the theory. In the Bay Area the rains usually begin in October or November, so "in a couple of months" places the wet season correctly; Hadley's point is that the cellar gets wet before the rains, which would indeed suggest groundwater rather than rain. He may be right.
After a silence Fergesson asks permission, like a schoolboy: "Can I ask Hadley if he called West Coast Supply about that damaged cabinet?" Hadley did: "They told me their inspector has to come out and examine it." "That's fine." "I think they'll come through. We saved the carton, of course. They can see it was dropped."
A competent employee. Between the visions, Hadley is good at the job. He handled the damaged-freight claim properly, keeping the carton as evidence for the supplier's inspector, and he knows the Philcos are coming and where they will go. The novel is fair to him here: his failure is not incompetence but restlessness. Fergesson's "That's fine" is the closest he comes to praise.
Christmas, the radio, and singing commercials
"'Gee,' Ellen said plaintively, 'this is a lot like Christmas. Remember when we all got together that Christmas?'"
Alice remembers. "On Christmas Day it had been cold and wet; rain lashed against the windows; icy wind whipped through the tall cedars along the path." The house was full: "Jack V. White, his wife, Peggy, and their two children; Stuart and Ellen; Joe Tampini and his girlfriend; Olsen and his wife; a handful of neighbors; relatives; and old friends." They had "a big turkey dinner at two tables," then sat "listening to the rain and sipping little mugs of foamy eggnog. The FM had played Christmas music softly, a Bach Christmas cantata. Everybody and everything had been quiet and peaceful."
Fergesson smiles at Alice: "I remember that. Who were all those people? Friends of yours, I suppose." Ellen: "This is a lot like Christmas. Only it's hot instead of wet, and there aren't so many people here." Hadley: "It's nicer this way."
The Christmas memory. Ellen's comparison is touching and slightly absurd, and Alice's memory shows why she makes it. The Christmas was the store as family: the whole staff and their wives and children under the boss's roof, rain outside, Bach on the radio. It is the picture of Modern TV as a small, warm community, the "neat little cosmos" Hadley will see on the walk home. Fergesson's joke ("Who were all those people? Friends of yours") tells us that the warmth was Alice's work, as tonight is. Bach wrote many cantatas for the Christmas season (the Christmas Oratorio of 1734 is a set of six); FM stations in the Bay Area of the early 1950s, such as the listener-supported KPFA in Berkeley (on the air from 1949), were known for classical music.
Hadley goes to "the heavy radio-phonograph in the corner" and dials it, finds "only popular jazz," and shuts it off. Ellen: "The radio's just terrible. I have to hear it all day... nothing but soap operas and commercials. I hate those singing commercials; they drive me crazy."
"'They're supposed to,' Fergesson said."
"'That's awful, if they're supposed to,' Ellen answered. 'What kind of a person thinks up things like that? There ought to be good music... Radio is so tasteless and cheap. Of course, I suppose the average man likes that sort of thing... They have to aim their programs at the greatest possible number.'"
"'Which means morons,' Hadley added."
"Fergesson chewed his lip and asked: 'Have you ever met anybody who liked singing commercials? If you took a poll of this country you wouldn't find a damn person who likes singing commercials.'"
"'Then why do they have them?' Ellen asked."
"'Because they sell products,' Fergesson answered. 'They irritate... they're repetitious. People hate them, but they remember the sponsor's name. They work; that's why they keep turning them out.'"
The merchant's realism. It is Fergesson, the man who would not have a television at home, who understands advertising best. Ellen and Hadley speak as people of taste: "good music," "tasteless and cheap," "morons." Fergesson speaks as a seller: irritation and repetition fix the name in memory, and memory sells. He does not like it; he knows it works. The exchange also shows Ellen alone at home "all day" with the radio, the life of the young mother in the apartment, and Hadley's quick contempt for "the average man," which is the snobbery that turned into the slur in Chapter 12.
Practical angle: optimising for recall, not liking. Fergesson's account of the jingle is an early statement of a problem that has grown with digital advertising and recommender systems: a message or a feed can be tuned to what people remember or react to, which is not the same as what they value. A system rewarded only for recall or clicks will drift toward the "repetitious" and the irritating, because those work. Anyone setting the objective for such a system has to decide, as Ellen asks, "What kind of a person thinks up things like that?", and measure satisfaction as well as response.
Hadley takes the commercial talk as his cue. "Look. What about this? You ought to have a TV program or a radio program; you can't reach enough people through newspapers." He hurries on: "you don't have to sponsor a program; all you have to do is pay for spot announcements. In the evening, maybe; around six or seven o'clock. Over one of the big S.F. stations, like KNBC. You could bring down people from the Bay Area, and people from the whole peninsula." And, "Enthusiastically": "KNBC is clear channel... people get it all the way down in Bakersfield."
KNBC, 680 on the dial. Hadley's facts are right. KNBC was NBC's San Francisco radio station on 680 kHz, a clear-channel frequency broadcasting at 50,000 watts, so at night it carried for hundreds of miles; Bakersfield is some 280 miles away. (The station had been KPO until 1947 and became KNBR in 1962, when NBC moved the KNBC call sign to Los Angeles television.) The practical flaw is the one Fergesson would see at once: a store in one Peninsula town has little use for listeners in Bakersfield, and clear-channel reach is paid for in the price of the spot. Note too that Hadley says "TV program or a radio program" and then names a radio station.
"Alice eyed him and wished he would stop having ideas for once in his life. It was easy to read the distrust on Jim's face; he was suspicious of innovations, especially those which cost him money."
Apricot brandy and "some girl in"
Alice rescues the evening with drink. From the refrigerator she takes "a bottle of chilled French apricot brandy," pours four small wineglasses and brings them in on a tray. Fergesson brightens: "Fine... How many for me? Two? Three?" Alice: "Just one," "swooping the tray away from him and over to Stuart Hadley."
"'Thanks,' Hadley said; he accepted the brandy but did not drink it. Setting it down on the arm of the chair he sat gazing intently forward, his blue eyes cloudy with thought. He opened his mouth to speak, but Alice was instantly ahead of him."
The untouched glass. The last time we saw Hadley offered a drink, on the road in Chapter 12, he drank the Jameson, poured the rest away, and the night went wrong. Here he takes the glass and does not touch it. It is a small sign that he is holding himself in, and Alice's quickness ("instantly ahead of him") shows she is holding him in too: she will not let him launch another idea.
Alice turns to Ellen: "Maybe you shouldn't have any. Or is it all right now?" Ellen: "It's all right... Thanks a lot, Alice. It looks wonderful..." She sips. "It tastes glorious." "Inwardly, Alice sighed."
"Or is it all right now?" Alice's question presumably refers to Ellen's recent childbirth and to feeding the baby; the chapter does not spell it out, and the guide does not guess beyond what the line implies. Alice's inward sigh is at Ellen's gush ("glorious"), not at the drinking.
Fergesson moves to staff. "I understand Joe Tampini's going to get married. That same girl?" Hadley: "The same one. The cute redhead." Fergesson, "drearily": "I guess he's going to want a raise. Like you, when you got married." Ellen: "She's a lovely girl. I always envy women with red hair like that." Fergesson: "Redheads are either awfully pretty or ugly as hell."
He remembers "that kid who used to come into the store when we had that pile of jukebox records? Green eyes, red hair... She liked those trumpet records." Hadley: "I remember her. Her name was... Joan something. I managed to get her name on an order card for a Bix Beiderbecke record once." Fergesson: "She wasn't over eighteen." Hadley: "Eighteen, hell. She was a high school kid."
The redhead and the order card. The banter is about girls, and it leads straight to business. Hadley's boast that he "managed to get her name on an order card" is a salesman's trick and a flirt's, and it shows the store as a place where the young men look at the girls who come in. Bix Beiderbecke (1903 to 1931) was the great cornet player of 1920s jazz; a Bix record in 1952 would have been a reissue, the taste of a collector, so "Joan something" was no ordinary teenager. The red hair also brings Marsha into the room for the reader: her hair was "reddish" on the freeway in Chapter 12.
Then the idea Alice and Ellen have been waiting for, or something near it. Fergesson: "I've been thinking we need a girl in at Modern...to make it more attractive to the family trade. It was okay during the war... all we did was repair radios. We had those big-tit calendars up on the walls and nobody kicked; it was mostly men we did business with. But now we're getting more couples. If we had some girl in, maybe as a bookkeeper, or to wait on people... She could check tubes, make out service tags, answer the phone."
"'A receptionist,' Hadley said."
"'Would there be enough work to keep her busy? I'm not paying any girl to stand around wiggling her ass at customers; she's got to sweep and keep the place clean. I think a woman's better at that; polishing and dusting is women's stuff.'"
"'Oh, sure,' Hadley agreed readily. 'There'd be plenty of work she could do. Making out the bills, like you say. The riling, all the paperwork...'"
"'But we don't want her stuck up in the office,' Fergesson pointed out. 'We want her down front, where people can see her.'"
The family trade. Fergesson's history of his own shop is a small social history of post-war retail. During the war the store repaired radios for men, and the walls had pin-up calendars. Now the customers are "couples" buying television sets for the home, and the shop must look fit for wives. His solution is a young woman "down front, where people can see her," who will also sweep, dust, check tubes and answer the phone. The contradiction is plain and Dick lets it stand: she is to make the store respectable by being looked at.
Sexism in the job description. "Wiggling her ass at customers," "big-tit calendars," "polishing and dusting is women's stuff": Fergesson's words are crude and his assumptions were common in 1952. Hadley agrees "readily." Alice and Ellen object, lightly, a few lines later. The guide flags the passage and does not soften it; it shows the world in which Ellen and Alice live and in which "the girl" will work.
Hadley sees a chance: "That's a point, and it's interesting, because I was thinking along those lines myself. The other day I had a thought on that; I'll give it to you for what it's worth." His idea: "an expanded record department. I'll tell you why... it'll bring a lot of people in, and we can turn them into TV and radio-phono sales. The two tie in together; we could knock out the back wall and use the storeroom for listening booths... maybe even partition it into a lot of booths."
"Fergesson shook his head. 'That's out. Modern will never do a real record business.' He peered up intently at the ceiling. 'O'Neill is better. And there's more display space. Records take too many counters and racks.' Sourly, he concluded: 'Records break all the time.'"
"'Not the new LPs,' Hadley reminded him."
"'Those scratch.'"
Records in 1952. The argument has its period facts right. Shellac 78s broke easily; the vinyl long-playing record, introduced by Columbia in June 1948 (with RCA's 45 following in 1949), did not shatter but did scratch. Listening booths, where a customer could hear a record before buying, were standard in record shops of the time. Hadley's plan is a classic "traffic builder": low-price goods that bring people in, to be sold high-price ones. Fergesson's answer is that O'Neill's, his own new store, is the better place for it, and the next lines show why that matters.
"Fergesson studied his two hands, which were pressed tightly together. 'Of course, I wouldn't put you in O'Neill's place...that's for me. I'm keeping you at Modern.'"
"'I know that,' Hadley said."
The offer, sideways. This is the first time in the evening that Fergesson says aloud that Hadley will run something: "I'm keeping you at Modern." He says it while refusing an idea and while staring at his own hands "pressed tightly together." He has decided, and he is still not ready to say it plainly. Hadley's "I know that" is a deft reply: it accepts without seeming eager.
"'If I put in a full-sized record department I'll get down some queer from Berkeley to run it...like you see in the Berkeley record shops. They know all those classics, those Lily Pons and Toscanini. I'm not messing with that.'"
"'Right,' Hadley agreed. 'That's a specialty.'"
"'So forget about the records. But we'll think about getting some girl in. You think a high school girl could handle it?'"
"'Better get one from the business college,' Hadley said. 'That place upstairs across the street from Modern. They're older, more experienced. You know the ones I mean? Heels and sweaters... the ones you see in Woolworth at lunchtime.'"
"'I thought they were secretaries.'"
"'No, they're going to that business school. They're looking like hell for jobs.'"
"'Fine,' Fergesson agreed. 'I'll go over there one of these days and see what we can scare up.'"
"'I don't know if I like this idea,' Alice said tartly. 'You two are too darn interested.'"
"'I don't know either,' Ellen piped up, caught between joking and genuine concern. 'I think Modern looks all right.'"
Ellen's slip. Ellen spent the washing-up telling Alice that her husband could "transform" the store. Now, faced with a girl in heels and sweaters at the counter, she says "I think Modern looks all right." Her jealousy wins over her campaign for a moment, and it is funny and sad: she wants the store changed, but not that way. The girls "in Woolworth at lunchtime" connect with Hadley's world of the street; in Chapter 21 the scarred Hadley thinks there "would be no kidding with the dark-haired girl at Woolworth's soda fountain."
"Ignoring the two women, Fergesson continued: 'On second thought, maybe I'll let you handle that. Do what you think best. We'd have to pay her two hundred a month... in a year that's two thousand four hundred dollars...and that's for a five-day week.'"
"'True,' Hadley admitted. 'There's the state law.'"
"'Would you rather have a couple of thousand to modernize the front? Maybe you could brighten it up more that way...new lighting fixtures, that glass you were talking about.' He waved his hand. 'All that fancy stuff.'"
"The room was abruptly silent. Everybody sat frozen, watching Hadley."
"'I'd have to check into construction costs,' Hadley said finally. Gripping the arms of the chair he said thickly. 'Labor is the big item; all that stuff's union.'"
"'Well, it's something to think about. There's no rush on it.' Fergesson lifted his head and peered crookedly across the room at the blond young man. 'But if you're going to run that place you've got to learn to make decisions.'"
"'Sure,' Hadley said huskily."
The test. Fergesson's choice is a real one and a trap. The two options cost about the same (a girl at $2,400 a year, or "a couple of thousand" for the front), and they stand for the two visions of the store: the family shop made respectable by a pretty face, or the modern shop made glamorous by glass and light. By offering Hadley the front, Fergesson offers him his dream, in a reduced form, and watches what he does with it. Hadley, who has talked about the front all evening, freezes and asks for costs. "Labor is the big item; all that stuff's union" is the cautious answer of a manager, which is what Fergesson wanted to hear and what Hadley least wants to be. "If you're going to run that place" is the first open statement of the offer; it comes as a lesson.
The girl at the counter.
- $200 a month, which Fergesson multiplies correctly to $2,400 a year.
- "a five-day week": about 21 or 22 working days a month, roughly 173 hours at forty hours a week, so about $1.15 an hour.
- "There's the state law": California had limited the working hours of women since 1911 (eight a day, forty-eight a week), and the state's Industrial Welfare Commission set minimum wages for women; in 1952 it raised the minimum for women in mercantile work to 75 cents an hour. $200 a month was well above that floor. Hadley's remark most likely refers to the hours limit, which made a six-day week for a woman clerk impossible.
- Compare: Hadley's own $250 a month, and the $300 he is about to be offered. The girl would earn two-thirds of the manager's base salary.
The offer
Fergesson chews his cigar. "The room was tense and strained; nobody dared move or breathe. Outside, some people walked along the dark sidewalk laughing and talking. The sounds died into silence and there remained only the whirr of the air-conditioning system Fergesson had installed with his own two hands."
"'Hadley,' Fergesson said, 'I think you've calmed down now that you have a son. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me you're beginning to grow up.'"
"Hadley's face showed that he was trying to find something to say; but no words came."
"'You've got a wife and child now,' Fergesson continued. 'You've got responsibilities you didn't have before. You've got a great future ahead of you, if you really bear down and stick with it.'"
"'Sure,' Hadley agreed, in an almost inaudible voice."
"You're beginning to grow up." The reader knows how wrong Fergesson is. A few weeks before, the man he calls "calmed down" spent a night on a dark road with another woman, attacked her and insulted her in the foulest terms, and tore up his membership card in a cult. Fergesson's theory of maturity (a son, responsibilities, sticking with it) is sincere and conventional, and the novel will test it to destruction in Part Four. Hadley's silence is the silence of a man being praised for a self he does not have.
"'Of course,' Fergesson continued inexorably, 'you've got more expenses now. It costs a lot to raise a kid these days. Medicine, clothes, food... everything special.'"
"Alice smiled a little. 'The authority,' she said softly, not loudly enough for her husband to hear. There was no point in hurting his feelings."
"The authority." Alice's whispered joke implies that the Fergessons have no children of their own (the novel nowhere mentions any), so Jim lecturing on the cost of raising a kid is a lecture from theory. It is also tender: she keeps the joke to herself "There was no point in hurting his feelings." (An earlier summary of this chapter called Alice "childless"; this chapter does not say so outright, and the guide records it as an inference from this line. Chapter 14 comes close to confirming it, when Alice says, "Jim and I would give anything in the world to have a son.")
"'I realize that,' Hadley said. He tapped his wallet. 'It's already begun to cut in.'"
Then the terms. "'You're making two fifty a month,' Fergesson said, 'plus five percent. Running Modern means you won't be on the floor as much; you'll be upstairs a lot, running out to people's homes... It'll probably exit down your actual sales.'"
"'I suppose so,' Hadley managed."
"Fergesson studied his hands and mulled. 'I can't go above three hundred. On the commissions, I'll take away the five on what you sell and give you a flat one percent on the gross take of the store. That means on all commission able items...not tubes and phonograph needles and repairs.'"
"'I get it,' Hadley said swiftly."
"'Sure,' Hadley agreed. 'I know.'"
"'How does it sound?' Fergesson demanded belligerently. 'I know three hundred doesn't sound like much, but around Christmas a one percent on the gross ought to really roll it in for you.'"
"'It sounds fine,' Hadley said."
| Now (Ch7 and Ch13) | Promised in July (Ch7, as Hadley reports it) | Offered in August (Ch13) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base | Ch7: "Commission and draw," netting "More like two fifty"; Ch13: "two fifty a month" | "three fifty salary" | $300: "I can't go above three hundred" |
| Own sales | 5% | "plus my five percent on what I sold" | Dropped: "I'll take away the five on what you sell" |
| Store gross | None | "an additional one-half percent on the gross take" | 1% "on the gross take of the store" |
| Base of the gross share | n/a | Not specified | "all commission able items...not tubes and phonograph needles and repairs" |
| Duties | Selling on the floor | Running Modern | "upstairs a lot, running out to people's homes"; let White and Tampini "close the stuff"; "keep the ceiling from falling"; hire someone "to sweep and clean" |
| Who says so | Hadley to Bob Sorrell; Fergesson at dinner | Hadley, reporting "One night after hours" | Fergesson, before witnesses |
| Fergesson's pitch | "In the long run you'll make more"; "around Christmas a one percent on the gross ought to really roll it in" |
Is it a raise?
- The promise: $350 plus 5% of his own sales plus 0.5% of store gross.
- The offer: $300 plus 1% of commissionable gross, no personal commission.
- The break-even: the extra $50 a month of base is gone at once. The 1% on the gross replaces his 5% on his own sales only if the store's commissionable gross is at least five times what Hadley personally sells. If Hadley sells $2,000 a month (worth $100 at 5%), the store must gross $10,000 a month in commissionable goods for the 1% to match.
- Against today: if his "two fifty" already includes commission (as he told Bob Sorrell in Chapter 7), the offer is $50 more in base with a share in a gross that peaks at Christmas; if it is $250 plus 5%, as Fergesson says now, the offer may be worth less than what he has, in the months before Christmas.
- In context: $300 a month is $3,600 a year, a respectable white-collar salary in 1952, when average manufacturing pay was around $1.65 to $1.70 an hour (roughly $3,400 a year for full-time work).
Inconsistency: what Hadley earns now. In Chapter 7 Hadley tells Bob Sorrell he is on "Commission and draw" at five percent, and when Sorrell guesses "about three fifty a month net," answers "More like two fifty." Here Fergesson says "You're making two fifty a month... plus five percent," which reads as a salary of $250 with commission on top. The two can be reconciled (a $250 draw against commission, earned back by sales), but they do not quite match.
"It sounds fine." Hadley does not bargain. He does not mention the $350 he says he was promised, or the five percent he is giving up. He was told he must "learn to make decisions," and his decision is to agree to everything. The phrase he uses has been the sign of his surrender throughout the book: "Sure," "I know," "It sounds fine." Fergesson's "I know three hundred doesn't sound like much" shows he knows the offer is lean; "around Christmas" is the salesman's close, a future gain to cover a present cut.
"'Thank God,' Alice breathed, getting to her feet with a sigh of relief. 'I'm certainly glad that's over.'"
"'What are you talking about?' Fergesson roared, outraged. 'You goddamn women, sitting around like a bunch of witches... you had this all arranged!'"
The comedy closes. Alice gives the game away with "Thank God," and Fergesson's roar confirms what he said before dinner ("This whole thing is rigged!"). The "witches" line is half anger and half admiration. The evening worked exactly as planned: the women arranged it, the boss believed he decided it, and the young man agreed to it. Nobody in the room asked Hadley what he wanted.
The walk home
"Stuart Hadley and his wife walked slowly home along the dark, warm streets. Overhead, scattered clouds of stars winked. A faint night wind stirred the Oriental plums along High Street. The rows of houses were dark and still; front doors stood wide open to admit fresh air. In her arms Ellen clutched the bundle that was Pete wrapped in his robes and feeding apparatus."
The street at night. The opening picture is calm and generous: a warm night, stars, flowering plums (ornamental plums are common street trees in Bay Area towns), and houses with their front doors "wide open," a sign of a town where people trust their neighbours. Ellen carries Pete with his "feeding apparatus," the bottles and bags of a young mother. Everything outside is safe. Everything that follows happens inside Hadley.
"'Well?' Ellen said. 'What do you have to say?'"
"'I guess I got the job.'"
"'How... do you feel about it?' Anxiously, she pushed against him and squeezed his arm. 'Tell me how you feel, Stuart; are you glad? It is what you want, isn't it?'"
"I guess." The job he has wanted for months, the promotion his wife engineered, arrives in his mouth as "I guess I got the job." Ellen asks three times how he feels, and in three different ways.
"No fantasy." The phrase matters because the whole book has been a contest between Hadley's fantasies and the real world: the screen door, the Theodorus vision, the life with Marsha. For once the thing he imagines is real. The words he chooses ("power over others," "mold and shape," "a plastic object") are the words of his daydreams applied to a small shop with three employees. The store becomes a substitute for the world he could not shape.
"He thought of the world outside the store. An infinite chaos of shifting shapes... Outside, there was nothing to stand on, only chill shadows and the dim light of stars too remote to be touched. The store was a neat little cosmos, an orderly square of firmness around which a meaningless nether-universe drifted and swirled."
"Suddenly he was terrified; he couldn't stand it outside the store. Even now, walking the dark quiet streets with his son and wife... it was too dangerous, too much of a risk. The world was out of control. Nothing could be depended on...the ground under him tilted away wherever he walked, spilling him into the shadows."
From warm night to chaos. The same stars that "winked" a paragraph before are now "too remote to be touched," and the solid pavement "tilted away." Dick shows the change from outside to inside without a break: nothing in the street has changed, only Hadley. The "neat little cosmos" is the book's fullest image of the store as shelter, and it fits Fergesson's own pride in the shop and the house, down to the air-conditioning "installed with his own two hands." Hadley at last shares his boss's faith in the store, for opposite reasons. For Fergesson it is a thing he made; for Hadley it is a wall against the void.
The morning catalogue. The image is the opening of Chapter 1 and the street scenes of Chapter 2, remembered as comfort: dew, secretaries, awnings, coffee, the phone, Olsen "crossly" off on the repair round. Each figure has a place and a task; that is what makes it comforting. The list moves from weather to people to the store, as Hadley's mind withdraws from the open sky to the shop counter.
Race: the man in the gutter. Among the secretaries and businessmen, one figure has no name or role except his race and his broom: "the Negro sweeping trash into the gutter." In Hadley's ordered morning, the black man belongs at the bottom, sweeping. The detail is a period assumption, used without comment, and it gains a bitter echo from Chapter 12, where the night before ended with Hadley tearing up his Society card and scattering the bits "across the gutter, along with the other night debris." The man who sweeps the gutter would sweep those pieces away. The guide flags the passage as the third racial reference in two chapters, after the slur on the road in Chapter 12 and "Orientals" and "Chinamen" earlier in this one.
"'Sure,' Hadley said desperately. He increased his pace; the darkness terrified him. It reminded him of that night with Marsha, the deserted road, the parked car, the crickets. The utter bleak loneliness and desolation. 'Let's get home and hit the sack... I have to get up early tomorrow.'"
The only memory of Chapter 12. This is the one line in the chapter that names the night with Marsha. It comes not as guilt but as fear: the darkness is like "the deserted road, the parked car, the crickets." What frightens him about that night is not what he did to Marsha but the "loneliness and desolation" of being outside, with no store and no role. "I have to get up early tomorrow" is the new manager's excuse, and the first use of the job as a hiding place.
"'It's cold,' Ellen said. She shivered against him and hurried to keep up. 'Here, you take Pete awhile.'"
"It's cold." The night was "dark, warm" at the start of the walk. Now Ellen says "It's cold," and the stars are "cold." Either the night has cooled or Ellen has caught her husband's chill; Dick leaves it open. Hadley "grabbed" the baby, a hard verb for a father taking his son, and the image of the man striding on with his son clutched to him while the universe is "utterly indifferent to human affairs" sets the family against the void. "Pull it around him" is the image the guide's diagram uses for the chapter's end: the store worn like a coat against the cold.
"'I'm glad,' Ellen was saying breathlessly. 'Everything worked out all right... It's so wonderful.'"
"Hadley wasn't listening. His fear grew; and it was fear of himself, fear of what he might do. He might destroy himself; he might suddenly, blindly, burst out and destroy the safety of his microcosmos. In his archaic fury he might smash, demolish, pull down the only world in which he could exist."
"In his mind were forces that could destroy it; in him was the possibility, the energy to annihilate himself and his tiny universe. As before; as in all his life. It was not new; it had always been there. In one moment he could collapse every fragment of himself. That was the terror; that was what made the universe awful and foreboding."
The danger is inside. This is the most important passage in the chapter and one of the most important in the novel. Hadley's fear moves from the outside world to himself: what makes the universe "awful" is not the stars but his own capacity to "smash, demolish, pull down" what he has. "Archaic fury" points backward, to something old in him, to something in him older than the job, the marriage or the Society. "As before; as in all his life" tells us the pattern is not new: the attack on Marsha, the quarrel with Fergesson, the drinking. It also forecasts the novel exactly. Within a few chapters Hadley will drink, fight, and lose his place in the store. The chapter that ends his ambition also states, in his own mind, that he will wreck its result.
"Again, he might struggle out into the infinite hostile regions, striving to find something, catch hold of something vague and dim, something he could never really find. Something beyond the reach of his groping hands."
The other danger. There are two ways to lose the store. One is to destroy it in fury; the other is to leave it to look again for "something vague and dim," the something Theodorus promised and Marsha seemed to offer. The "groping hands" link the passage to the opening of the walk, where Hadley "groped for an answer."
"'You're walking too fast,' Ellen protested breathlessly, hurrying behind him, trying to keep up. She listened; she fervently examined his voice, trying to hear how he felt. 'I'm so glad,' she told him. Desperately, she ran to keep up. 'I want you to be happy; I want you to have what you need. It's wonderful, isn't it? All this... It finally came through.'"
"Hadley didn't answer."
"'You know,' his wife gasped, her voice thin and pleading, 'I think I'm happier now than I've ever been in my life. What do you think about that? Isn't it wonderful?'"
"There was no response. Hadley strode on, gripping his sleeping son. Tugging his wife after him, along the dark, deserted streets."
The last image. Ellen speaks of happiness in a voice "thin and pleading," running to keep up, studying the voice that will not answer. Her "happier now than I've ever been in my life" is real and also an appeal: she needs him to say it too. He says nothing. The final sentence is a fragment, without a main verb of its own ("Tugging his wife after him"), and the grammar does what the man does: it drags her on. The husband with the sleeping son in his arms, the wife pulled behind him through "dark, deserted streets," is a picture of a family held together by force and fear. Part Three of the novel opens with a promotion; it ends this first chapter with the man running home from the dark.
How the evening turns
The chapter moves in ten steps from Alice's kitchen to the dark street, and the last step folds back on the one before it: the offer that ends the comedy is what Hadley pulls around himself in fear.
The shape. The first half of the chapter is social comedy: the planned dinner, the shop talk the women cannot stop, the pitches the boss will not buy. The middle is a test, the choice between a girl and a new front, which Hadley passes by being cautious. The end is the offer, accepted with "It sounds fine," and then a sudden turn inward on the walk home, where triumph becomes terror. The loop marks the irony: the store he wins is the thing he will "pull around him" and the thing he fears he will "pull down."
The people at the table
| What they want tonight | What they do | What they get | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alice Fergesson | To get Hadley the job without hurting Jim's pride | Cooks, stage-manages, stops Hadley's ideas, serves the brandy at the right moment | "Thank God... I'm certainly glad that's over"; called a witch |
| Jim Fergesson | To find a manager he can trust, and to decide it himself | Lectures, refuses ideas, tests Hadley with the girl-or-front choice | A manager on $300 plus 1%, and the knowledge that it was "all arranged" |
| Stuart Hadley | To change the store; to be someone | Pitches mats, DuMont, a new front, KNBC, records; then agrees to everything | The job, and a terror of himself |
| Ellen Hadley | Security for Pete; her husband's happiness | Shows off the baby, sells her husband to Alice, objects to the girl | "happier now than I've ever been," and no answer |
| Pete | Sleeps | Carried home asleep, gripped in his father's arms |
In practice
Incentives change the job. Fergesson redesigns Hadley's pay to match the role: take away the five percent on his own sales and give him one percent of the store's gross, so that he will "let them close the stuff" and look after the whole shop. This is sound practice and still argued over in every bank and sales organisation: a manager paid on personal sales will compete with his own team; a manager paid on the unit's results will coach them. The warning runs the other way too. When the measure is narrow and the pressure high, people chase the measure. Wells Fargo's retail bank, which pushed branch staff to meet aggressive cross-selling targets, was found in 2016 to have opened about 1.5 million deposit accounts and some 565,000 credit card applications that customers may not have authorised; the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fined it $100 million in September 2016. Fergesson's scheme is modest and fair by comparison, and it carries the old lesson: decide what you want people to do, then pay for that, and check what else the formula rewards.
A promotion can be a pay cut. Hadley takes the title and gives up money he could count on (his own five percent) for a share in an uncertain total that pays off "around Christmas." He loses the $350 he believes he was promised and does not ask about it. Anyone weighing a move into management, from sales or from engineering, faces the same arithmetic: the base, the variable part, what the variable part depends on, and who controls it. The num box above shows how to test the offer: work out the break-even, and ask whether it is reachable in an ordinary month.
Ideas without a business case. Hadley's pitches (ad mats, DuMont, a new front, listening booths, spot announcements on a clear-channel station) are not bad ideas. What they lack is a cost, a payback period and a link to the store's own customers; "In two years you'll make it all back" is a hope, not a case. Fergesson, crude as he is, asks the right questions: what does it cost, who pays, does it bring the customers we have. The decision Fergesson then forces, about $2,400 a year for a person or about the same sum for a new front, is portfolio management in miniature: two uses for one sum of money, each tied to a different idea of what the business is. The architect's job is to make such choices visible and comparable, and Hadley's freeze when he is handed one shows how hard it is to own the choice rather than argue for it.
Reading the room. The real decision in this chapter was made before it began, by Alice and Ellen, and the men's talk about business serves a negotiation conducted by the women. In any organisation, the formal meeting often ratifies what was arranged in the kitchen. Hadley, who talks the most, understands the least about what is happening around him.
Flags for this chapter
Points to watch, in order of appearance.
- Pay inconsistency. Ch7 has Hadley on "Commission and draw" netting "More like two fifty," with a promise of "three fifty salary plus my five percent" and "one-half percent on the gross take." Ch13 has "two fifty a month plus five percent" now, and an offer of $300 plus 1% of commissionable gross. The promise of $350 is never mentioned at dinner.
- KNBC was a radio station (680 AM). Hadley proposes "a TV program or a radio program" and names only the radio station. Not an error, but the TV side of the pitch has no station.
- (probably "cut down"), "The riling"
- Prejudice: "Orientals" and "Chinamen" in the Korea talk; "some queer from Berkeley"; "the Negro sweeping trash into the gutter" in Hadley's morning image. All are flagged where they occur.
- Sexism: "big-tit calendars," "wiggling her ass at customers," "polishing and dusting is women's stuff," and the girl "down front, where people can see her."
- Alice's childlessness is implied by "The authority," not stated.
- Chapter 12's aftermath is missing. The chapter does not say what Hadley told Ellen about the night with Marsha, and the only trace of it is one memory on the walk home.
- Timing. The dinner is on a hot evening some weeks after the night on the coast road, and Hadley will open up as manager "Tomorrow morning"; Chapter 14 is "The Manager's Thursday," set "late in August." The guide places the dinner in August and does not fix the day.
- Geography. Cedar Groves has High Street, a Bay view, the San Mateo Times and "851 Bancroft Avenue." It is a composite of Peninsula and Berkeley; the guide does not identify it with a real town.
- Earlier summaries. An earlier version of this guide said Alice was childless and gave Hadley's current pay only as "$250 plus 5%." Both are corrected above with the evidence.
Outside facts checked for this chapter.
- Stonestown, San Francisco: the Emporium store opened in July 1952 and the centre was dedicated in November 1952.
- Leo J. Meyberg Co. was a real San Francisco radio and RCA distributor, which ran the early station KDN in 1921 to 1923.
- Mason-McDuffie (Dick writes "McDuffy") was a Berkeley real estate firm dating from 1887, developer of the Claremont district and St. Francis Wood.
- Belleau Wood: June 1918, fought by the 4th Marine Brigade of the US 2nd Division. The Second Battle of the Marne: 15 July to 6 August 1918.
- Korea: armistice talks began in July 1951 and moved to Panmunjom in October 1951; the armistice was signed on 27 July 1953. MacArthur was dismissed in April 1951. Eisenhower's "I shall go to Korea" speech was given in October 1952.
- The long-playing record was introduced by Columbia in 1948. Bix Beiderbecke died in 1931. Lily Pons sang at the Metropolitan Opera; Toscanini led the NBC Symphony from 1937 to 1954.
- KNBC San Francisco: 680 kHz, clear channel, 50,000 watts; formerly KPO (to 1947), later KNBR (from 1962).
- California's women's eight-hour law dates from 1911; the Industrial Welfare Commission's minimum for women in mercantile work was 75 cents an hour from 1952.
- Wells Fargo: CFPB fine of $100 million, September 2016, over about 1.5 million deposit accounts and 565,000 credit card applications opened possibly without authorisation.
- KPFA, the listener-supported FM station in Berkeley, went on the air in 1949. Bach's Christmas Oratorio dates from 1734.
Takeaways from Chapter 13
- Part Three opens with a social comedy: Alice and Ellen arrange Hadley's promotion, and Fergesson believes he decides it until "Thank God" gives the plot away.
- Hadley's ideas pour out all evening (mats, DuMont, the front, records, KNBC) and none survives Fergesson's questions about cost and customers.
- The Korea talk shows Fergesson's war of 1918 against Hadley's draft-age doubt, and Hadley's 4-F as a quiet shame.
- The decisive test is the choice between a girl at $2,400 a year and "a couple of thousand" for the front. Hadley freezes and talks about union labour, and so proves he can be a manager.
- The offer is $300 plus 1% of commissionable gross, less on paper than the $350 Hadley says he was promised in Chapter 7, and he takes it with "It sounds fine."
- On the walk home the store becomes "a neat little cosmos" against an indifferent universe, and Hadley's fear turns from the dark to himself: he might "smash, demolish, pull down the only world in which he could exist."
- Ellen's "happier now than I've ever been in my life" gets no answer. The chapter ends with Hadley "Tugging his wife after him," which forecasts the collapse of Part Four.
The Manager's Thursday
When and where. A Thursday, "a hot day late in August," 1952 by the novel's internal dating. Morning: Wakefield's room, his sundeck, and the walk across town to the Society of the Watchmen of Jesus hall. Early afternoon: the doorway, counter and basement of Modern TV Sales and Service, then the Health Food Store across the street. Mid-afternoon: the upstairs office at Modern, where Alice has been sitting "An hour or so." The chapter ends with Hadley going down to the front counter. (The book runs straight on into Hadley's walk home that evening, which this guide treats as the opening of Chapter 15.)
Who is here.
- Horace Wakefield: florist, anti-vivisectionist, Watchmen member; it is his day off.
- Mary Krafft: Watchmen organiser, at the wall map.
- A "large colored matron": unnamed, who runs the work at the hall and sets Wakefield to envelopes.
- Stuart Hadley: on what the text implies is his first day as manager of Modern.
- Old man Berg: of Berg's Jewelry Store, a neighbour on the street.
- Jack White (selling an RCA combination), Olsen (the repairman), Joe Tampini (salesman).
- Betty: who runs the Health Food Store counter.
- Alice Fergesson: the boss's wife, waiting in the upstairs office.
- Two customers: a man on the phone asking about his radio, and an old man at the counter with a radio under his arm.
- Offstage: Jim Fergesson, "putting in thirteen hours a day" at O'Neill's; Beckheim, travelling south; Ellen and Pete.
Edition note. The text is quoted as printed, with dialogue dashes shown as "..." in this guide. (lower-case "you"), "Why-did he do that?", "Meanwhile, I'm staving away from you nuts" (surely "staying"), and "Trace my problems back to you" (which may mean "back to your generation"; the sense is clear). The chapter contains a racial slur spoken by Berg, which this guide paraphrases rather than reprints, Wakefield's "I hate old women," and Olsen's obscenities, which are quoted because they are the man.
Wakefield's day off
The joke in the first sentence. The narrator speaks for a moment in Wakefield's voice: a union rule that closes nurseries on Thursdays is "fantastic" and "in direct opposition to the laws of God and commerce." God and commerce side by side is exactly Wakefield's world, and the sentence teases him for it, since the result of the outrage is a day off that he enjoys. Weekday closing days were common in small-town retail of the period (the "half-day" or full day off midweek, often agreed among local merchants or under a union contract with retail clerks), so the rule is not impossible; it is the indignation that is comic. The extra hour of sleep and the prunes "instead of cornflakes" are the luxuries of a man of small habits.
Anti-vivisection. The magazines place Wakefield in a long tradition of moral campaigns. The anti-vivisection movement, which opposed experiments on live animals, began in Victorian Britain (the Victoria Street Society was founded in 1875) and had American societies from the 1880s. By the 1950s it was a cause associated with elderly enthusiasts, health food and letters to the editor, which is how Dick uses it. The details belong together: a man who will not harm animals, eats prunes and soyburgers, waters roses and writes to the papers. The street outside, with its mailman and laundry driver labouring in the heat, is ordinary work seen by a man with a day off.
"Practically a giant." The little man, whom Hadley will soon call "tiny" and "trivial," feels "immense" on his own sundeck among his flowers. It is a moment of joy given without irony, and it matters for the end of the chapter: Wakefield has a small world that fits him, and he is happy in it. Hadley, who wants a world large enough for "millions of things for millions of people," has none.
"And then there was the real work."
Then a paragraph of one line: "And then there was the real work." For Wakefield the flower shop is a job and the Society is his vocation. He will say the same to Hadley at the counter: "Not at the flower shop; I mean the real work down at the hall." The phrase sets up the contrast of the chapter. Hadley has just been given the job of his life, and for him there is no "real work" anywhere.
A rooming house. Wakefield lives in a single room in an old house with a landlady, a carved banister and an "ancient mirror." Like the Golds' apartment and Marsha's flat, it is a dwelling that tells us the person's place: a single man of modest means in an old part of town. "Every morning of his life" makes the routine sound lifelong, and the routine is what he will reach for at the end of the coffee scene, when he takes up his glass of milk "trying to resume his routine."
The hall as a machine
A believer who loves the world. Wakefield belongs to a sect that preaches the end of the world, and he "rejoice[s]" in "such a beautiful world." The contradiction is not hypocrisy; it is the ordinary condition of many believers, who hold an apocalyptic doctrine and enjoy their roses. His hatred of the bus fumes ("poisonous vapors") is the health-food conviction again, and a fair point: diesel and petrol exhaust in city streets was a growing complaint, and Los Angeles had begun to study its smog in the late 1940s.
Belief and apparatus. This is one of the novel's sharpest passages of social observation, and Dick gives it to the least sophisticated character. Wakefield sees two layers: the volunteers ("pies," "old clothing," "raffles") and beneath them "the hard core of astute directors" for whom the Society is "a full-time job." The media list is precise and modern for 1952: leaflets, pressed records, radio scripts, fund-raising. American religious movements of the period used every one of them; radio evangelism had been big business since the 1920s and 1930s, and Billy Graham's "Hour of Decision" broadcast began in 1950. "Those who believed made arrangements to have others believe" is a fine definition of an organisation, religious or not. The last phrase brings the chapter's theme into view early: the Society is "A world, not merely an activity." That is exactly what Hadley will say a store is not.
The Society as an operating model. Wakefield's survey reads, almost line by line, like a description of how a mission becomes an organisation.
- Mission: belief in the coming end ("Simply to believe was not enough").
- Growth: "Those who believed made arrangements to have others believe"; the main hall is a "recruiting center."
- Revenue: dues "collected and processed"; raffles; "money was collected"; and, we learned in Chapter 11, blue cards at $1.50.
- Channels: lectures, leaflets, records, radio scripts, mailings.
- Two workforces: volunteers who bake and sort, and professional directors for whom it is "a full-time job."
- Measurement: Mary Krafft's map of the United States with pins for contributions.
A capability map of the Society would show which parts are run by "well-meaning ladies" and which by "astute directors," and where the money flows.
The tent and the tub
California's revival country. The "upright Ford" (a Model T, made from 1908 to 1927, tall and boxy) and the "endless peach and apricot orchards" place Wakefield's childhood in rural California, most likely the Santa Clara or Central Valley in the 1910s or 1920s, when tent revivals toured the farm towns. Dick does not say where; the orchards are the clue. The memory gives Wakefield a history and explains his manner: he admires the zealots of the hall "and he was afraid of them." What frightened the boy was not the preacher's performance but the moment an "ordinary" neighbour was seized and ran forward to "testify." Dick's wording is precise: the fear is of ordinary people becoming possessed, and of himself becoming one of them.
Check: the tarantula. Wakefield's "(or so he had heard)" is well judged, because what he heard is backwards. In the folk belief of tarantism, found in Apulia in southern Italy from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, the bite of the tarantula (the wolf spider Lycosa tarantula) was thought to cause a sickness of lethargy and distress, and frenzied dancing to music (the origin of the tarantella) was the cure, not the effect. The bite of the real spider is painful but not dangerous. The guide flags the reversal as Wakefield's, which the narrator signals.
Fear of the leap. Wakefield's childhood terror parallels Hadley's adult one. In Chapter 13 Hadley feared he might "suddenly, blindly, burst out" and destroy his world. Wakefield as a boy feared he might "leap up" and roll down the aisle "in sight of his friends and neighbors." Both men fear a loss of control from within; Wakefield has made a life of small routines to contain it, and Hadley, as this chapter shows, cannot. The "tub of water" is total-immersion baptism, the rite of many revivalist and Baptist churches, in which "the old souls were made new." The image prepares Hadley's "ocean of water before" later in the chapter.
"We're catching fire!"
"'Morning,' he muttered."
"Breathing hoarsely, Mrs. Krafft caught hold of his arm and spun him around to face the wall chart. 'Well,' she cried, 'what do you think?'"
"Wakefield could make nothing of the wall chart; it showed a map of the United States with little colored pins stuck here and there. Disengaging his arm he answered with dignity: 'It looks very nice, of course. Very neat and orderly.'"
"'Everywhere!' Mrs. Krafft spluttered in his ear. 'Do you see? Contributions from every state in the Union. We're getting our message all over the country... we're catching fire!'"
"Wakefield winced and tried to edge away. 'Very nice,' he mumbled. 'Very impressive.'"
The pin map. Mary Krafft, whom we met in Chapter 5 at the lecture, is the believer as organiser: hoarse, grabbing, delighted with her chart. "Contributions from every state in the Union" shows how the Society measures success, by money and spread. Wakefield, who believes more quietly, sees only "Very neat and orderly," a compliment he would give a flower bed. "We're catching fire!" is a sect's boast with an unlucky image for a group that preaches the end by fire; Hadley will take it up later in the chapter as "Cleansing fire that wipes out everything." In 1952 there were forty-eight states in the Union; Alaska and Hawaii were admitted in 1959.
Practical angle: the vanity map. A map of pins for "contributions from every state" looks like growth and says little about it: one gift from each state would fill the map. Wakefield's mild "Very neat and orderly" is the right review of such a chart.
"The ring of ladies gave way, and he made his escape back into the center of the booming hall. There he stood, wondering what to do, wanting to pitch in and help but not wanting to involve himself with the grim-jawed women feverishly working on every side."
"'Here,' an authoritative voice said; a large colored matron was approaching him. 'There's too much to do for standing around; come over here and I'll put you to work.'"
"'Oh, yes,' Wakefield said guiltily, starting into life. He hurried toward the colored woman. 'I mean, I just came, of course.
"The colored woman strode among tables to a corner of the hall. Wakefield trotted after her, hoping it was something important, hoping that he had been singled out for some unique assignment. The woman halted in front of a long table on which were stacked folded papers and boxes of stamped envelopes. 'You can stuff these. Or you can operate the mimeograph. Take your choice.'"
"Abashed and disappointed, Wakefield stammered: 'Well, I guess I'd rather stuff the envelopes.' He lingered plaintively. 'Isn't there anything else?'"
"'What do you want to do?' the woman demanded haughtily. 'Let Mister Beckheim stuff the envelopes while you preach?' She strode off, leaving Wakefield standing mutely by the table."
The man who wanted to be chosen. Wakefield "hoping that he had been singled out for some unique assignment" is the key to his anger later: he wants to be special to the Society and is given envelopes. The matron's retort is the best line in the scene and puts him in his place: the work is the work, and nobody preaches but Beckheim. In the main hall, the matron has authority over a white man and uses it without apology. The narrator's repeated "colored woman" is the polite term of the period; Dick names her by race three times and never by name, as he named Beckheim's race in Chapter 5. The mimeograph, a stencil duplicator, was the standard way for small organisations to print leaflets and newsletters before photocopiers spread in the 1960s.
Race and gender in the hall. The Society, as Dick draws it, is racially mixed: a Black leader (Beckheim, Chapter 5), a Black matron in charge of the volunteers, white middle-aged women at the wall chart, and a white florist at the envelope table. That was unusual for a white American congregation in 1952 and closer to some Pentecostal and holiness movements, which had begun with interracial meetings (the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles, 1906) before largely separating by race. The narrator's naming of the matron only by her colour is a period habit, and the guide flags it. "Grim-jawed women feverishly working" and Wakefield's later "I hate old women" give the scene its sexism: the Society runs on women's labour, and the men the novel follows despise them for it.
"He sat miserably down and began pushing the mimeographed inserts into the envelopes. One of them fell open; he gazed at it dully. Beckheim had left San Francisco and was retracing his long journey down the coast to Los Angeles. In huge amateurish letters the sheet proclaimed another lecture in Cedar Groves as Beckheim passed through. Wakefield refolded the paper and pushed it sullenly into an envelope."
The insert. The leaflet tells us where Beckheim is (heading back down the coast from San Francisco to Los Angeles) and that he will lecture again in Cedar Groves "as Beckheim passed through." This is the lecture Hadley will try to enter on the Saturday night of Chapter 17, when an usher at the inner door stops him: "You have to have either a white or a blue card, sir." The scene at the counter later today explains why that sentence will hit him so hard. The "huge amateurish letters" are the volunteers' work, and "sullenly" is the mood of a man who wanted to be more than a mailing clerk. The Wakefield section ends where his sulk will carry into the afternoon: he has been made to feel small, and he will meet a man who claims he was handed the Society's highest honour and tore it up.
The store in August
"Standing in the entrance of Modern TV Sales and Service, Stuart Hadley surveyed the August street. It was a blazing afternoon; the sun beat down on the passersby creeping miserably along the baking sidewalks. Two young women passed in shorts and halters; Hadley watched their sweat-glistening legs until they disappeared around a corner."
"Behind him, the store was cool and dark."
The manager in the doorway. The section opens with Hadley where Fergesson stood in Chapter 1: in the entrance, surveying the street. The posture is the owner's; the gaze is the old Hadley's, following two girls' legs round the corner. "Behind him, the store was cool and dark" is a one-line paragraph and the chapter's image of the store as refuge: the heat and the women are outside; the shade is within.
"From the depths the sound of Olsen's repair bench filtered up tinnily. In the back display room, Jack White was showing a big RCA combination to a family of four. Impatiently Hadley gazed off down the haze-dulled street: Joe Tampini was supposed to be back from his lunch any moment. Whereupon it was time for Hadley to go out for his early-afternoon coffee."
The store working. In two sentences we hear the whole shop: Olsen in the basement, White selling a "big RCA combination" (a console with television, radio and phonograph in one cabinet, the costliest item on the floor) to a family of four, Tampini at lunch, the manager waiting for his coffee break. It is Fergesson's "family trade" from Chapter 13 in action.
"Old man Berg from Berg's Jewelry Store came ambling along, wizened and shrewd, tiny eyes glittering. He clapped his clawlike hand over Hadley's shoulder and wheezed in his ear: 'Say, boy, I hear you're top dog now.'"
"'That's right,' Hadley answered, grinning absently."
"The old man's strong fingers dug into Hadley's flesh. Rancid, oniony breath billowed in his face as the old man rasped: 'Say now, you're doing all right for a boy, aren't you? You're right up there, Stuart, right up there on top. How's the TV business these days? How's the summer treating you? Business a little off?'"
"'Can't complain,' Hadley said good-naturedly."
"'Sure,' Hadley agreed."
"The old man slapped him on the shoulder. 'All right, boy. Take care of yourself. You've got what it takes; I always said so.' He scurried off down the sidewalk; in front of the big men's clothing store he cornered two elderly women and began an intimate, wheezing conversation with them."
Prejudice: Berg's advice. The neighbour's welcome to the new manager is a piece of merchant's wisdom and a racist rule: refuse credit to Black customers. Berg uses a slur, which this guide does not reprint. Dick makes the old man physically repellent (clawlike hand, "rancid, oniony breath," spattered saliva), which marks the narrator's distaste, but Hadley's answer is "Sure." It is the same easy agreement he gives Fergesson ("It sounds fine") and Wakefield will get the opposite. The scene shows how such rules were passed on: casually, between neighbours, as advice to a young man starting out. Hadley's "Sure" also fits Chapter 12, where his own slur ended the night with Marsha on the coast road. Note that Berg's name and jewellery trade are not given any ethnic marking by Dick here, and the guide does not add any.
The Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 barred credit discrimination on the basis of sex or marital status, and its 1976 amendments added race, colour, religion, national origin and age, among others; the Fair Housing Act of 1968 had already outlawed racial discrimination in mortgage lending. Berg's "make them pay cash" was also an informal practice in shops that offered instalment credit on appliances, which is why it matters for Hadley: a television store in 1952 sold largely on time payments, so a manager's credit rules decided who could buy a set at all. The modern version of the problem is subtler. A lending model that never sees race can still reproduce Berg's rule through proxies such as postcode or shopping patterns, and fair lending testing for disparate impact exists to catch it.
The street's view of Hadley. "Top dog," "a good boy," "right up there on top": Berg's praise is patronising ("for a boy") and, to the old man, sincere. The street has noticed the promotion before the morning is out. Berg's last image, cornering "two elderly women" for "an intimate, wheezing conversation," tells us how the news travels: gossip is the town's information system, and Betty at the Health Food Store will prove it a few minutes later.
It is a long way from the tilt-front glass and recessed lighting of Chapter 13, and it is half finished. The broom in the corner is the other half of the job: he is sweeping, because the girl Fergesson wanted at dinner, who has "got to sweep and keep the place clean," has not been hired. "Imitation hardwood" is Dick's quiet joke on the combination set: the modern object dressed as furniture.
The trash box. Dick lists the store's rubbish with the care he gives Wakefield's chores: dead batteries, string, broken tubes, polish rags, old tags, mouldy lunch, "endless empty coffee cups." The coffee cups are Betty's, as we will learn ("you have practically all of our cups over there"). The list is the store's real texture under the window displays, and it ties back to the end of Chapter 12, where the torn blue card went into the gutter "along with the other night debris."
"'Hello,' the telephone said, a gruff man's voice. 'I brought my radio in last week; I wonder if it's ready.'"
"'Can you give me the number on your receipt?' Hadley said. 'And what kind of radio was it?'"
Olsen goes to lunch
"He wandered downstairs to the service department. The basement was chill and cold; Olsen sat huddled on his tall stool, legs wrapped around the rungs, face screwed up in an intent scowl as he poked into the works of a little Philco upturned on his bench."
"'Goddamn it!' Olsen screamed, throwing the radio against the oscilloscope and leaping from the stool. 'I'm through with the whole fucked-up mess! I'm getting out of here! The fuck with it!' He grabbed his coat from a hook over the bench and headed for the stairs: it was his way of going out to lunch. 'What do you want, Hadley? What's up your ass?'"
"Olsen's rage knew no bounds. 'Christ, the old fart just brought it in!' Purple with wrath, Olsen swept up the radio in question and savagely examined the tag. 'Tell him to go stick it up his ass! Tell him next year. Shit, I'll talk to him myself.' Olsen raced furiously for the stairs. 'Where is he? Upstairs?'"
"'On the phone,' Hadley said, grinning. 'You go on and eat; I'll take care of him. You think it'll be ready tomorrow?'"
"Dancing with fury, Olsen screeched: 'Fix it your goddamn self! You're such a goddamn big shot around here... you get all the credit, you might as well do some work.' As he disappeared up the stairs three at a time he shouted back: 'Tell him late tomorrow. The hell with it... I'm never coming back. I'm going in the Army!'"
The comic repairman. Olsen's daily explosion is "his way of going out to lunch," and Hadley grins through it: the scene is farce, and it is the store's real engine room. A "little Philco" thrown at an oscilloscope (the test instrument that shows a signal's waveform on a screen, standard on a television repair bench) is expensive temper. "Christ, the old fart just brought it in!" contradicts the customer's "last week," and the truth is probably between them; Hadley's lie to the customer a moment later ("the serviceman wanted to be sure it was all right and would like to keep it playing until tomorrow") is a salesman's kindness. Olsen's "You're such a goddamn big shot around here... you get all the credit" is the first sign of resentment at the promotion, from the one man in the shop who never wanted it. "I'm going in the Army!" is his joke and an echo of the draft talk at the Fergessons' dinner: Olsen is old enough that it is empty, Hadley is "permanently ineligible," and Tampini, young and about to marry, is the one the draft could actually touch.
"Knee deep in a pool of repaired sets." The basement is full of radios that are fixed and not collected, the backlog of a repair shop. It is also the cellar Fergesson warned would be "dripping wet" in a couple of months, where Hadley was to clear room for the Philcos. The sets on the "cement floor" are the cartons he was told to keep "up off the ground."
"Hadley climbed the stairs and crossed the store to the phone. He informed the man that his radio was on the bench being worked on; the serviceman wanted to be sure it was all right and would like to keep it playing until tomorrow."
"'All right,' the man said. 'I'll come by tomorrow.'"
Tampini's twelve bucks
"As Hadley hung up the phone, Joe Tampini entered the store. 'Sorry I took so long,' Tampini said. Dressed in a neat single-breasted suit, brown shoes, and silk tie, his curly black hair carefully oiled and combed, Tampini was an impressive sight. 'Anything happen? Anybody buy anything?'"
"'Those people you were showing the Admiral table model to came back,' Hadley said. He pushed the tag from the register onto the counter. 'I closed it for you... it's going out sometime this afternoon.'"
"Tampini flushed happily. 'No kidding?' Visibly, he added up his commission. 'Gosh, that's twelve bucks!'"
"'You better check the set over,' Hadley said. 'I think the vertical lock is off; I had it on for a couple minutes and the picture was foreshortened.'"
"'Right,' Tampini agreed, searching behind the counter for the screwdriver. 'Where's the mirror? Probably in the truck. Will you be around, or were you going out? You're pretty good at setting up this stuff.'"
"Hadley remained long enough to help Tampini set up the Admiral. He pushed the uncompleted Zenith display to one side of the counter, carried the broom to the back closet, and then wandered out onto the hot, bright sidewalk."
The new pay plan at work. This small exchange shows Fergesson's incentive design from Chapter 13 doing what it was meant to do. Hadley no longer earns five percent on his own sales, so he can close a sale for Tampini and hand him the commission: "you can let them close the stuff." Tampini, about to marry, is delighted. The manager now earns one percent of the store's commissionable gross, so the sale helps him too, in a small way. Hadley is also generous by nature, and good at the technical side: he spots the fault (the picture "foreshortened," squashed vertically) and helps set the set up. "Where's the mirror?" is a real trade detail: television servicemen adjusting controls on the back of a set used a mirror propped in front of the screen to watch the picture as they turned the knobs.
Twelve bucks.
- If Tampini's commission is five percent, the rate Hadley was on, $12 implies a sale of about $240.
- That fits an Admiral table model of 1952: Admiral was a mass-market maker, and its 17-inch and 21-inch table sets sold at roughly $200 to $300.
- For Hadley, the same sale at his new 1% of commissionable gross earns about $2.40, against $12 under his old plan.
- Olsen's power transformer job, later in the chapter, is quoted at $12.50, about the same as Tampini's commission, on a set "not worth over ten."
Practical angle: the new manager who keeps doing the work. In one afternoon Hadley sweeps, takes the phone, chases a repair, closes a sale, adjusts a set and builds a window. He is doing every job in the shop except managing it, which is the common trap of a good individual worker promoted to run his old team. Olsen's "you might as well do some work" shows how the team reads it. The shift that Fergesson's pay plan encourages (let others close, "keep the ceiling from falling") is easier to pay for than to do, and most organisations that promote their best seller or best engineer give them the title before they give them the training.
"As if he had always been manager"
"There was really no difference." The promotion that took a dinner party and two women's campaign to arrange has changed nothing: "after the first hour, it seemed as if he had always been manager." This is the hinge of the chapter. The store that on the walk home in Chapter 13 was a "neat little cosmos" is, by daylight, "the filthy bathroom, the littered upstairs office, the ringing phone." "The permanent reality of a small retail store" answers the question Hadley asked Fergesson at dinner ("A sense of permanence?") in a way he did not want. The phrase "after the first hour" also suggests that this Thursday is his first day as manager, which would make the dinner Wednesday evening; the text does not name the day of the dinner.
"Lighting a cigarette, he stood by the gutter, his hands cupped around the match. Sleepily, he watched the people stroll past. Brightly dressed women. Hurrying businessmen in white shirts, crisp sleeves rolled up. Children on bicycles. Cars. He waved the match out, dropped it in the gutter, and crossed the sidewalk to the Health Food Store."
The street again. The list (women, businessmen, children, cars) repeats the morning image of Chapter 13 in the heat of afternoon, without the comfort. Hadley watches "sleepily." The match into the gutter is a small repeat of the torn card in Chapter 12.
At the Health Food Store
"The heavy odor of dried prunes and sacks of graham flour lay over the low stools and glass display cases, the scrubbed linoleum, the endless shelves of cans and jars and packages. He seated himself at the counter, by the marzipan display; only two other people were eating, a plump woman consuming a pear-and-cottage-cheese salad, and a small man with steel-rimmed glasses, sipping a tall glass of milk."
"'Stuart!' Horace Wakefield cried, pleased. He waved down the counter at Hadley, past the woman and her salad. Getting to his feet, he carried his glass of milk over and sat down on the empty stool beside Hadley. 'How have you been?'"
"'Fine,' Hadley said noncommittally."
Wakefield's world. The Health Food Store is where we first met Wakefield, Betty and Mrs. Krafft, in Chapter 5. Prunes (his breakfast this morning), graham flour (named for Sylvester Graham, the nineteenth-century American diet reformer whose followers ate unsifted wheat flour for health and virtue), marzipan, cottage cheese and milk: it is a temperance and health-reform shop, the commercial side of the culture of anti-vivisection and plain living. Hadley, who sneered at it in Part One, comes here for coffee because it is across the street and its cups are in his trash box.
"From the back, Betty pushed her way through the curtains and came wearily over. 'Afternoon, Stuart,' she gasped. Her thick, pulpy face was wet with perspiration. She batted at a fly. 'Well, it'll be winter soon enough.' Resting her doughy hands on the counter, she asked: 'What can I do for you? Some nice iced tea? Some brown Betty and hard sauce?'"
"'Just coffee,' Hadley said, rolling a dime from his trouser pocket and up onto the counter."
"Carefully, Betty got down a white cup and saucer from the shelf behind the counter. As she poured the steaming coffee into it she said: 'You know, Stuart, you have practically all of our cups over there. I wish you'd bring them back.'"
"'I sure will,' Hadley answered. 'You bet your life.'"
A dime for coffee. A cup of coffee at a lunch counter cost five to ten cents in the early 1950s, so Hadley's dime is the full price. "Brown Betty and hard sauce" (a baked apple pudding with a sweet butter sauce) offered by a woman named Betty is a gentle joke, probably Dick's. The cups are a running thread: Hadley takes them over the street and never brings them back, and at the end of this scene he will storm out with another one. "You bet your life" is his breezy promise; the cups stay in the trash box.
"Putting the Silex back on the warmer, Betty said to Wakefield: 'Things are going to be different. Stuart's manager of Modern now. Did you know?'"
"It was amusing to see Wakefield's excitement. His small face alive with astonishment, he half rose from his stool, eyes wide, mouth open. 'Stuart!' he shouted. 'Is that so? you're manager?'"
"Hadley laughed. 'Sure, why not?'"
"'But...' Wakefield spluttered in confusion. 'Why, that's marvelous! Where's Mister Fergesson? Did he retire?'"
"'Jim bought another store,' Betty explained as she took Hadley's dime and rang it up. 'I don't know the name of it, but it's on the highway somewhere.'"
"'O'Neill's place,' Hadley said."
Betty, the town's news service. Betty knows the promotion, the new store "on the highway somewhere," the baby's name and Ellen's figure; she does not know the name of O'Neill's. The Silex, a glass vacuum coffee brewer kept hot on an electric warmer, was the standard of American diners and kitchens of the period. Wakefield's "Did he retire?" shows how fixed Fergesson is in the street's mind: the only reason he could imagine the old man giving up the store is age.
"Wakefield was still dazed. 'I can't get over it. My goodness, that's just wonderful.'"
"'And he has a sweet little baby boy named Pete,' Betty continued, beaming wearily and showing her false teeth. 'Isn't that nice?'"
"Wakefield could only open and shut his mouth."
"'His wife looks so cute now, with her figure back,' Betty said. 'She's a lovely girl, Stuart. Look what you've got to be thankful for; yes, really have... You've got such a pretty little wife, and a fine healthy baby, and now you're manager of a store.' She shook her head resignedly. 'How's Jim doing over at the new place?'"
"'All right,' Hadley answered. 'The place needs a lot of work; he's putting in thirteen hours a day. But he likes it.'"
"'Well, he's got the new place,' Hadley said absently. He was listening intently for the phone; it was dimly audible from where he sat. He wondered if he should forget his coffee break and go back... It was hard to know how his privileges stood, now that nobody was looking over his shoulder."
Freedom as anxiety. "It was hard to know how his privileges stood, now that nobody was looking over his shoulder" is a precise note on the new manager's position. Before, Fergesson decided when Hadley could take a break; now nobody does, and the freedom feels like a test. He listens for the phone across the street. The man who wanted to "cut loose" the store cannot take a coffee break without worry. "Twenty years, at least" dates Modern to the early 1930s at the latest, which fits Fergesson's age and his pride in the store as his "whole life."
"'Say,' Wakefield said awkwardly, 'maybe you'll let me pay for your coffee, as a sort of celebration.'"
"Hadley laughed. 'It's already paid for.'"
The lonely man's envy. Wakefield is kind: he offers to pay, then to buy a "soyburger sandwich" (meat substitutes made from soy and wheat had been sold in American health food shops since the 1930s, notably by Seventh-day Adventist food firms). "I certainly envy you...especially your family" is the one moment where the bachelor of the rooming house admits what he lacks, and "baffled and momentarily unhappy" shows it costs him. He consoles himself with "the real work down at the hall," the phrase of this morning, now spoken aloud, and it leads straight into the subject Hadley least wants.
The white card and the blue
"Hadley tensed as he sipped his coffee. 'How are things coming?' he asked tersely. Pulling his cup toward him he half rose to his feet; he didn't want to hear about the hall."
"'Things are fine,' Wakefield said. 'You know, don't you, that Mister Beckheim will be coming back down this way in a few days?'"
"'No,' Hadley said rigidly. He braced himself. 'I didn't.'"
"'We're getting prepared for another lecture. You were at the last one, weren't you?'"
"'Yes, I was,' Hadley said. A cold, fearful numbness crept over him and he settled down again on the stool. 'I was there, as you know perfectly well.'"
The insert, delivered. The news that Wakefield folded into envelopes this morning now reaches the one person in town who dreads it. Hadley's body tells the story before he speaks: he "tensed," "half rose," "braced himself," then "a cold, fearful numbness" sits him down again. The sharpness of "as you know perfectly well" is the first crack. Wakefield took him to the lecture in Chapter 5 and knows he went; the irritation is Hadley's guilt at Chapter 12 turned outward.
Wakefield blinks at the tone and says he thought Beckheim "terribly impressive that time." Hadley tries to leave: "The damn phone's ringing." Wakefield will not let him go. "As a matter of fact, it's young people like you that ought to come. We old people won't be around much longer, you know."
"'None of us will be,' Hadley said harshly. 'Isn't the world going to come to an end?'"
"'Of course,' Wakefield said, with dignity. 'But not right away... not for a while.'"
The end of the world, on schedule. Wakefield's "Of course... But not right away" is the most human line in the scene, and a fair joke on comfortable apocalyptic belief: the end is certain, and there is time for the roses. Hadley's sarcasm ("Isn't the world going to come to an end?") is the doctrine thrown back. Later in the same scene the positions swap, when Wakefield warns that selling televisions "when they're getting ready to drop A-bombs on us" is a joke and Hadley defends the job.
Wakefield then offers a theory: Hadley seems "a lot healthier since you went to hear Mister Beckheim"; perhaps there is "a relationship" between the lecture and his health. "Didn't you used to have a weak stomach?"
"'You bet,' Hadley agreed, 'and I still do.'"
Health and holiness. Wakefield's theology of health is a muddle that he knows is a muddle: health "comes directly from God," but not in the way of "the Christian Science people." Christian Science, founded by Mary Baker Eddy (Science and Health, 1875; the Church of Christ, Scientist, chartered in Boston in 1879), teaches that sickness is an error of thought to be healed by prayer and right understanding, hence Wakefield's "pure thoughts." The Watchmen, by contrast, run a Health Food Store culture and Mrs. Krafft's cures (Chapter 5). The "weak stomach" is Hadley's real complaint and his 4-F "liver trouble" from the dinner table is its official form. "You bet... and I still do" is Hadley's small cruelty: he will not give the little man his miracle.
Prejudice: "I hate old women." Wakefield says it plainly, and wants "more men mixed up in this thing." It sits beside the hall scene of the morning, where the women bake pies and the matron gives orders, and it shows the movement's men resenting the women who do most of its work. Dick's own narration of women in this chapter is no kinder (Betty's "thick, pulpy face" and "doughy hands," the "plump woman," Hadley's gaze at the "sweat-glistening legs"). Whether the novel endorses Wakefield is left open; it plainly does not correct him.
"'I came,' Hadley said curtly. 'I joined. I got a blue card.'"
"Hadley sat down slowly on the stool. 'I didn't know that,' he said. A terrible burning panic lodged in his windpipe and stayed there. 'I thought it was just the regular card.'"
The card's meaning, too late. This is the revelation the book has been holding back since Chapter 11, when Beckheim wrote out the blue card in San Francisco, and Chapter 12, when Hadley "tore it furiously apart" and the bits went into the gutter "along with the other night debris." The card he treated as a membership receipt was the Society's highest mark of favour, given personally and to "only a few dozen" people. Wakefield, a faithful member who stuffs envelopes on his day off, carries a "perfectly white" card. Dick lets the most ordinary believer in town deliver the news, so that it lands with no drama except Hadley's "burning panic." The usher's line in Chapter 17 ("You have to have either a white or a blue card, sir") will turn this scene into a locked door.
"'Do you have it?' Wakefield leaned toward him curiously. 'Can I see it? Let me look at it.'"
"'I tore it up.'"
"Wakefield giggled. 'You're pulling my leg.'"
Hadley asks if it is "on the level, about the blue cards." Wakefield says it is, but that if anyone but Beckheim gave it then "it's not really the genuine..."
"'He gave it to me. He wrote it out and handed it to me. For a dollar fifty.'"
The price of grace.
- Hadley paid $1.50 for the card in Chapter 11, about the price of a cheap lunch for two and less than an hour's wage for a factory worker in 1952 (average manufacturing pay was about $1.65 to $1.70 an hour).
- Tampini's commission on one table set this afternoon was $12, eight times as much.
- The card that cost him a dollar fifty is the one Wakefield could not earn in years of service. "For a dollar fifty" is Hadley's bitter way of making it cheap.
"Wakefield licked his lips and said hoarsely: 'I can't imagine why you tore it up, Stuart.' He was visibly moved. 'Why didn't you tell me? I've never met him face-to-face; I've never talked to him. This is such a terrible thing...' His voice broke. 'For heaven's sake,' he quavered furiously, 'will you have the decency to tell me why you tore it up?'"
"Hadley had never seen little Horace Wakefield angry. Behind his glasses the man's eyes swam; abruptly he jerked out his pocket handkerchief and blew his nose violently."
Wakefield's grief. "I've never met him face-to-face; I've never talked to him." Hadley, the scoffer, got in a single afternoon what the faithful man has never had: a private meeting and the blue card. Wakefield's anger is not jealousy alone; it is horror that the gift was thrown away. "Will you have the decency" is the most forceful thing he says in the novel. "Is he a deity or something?" is Hadley's defence, and it is half a question he is asking himself. He "just walked in," which is true, and it is why the card meant so much: Beckheim saw something in him.
"A normal life, not a nutty life"
"Awkwardly, Hadley said: 'I'm sorry, Horace; I don't want to get mixed up in this thing. Don't you understand?' Patiently, he traced a line of moisture on the surface of the counter. 'I want to live a normal life... not a nutty life. Sorry if this offends you, but you asked me.'"
"'Go on,' Wakefield whispered."
Two speeches in one breath. Hadley defends two lives at once and believes neither. First the ordinary life ("a wife and a family, a place to live... it's perfect"), which goes "hollow" as he says it; then the dinner-table dream of a store that will "really travel," which he will tell Alice within the hour was "meaningless hot air." "Fergesson has held it back all these years" is unfair to a man who built the store over "twenty years, at least," and it is the first time Hadley has said aloud to anyone outside the store what he thinks of his boss. The speech moves from apology ("Sorry if this offends you") to aggression in a few lines.
"Meaning it with all his soul." Dick marks the one line Hadley truly means: "I want my life to add up to something." Everything else in the speech is defence. "I'm not ready for the end of the world" is honest, and it shows what the Society asks: to write off "a lot of wonderful people and places" in advance.
"In a crazy world, it's the nuts who know"
"'It's my job,' Hadley said defiantly. 'I want it; I'm staying at it.'"
"'You'll be dead,' Wakefield whispered."
"Hadley got to his feet; he was shaking violently. 'I told you I'm through with nut cults. End of the world...' Savagely he grabbed up his coffee cup and started toward the door. 'A bunch of religious fanatics. You're crazy... you're crackpots!'"
"The screen door slammed after him. He could see the small figure sitting frozen at the counter; Horace Wakefield was reaching automatically for his glass of milk, trying to resume his routine. The heavyset woman, who had been listening to everything, gazed with frank curiosity after Hadley."
The little man's best argument. "It isn't possible to cut out a neat little pattern" answers, without knowing it, the "neat little cosmos" Hadley imagined on the walk home from the Fergessons' (Chapter 13). "In a crazy world, it's the nuts who know what's going on" is the thesis of much of Dick's later fiction, given here to the smallest and most comic believer in the book. The world of 1952 gave it weight: the Korean War was in its third year, the United States would test the first hydrogen bomb ("Ivy Mike") at Enewetak that November, and civil defence films such as Duck and Cover (made in 1951, released early in 1952) were being shown in schools. "You'll be dead," whispered, is a threat and a grief at once.
Two routines. Hadley storms out with Betty's cup, adding one more to the pile under his counter; Wakefield reaches "automatically for his glass of milk, trying to resume his routine." Both men go back to their routines at once, which is the chapter's whole argument in one image. The "heavyset woman" (the plump woman of the cottage-cheese salad) is the street's witness: this quarrel will be round town by evening, as the promotion was.
Alice in the office
"Hadley entered Modern, the coffee cup teetering and sloshing coffee onto his hand and wrist. It was lukewarm. Furiously, he shoved the cup under the counter with the others and turned to face the small knot of customers standing by the cash register, waiting to be waited on."
"Alice Fergesson was sitting quietly in the upstairs office, a cigarette between her fingers, her purse resting on the littered desk." He does not notice her until he has served the customers and gone for a roll of register tape.
"'Hi,' he said, nettled. 'How long have you been here?'"
"'An hour or so,' Alice answered. Grave and thoughtful, she gazed up at him, a cloud of gray smoke drifting around her. Legs crossed, dressed in a light print skirt and white shirt, she had been calmly watching him come and go, overseeing the happenings, unnoticed by everyone."
The watcher upstairs. "An hour or so" means Alice arrived before Hadley went for coffee, and so saw the window display, the sweeping, Tampini and the Admiral, the walk out, and perhaps the return with the sloshing cup. "Overseeing the happenings, unnoticed by everyone" is the position of the owner's wife who arranged the promotion: she has come to see how it is going. The office is the "littered upstairs office" of the routine passage, and Hadley sits "on the railing where he could see the floor below," half in the talk and half on duty. The whole conversation is held on that rail and the stairs, between the private office and the shop.
Hadley apologises: "That little man gets on my nerves." Alice has "seen him over at the flower shop." "He's mixed up in that cult, that Watchmen Society. He got me to go to the first lecture; now he wants me to go again."
"After a moment Alice asked: 'You went before?'"
"'I went. I listened.' Angrily, Hadley said: 'I'm not going to get mixed up with it again; once is enough. I wanted to know what it was about; is there anything wrong with that?'"
"Alice studied him intently. 'Is it important?'"
"'Yes,' Hadley said simply. 'I went a long way into it. I went all the way down.' In a sense he was exaggerating; he had not really gone so far...one lecture and a brief meeting with Beckheim. But he would have gone further, if he could; if it had been possible he would have gladly plunged the whole way down."
"All the way down." The narrator corrects Hadley at once ("one lecture and a brief meeting with Beckheim"), then corrects the correction: "he would have gladly plunged the whole way down." The distance between what he did and what he wanted is the measure of his longing. "My God, I used to get so damn tired standing around this store, day after day" is the confession under it: boredom drove him to the hall. "For a moment he weighed the practical considerations; Alice was, after all, the boss's wife" is a nice touch of the new manager's caution.
"'Then,' Alice said, 'you feel... you usually feel that things are coming apart?'"
"He nodded."
"'You feel that now?'"
The novel's central image, stated. Here Hadley puts into words what the book has been building through every scene in the store. Beckheim gave him "a region that was firm," a space where "the world had [not] collapsed one more notch." The store gives the same firmness, but "it's not big enough to be a world." The walk home in Chapter 13 imagined the store as "a neat little cosmos" in "a meaningless nether-universe"; this afternoon he finds the cosmos too small to live in. The comic list (meals in the office, a bath "down in the John," sleeping here) makes the point concrete: a refuge you cannot leave is a cell. Firmness and size are the two things Hadley wants, and every place in the novel offers one without the other.
Practical angle: the stable core that is too small. Hadley's complaint about the store is the complaint of any team kept on a stable, well-run legacy system: it works, it is "solid enough," everyone knows it, and it is not where the future is. The usual answer (keep the core firm and build new capability around it) is roughly what Fergesson does by buying O'Neill's, and it is exactly what he will not let Hadley do at Modern.
"'Yes,' Alice said. 'You always had such big plans... You had something much bigger in mind.'"
"'Sure, I always wanted to do a lot of things. It used to seem to me the world was large; there was so damn much a person could do. Opportunity... I don't feel that anymore. That's all over. The world's a bleak place. Instead of opportunity it's deserted hills and rusty beer cans.'"
Alice reminds him of the dinner: "that night you were excited. Your face was lit up the way it used to be... In fact, it was too lit up." Hadley is candid: "There wasn't anything else I could do... What else was there? Where else could I go?" She draws the conclusion: "You took it because you had nothing else."
"'I didn't make up the things I said,' Hadley answered. 'I forced myself to get excited; I wanted to be excited. I had to be excited. But I can't keep it up.'"
The dinner, explained. Chapter 13 showed Hadley's excitement at the table as real, his hands moving "spasmodically" as he described tilt-front glass and "a sort of radiance" of recessed lighting. Here he gives the inside view: "I forced myself to get excited; I wanted to be excited. I had to be excited." Both are true. "I didn't make up the things I said" defends his ideas; "I can't keep it up" admits the motive was need. Later he goes further: "I was trying to believe in it again, giving it one last chance." "Well, it got me the job" is his summary, and it is the only success he claims for it.
"I was taught there isn't any God"
Asked whether he might go back to the Society, Hadley searches his mind and says no: "I can't believe that stuff either. It makes less sense than this does. At least I understand this... I've been in the store so long I know everything there is to know about it. It's part of my life; it is my life."
"'There's nothing you can do,' Alice said."
"'I guess I heard about it too late. Now I try to think what the hell I heard instead, and I can't. Nothing... there never was anything in my life. Ideas, maybe. I grew up with grand ideas instead of real things.'"
Inconsistency: "taught there isn't any God." In Chapter 11, when Beckheim asked about his family's faith, Hadley said "Some kind of Congregationalists," and agreed when Beckheim offered "Modernists?" (024 L1837-1841). Here he says he was "taught there isn't any God." The two can be reconciled (a liberal, modernist Protestant upbringing may have taught very little belief, and Hadley exaggerates in both directions in this chapter) but the text does not reconcile them, and this guide leaves the tension in place.
Words without things. "God, country, the flag... it's all just vague sounds" is Hadley's diagnosis of himself: the old words worked for Beckheim's crowd and for Wakefield, who "was taught the Bible and God his whole life," and they do not work for him. "I grew up with grand ideas instead of real things" and "I put too much faith in ideas. Now I know they're not real. Words, talk... That's what my life's been" are the bleakest self-judgements in the book. They also look back to the "masterpiece of misinformation" he assembled "from the lean pickings of his past" in Chapter 9 and forward to the words that fail him in Part Three.
Children, and the fire next time
Alice offers the family as a meaning: "you have a son now; that means plenty... You're working for Pete and Ellen."
"'You can't have a family in a world like this.'"
"Alice said bitterly: 'Jim and I would give anything in the world to have a son. A little boy like Pete.'"
Alice's grief. One sentence opens Alice's life. "Jim and I would give anything in the world to have a son" explains her eagerness to help the Hadleys, her place at Ellen's side, her interest in the baby, and perhaps the coolness between her and Fergesson that this scene makes plain. It confirms what Chapter 13 suggested about the childless couple. Hadley does not hear it: his next words are "There's no use bringing children into this world."
"'No,' Hadley said. 'There's no use bringing children into this world. The world's falling apart. I'll be selling a TV set the day the A-bomb falls on us...acting out a meaningless routine, like a dumb animal.' Brooding, he murmured: 'I won't get out from under it... Maybe Pete will. I don't know. Maybe somebody will survive.'"
"'Yes,' Alice said quickly. 'Somebody will; somebody always survives.'"
Hadley preaches Beckheim's sermon. Half an hour after calling Wakefield a crackpot for his A-bomb talk, Hadley gives the apocalypse in its full biblical form. "I'll be selling a TV set the day the A-bomb falls on us" is Wakefield's "Selling television sets when they're getting ready to drop A-bombs on us" in Hadley's mouth. "An ocean of water before, a lake of fire this time" puts Noah's flood (Genesis 6 to 9) beside the "lake of fire" of Revelation 20:14-15, and it follows 2 Peter 3:6-7, where the world "that then was, being overflowed with water, perished," while the present world is "reserved unto fire." The same idea is in the African American spiritual line "God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time," which James Baldwin took for The Fire Next Time (1963). "Cleansing fire," "slag and ash," "something better will come": the man who cannot believe in God believes completely in judgement.
Contradiction: Hadley against himself. In this one chapter Hadley says the job is "perfect," then "damn small potatoes"; he will "cut it loose," then his dinner talk was "hot air"; Wakefield's A-bomb talk is crackpot, then he wants the world "wiped out"; he wants to leave the store "Of course," and "If I leave this store, I'll die." The guide reads these as the point of the chapter rather than a fault in it, but readers should notice that Dick gives no single position as Hadley's real one.
Alice says she feels it is her fault: "It's all our faults. Mine and Jim's... especially his. He's been working with you all this time and he never understood how you felt. He never did anything." Hadley: "He's all wrapped up in his stores... Getting another store, making the business a success."
"Furiously, Alice stabbed out her cigarette. 'Damn him. He's so little and blind. He's so small.'"
"'Don't blame him. He can't help what he is, any more than I can help what I am. Trace my problems back to you; trace your problems back another step. Where does it go? Back forever.'"
"Back forever." Alice's fury at her husband ("so little and blind. He's so small") is the strongest thing she says in the book and the bitterest view of Fergesson anywhere in it: the man who says "Modern will never do a real record business" and has no use for a manager who sees further than he does. Hadley, surprisingly, defends him. "Trace my problems back to you" is a slip in the text (he means that Alice's guilt traces his problems to her, and hers to someone else), and the logic is the same as the repair chain he will give her in a few minutes: every cause has a cause, "Back forever," so nobody is to blame and nothing can be fixed.
"Out!"
Hadley says it is "so damn late in the game now": "I'm here; I'm manager. I've got Pete and Ellen; I'm not going back to the Society." As he starts for the stairs, Alice calls after him:
"'Stuart, maybe you ought to quit! Maybe you ought to leave here!'"
"'No,' he said."
"'It's wrong... this is too small for you. You don't want to be this; you want more than this. It's all right for Jim, but not for you. It's as far as he can see... You don't want to take over his little world!'"
"'Where else can I go?' Hadley asked."
"'Out!'"
"'You want to leave here!'"
"'Yes,' Hadley said. 'Of course I do.' He started down the stairs from the office."
The woman who arranged the job tells him to quit. The irony is complete. Alice worked with Ellen to get Hadley the promotion (Chapter 13); an hour of watching him run the store convinces her it is "too small for you." "You don't want to take over his little world!" is a judgement on her own marriage. Hadley's "If I leave this store, I'll die" echoes Wakefield's "You'll be dead": the Society says staying is death, the store says leaving is. "I left here and I came back" is San Francisco (Chapter 11) and the coast road (Chapter 12). "Yes... Of course I do" is said on the stairs, and he keeps walking down.
The old man's radio
Alice begs him to stay and talk. "What about the old man down there? He has to be waited on." "Is he so important?" "He's got a radio under his arm. He wants it fixed." "Forget his radio."
"'I can't,' Hadley said, with irony in his voice. 'He's standing down there, waiting for me to come and take care of him. He's sure it's only a tube. Actually, it isn't a tube; it's a power transformer and it'll cost him twelve dollars and fifty cents.'"
"Alice was silent."
"'The set,' Hadley continued, 'isn't worth over ten. He and I will argue half an hour and then I'll take it downstairs to the service department. Two weeks from now he'll be back with it because it still won't work.'"
"'Why not?' Alice demanded miserably as he moved another step down."
"'Because Olsen wired the power transformer upside down.'"
"'Why... did he do that?'"
"'Because he threw away the service schematics Philco sent out for that model.'"
"Rigidly, Alice asked: 'Why did he throw them away?'"
"'Because no fat-assed corporation is going to tell him how to fix sets.'"
"Alice clutched at her purse. 'Is there any more?' she asked, when Hadley didn't go on."
"'No,' Hadley said. 'No more.'"
The repair, step by step. Hadley foretells the whole life of a repair job, one step down the stairs at a time:
- 1. The customer's theory. He is "sure it's only a tube." Tubes were the common failure and a cheap fix, and customers of the time often tested and replaced their own on the drugstore tube tester.
- 2. The real fault. A failed power transformer (the heavy part that converts mains voltage for the set's tubes), quoted at $12.50.
- 3. The economics. The set "isn't worth over ten," so the repair costs more than the radio. Half an hour's argument, then the job goes downstairs anyway.
- 4. The failure. "Two weeks from now he'll be back with it because it still won't work."
- 5. The cause. Olsen "wired the power transformer upside down."
- 6. The cause of the cause. He "threw away the service schematics Philco sent out for that model." Makers sent dealers service notes for each model, and Howard W. Sams's Photofact folders (from 1946) gave independent shops schematics for almost every set sold.
- 7. The root. "No fat-assed corporation is going to tell him how to fix sets." The chain ends not in a part but in a man's pride.
Hadley knows every link and can fix none of them. The manager who can foresee the failure will still take the job, still send it to Olsen, and still see it come back.
Hadley's five whys. Alice's "Why not?", "Why did he do that?", "Why did he throw them away?" is a root-cause chain of the kind taught as "ask why five times," the method credited to Sakichi Toyoda and made part of the Toyota Production System by Taiichi Ohno. It ends where real investigations often do: in an attitude that rejects the vendor's documentation, not in the failed component. Bank and technology incident reviews regularly trace an outage the same way, to a skipped runbook or a change made by someone sure they knew better than the manual. The difference is what happens next. A good post-incident review changes the system so the cause cannot recur; Hadley's chain ends in "No more," because the manager has no power over Olsen and no will to use it. It is also the "Back forever" of a few minutes earlier made practical: if every fault traces back to a cause beyond reach, nothing is anyone's to fix.
Why the radio matters. Hadley's irony is aimed at himself. He goes down the stairs to a job he knows is futile because "he's waiting for me to come and take care of him." It is the "meaningless routine, like a dumb animal" he described, and it is also service, the one thing he does well and with kindness all day. Alice's escalating "Why?" turns his account into an interrogation she does not win.
"That's what they mean by the meek"
Hadley tells Alice no one can help: "I thought Beckheim could, but now I know he can't. It isn't his fault; he did what he could. But I'm not going back to him... Seeing Wakefield and listening to him showed me that, once and for all." Alice pleads ("The old man can wait"); Hadley answers with the old man's errands and tired legs; she answers "He can sit down on one of the television sets," and then: "You've made up your mind... while you were standing here talking you made up your mind."
"'No,' Hadley said, 'I didn't make up my mind. I'm not going to do anything.'"
The meek shall inherit. "Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth" (Matthew 5:5, after Psalm 37:11). Hadley turns the beatitude into a sneer and a prophecy at once: Wakefield is "little," "tiny," "trivial," and "He'll go on." The meek survive because they want little. "The cross and the flag. Health foods, revival meetings, prayers and potted plants" is Wakefield's whole life as we saw it this morning (the roses, the prunes, the tent, the hall), and Hadley's list is cruel and accurate. His own claim is the opposite: "I wanted millions of things for millions of people." "Big dreams. Big ideas. Bullshit." closes the speech in three fragments, his dream of the store and of himself dismissed in a word.
"'Don't you believe in anything anymore?'"
"'Nothing that exists. What I believe in is bullshit.'"
"'Then what exists?'"
"'Terrible things. Things I don't want to have anything to do with. I'm fed up. Maybe I'm not getting enough sleep; maybe that's it.' Wryly, he grinned up at Alice. 'I could almost believe that. A good rest, plenty of fresh air, a good sermon at church on Sunday morning...'"
"Alice shivered. 'I'm sorry... I wish I could do something. Please, isn't there anything?'"
"'No, not now.'"
"'Ever?'"
"'Maybe never. Thanks.' He waved up at her. 'It's okay... don't worry about it. You didn't set up the universe. Maybe nobody did. It's all random chance, without meaning. So don't worry about it.'"
Comfort from nihilism. Hadley's last words to Alice are kind in an odd way. She feels guilty ("I feel it's my fault"); he absolves her by abolishing guilt: "You didn't set up the universe. Maybe nobody did." "A good rest, plenty of fresh air, a good sermon" mocks the ordinary cures, Wakefield's health and Fergesson's normal life together, and "I could almost believe that" admits he would like to. "Nothing that exists... What I believe in is bullshit" and "Terrible things" are as low as he has been.
"He stepped from the stairwell and walked slowly under the office, toward the front of the store. The old man was still there waiting at the front counter; he had set down his radio and stood leaning heavily against the cash register, weary and resentful."
"'Yes sir,' Hadley said to him gaily. 'What can I do for you?'"
"Gaily." The last word belongs to the routine. After "random chance, without meaning," Hadley greets the old man with a salesman's brightness, and Dick gives it one adverb: "gaily." It can be read as courage, as performance, or as the "dumb animal" acting out its routine, and the chapter supports all three. The old man is "weary and resentful," like the store's customers since Chapter 1; he gets the manager's best manner and a radio that will come back in two weeks.
How the chapter is built
The chapter is a single Thursday in August, told in two halves that never meet: Wakefield's morning at the Watchmen hall, and Hadley's afternoon at Modern. The halves are joined by one piece of paper (the insert announcing Beckheim's return, folded in the morning and spoken across the coffee counter in the afternoon) and by one object (the card, white in Wakefield's wallet, blue and torn in Hadley's past). The second half then turns twice: from the store's routine into the quarrel at the Health Food Store, and from the quarrel into the long talk with Alice on the office rail and stairs. It ends where it began, in the routine, with "Yes sir... What can I do for you?"
The shape of the chapter. Three refuges are tested in one day. Wakefield's faith works for Wakefield: it organises his day off, puts him to work in a "functioning machine," and lets him reach "automatically for his glass of milk" after a quarrel. The store works for the store: "after the first hour, it seemed as if he had always been manager." The Society, which might have worked for Hadley, is closed: he learns what the blue card meant on the day he learns he can no longer have it. What is left is Alice's "Out!", which Hadley cannot take, and a fantasy of "cleansing fire," which he cannot act on. The loop in the diagram is the chapter's ending: whatever he says on the stairs, the routine closes over him at the counter.
| Who | In this chapter | What it shows |
|---|---|---|
| Horace Wakefield | Day off; hall; envelopes; coffee counter; white card; "You'll be dead" | The meek believer whose faith works for him, and who is hurt more than Hadley by the torn card |
| Stuart Hadley | Manager's first afternoon; Berg, Olsen, Tampini; the quarrel; the talk with Alice | Firmness without size; every position taken and dropped in one day |
| Alice Fergesson | An hour unseen in the office; "Out!"; the childless grief | The arranger of the promotion, who sees it is wrong |
| Mary Krafft | The pin map, "we're catching fire!" | The movement's pride in growth |
| The colored matron | Gives Wakefield envelopes | The organiser who makes the machine run |
| Old man Berg | "top dog"; the racist credit rule | The street's welcome and its prejudice |
| Olsen | Throws a Philco; "I'm going in the Army!"; later, the upside-down transformer | The store's real engine, and its root cause |
| Joe Tampini | "Gosh, that's twelve bucks!" | The pay plan working as designed |
| Betty | The cups; the news; "Look what you've got to be thankful for" | The town's gossip and its picture of a good life |
| Jim Fergesson | Absent; "thirteen hours a day" at O'Neill's | The owner gone on to his next store; "so little and blind" to Alice |
| The old man with the radio | Waiting at the counter | The routine that wins |
In practice: for managers. Fergesson promoted Hadley for good reasons (he knows the store, he is liked, the pay plan lets him coach the salesmen) and never asked whether he wanted the job, which Hadley admits he took "because you had nothing else." A promotion accepted from need rather than wish can look fine for a day ("after the first hour, it seemed as if he had always been manager") and still fail. The talk Alice has with him on the stairs is the conversation the owner should have had before the offer.
In practice: for AI and organisations. Wakefield's insight in the hall, that a movement is "a functioning machine" under its beliefs, applies to any organisation adopting a new technology, AI included: the visible enthusiasm (Mrs. Krafft's pin map) means less than the people who stuff the envelopes and the processes that collect the money.
Flags for this chapter.
- Which day of the reign? "After the first hour, it seemed as if he had always been manager" suggests this Thursday is Hadley's first day in charge, though the earlier guide called it "a few days into Hadley's reign." The chapter gives no date beyond "August" and Thursday; if it is the first day, the Fergessons' dinner was probably the night before. Neither point is stated.
- "Twenty years, at least." Wakefield's figure for Fergesson's time at the store is a guess by a neighbour, not a date in the text.
- "Congregationalists" against "taught there isn't any God" (Chapter 11 against this chapter), noted above.
- Prejudice: Berg's racist credit rule and slur, and Hadley's "Sure"; Wakefield's "I hate old women"; the narration's handling of women's bodies; the matron described only by her colour.
- "The last one." Wakefield calls the Chapter 5 lecture "the last one," and Hadley calls it "the first lecture." Both fit; there is no sign of another lecture between.
Outside facts checked for this chapter.
- Anti-vivisection: the Victoria Street Society, London, 1875; the American Anti-Vivisection Society, Philadelphia, 1883.
- Billy Graham's radio programme Hour of Decision began in 1950.
- Ford Model T, built 1908 to 1927.
- Tarantism in Apulia: the dance (tarantella) was the supposed cure for the spider's bite, not its effect.
- Azusa Street revival, Los Angeles, 1906.
- Alaska and Hawaii became states in 1959, so "every state in the Union" in 1952 meant 48.
- Christian Science: Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health (1875); church chartered in Boston, 1879.
- Sylvester Graham (1794 to 1851), diet reformer behind graham flour.
- Equal Credit Opportunity Act, 1974, extended to race and other grounds by the 1976 amendments; Fair Housing Act, 1968.
- Average US manufacturing pay in 1952 about $1.65 to $1.70 an hour.
- Korean War from June 1950; the "Ivy Mike" hydrogen bomb test at Enewetak, 1 November 1952; Duck and Cover, made 1951, released 1952.
- Matthew 5:5 and Psalm 37:11 (the meek); Genesis 6 to 9 (the flood); 2 Peter 3:6-7 (water then fire); Revelation 20:14-15 (the lake of fire); James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 1963, from the spiritual "no more water, the fire next time."
- Howard W. Sams Photofact service folders, from 1946; the "five whys" credited to Sakichi Toyoda and Taiichi Ohno at Toyota.
Takeaways from Chapter 14
- A movement is a machine. Wakefield's day off shows the Watchmen from inside: pie-baking, a pin map, a matron who sets him to envelopes rather than preaching, and an insert that announces Beckheim's return.
- The promotion changes nothing. "After the first hour, it seemed as if he had always been manager." The store's routine (Berg, Olsen, Tampini, the trash box, the ringing phone) closes over Hadley at once.
- The blue card is explained too late. Wakefield's white card, and his "Only Mister Beckheim gives out blue cards... only a few dozen," tell Hadley what he tore up, and Wakefield's grief makes it worse.
- The store is firm but small. "It's not big enough to be a world. You can't live in a store." Firmness and size are what Hadley wants, and no place in the novel offers both.
- Hadley preaches what he mocks. He calls Wakefield a crackpot, then gives Alice the water-then-fire apocalypse in full.
- Alice tells him to quit. The woman who arranged the job says "Out!", and reveals that she and Jim "would give anything in the world to have a son."
- The routine wins. The repair chain ends in Olsen's pride, the talk ends in "Maybe nobody did," and the chapter ends with "Yes sir... What can I do for you?"
The Pictures Come Back
When and where. Two evenings, late in August 1952 by the novel's dating. The first is the Thursday of Chapter 14, "a little past seven," still light, on the walk from Modern to Hadley's apartment house in Cedar Groves and then in the Hadleys' kitchen. The second is the next night, Friday: Marsha's watch says "almost nine" as she sits parked across from Modern TV Sales and Service; the Bank of America clock reads "nine-ten"; the last customer is out at "nine-thirty." The drive then runs past a bread factory, through "a black, deserted block of the factory district" near the railroad track and station, by the red glow of the Farmers' Commercial Trust Building, along Bancroft toward the apartment house, and ends parked across the street from it, "almost the same place where she had let him off that night" in July. Places spoken of: San Mateo, where Marsha says she is staying with friends; her apartment in San Francisco; Oregon, where her eldest daughter is at school; Denver; England in the war; and New York, where her husband may be.
Who is here.
- Stuart Hadley: manager of Modern, on his feet "thirteen hours" by Friday's closing.
- Ellen Hadley: cooking lamb chops and creamed corn on Thursday; she receives the parcel and hands it on without suspicion.
- Pete: the baby, asleep "fretfully" on the couch.
- Marsha Frazier: seen first through Ellen's eyes ("about thirty," with "a huge dog"), then from inside her own head on Friday night, then in the long scene in the car.
- Tertullian: not named here, but the "huge dog" is surely Marsha's white wolfhound from Chapter 11.
- Customers at Modern: a young couple shown "a television combination," and a man and woman who try the locked door at nine-ten.
- Offstage and remembered: Theodore Beckheim ("Ted"); the Golds; Marsha's children Timmy, Pat and Charlotte; Don Frazier, her first husband; an unnamed Army major, her present husband; Sir Oswald Mosley.
Edition note. The text is quoted as printed, with dialogue dashes shown as "..." in this guide. Two slips in the book are kept and flagged: "Marsha gritted her teeth and suffered through the interminable" (a noun such as "wait" seems to be missing) and "disappearing into the back-probably for his jacket" (a hyphen where a dash was meant). The chapter uses the period word "Negro," which is quoted where it is the speaker's; it also contains a racial slur that Marsha repeats from Chapter 12, which this guide paraphrases rather than reprints. Hadley's crudest line about Marsha's body is summarised, not quoted in full.
The walk home
"It was still light as Hadley walked home that night. His jacket over his arm, he trudged along the evening streets, accepting the fresh, warm air into his lungs, gazing yearningly at the people and houses, the men watering their lawns, the boys scrambling and playing, the old people sitting quietly on their front porches."
The same Thursday. The book runs straight on from Chapter 14, where Hadley went downstairs "gaily" to serve an old man with a broken radio. The day ends with a walk that is the opposite of gaiety. Every verb is slow ("trudged," "dragged," "savoring"), and the street is a catalogue of ordinary family life: men with hoses, boys at play, old people on porches. Hadley is not part of any of it. "Yearningly" tells us he looks at it from outside, the way he looked at the Andertons' house or at Sally on the beach. He has a family of his own waiting a few blocks away, which is the irony of the whole first section.
Looking back down the hill. He stands at his own door and looks back "toward the business section," that is, toward Modern. At the end of Chapter 14 he told Alice that if he leaves the store "it's the end of me"; here the store is the place he looks back at, and the home in front of him is the place he delays entering. The old woman, the bent can and the tattered tomcat are small, shabby, slightly comic, and for that reason precious. Dick often makes ordinary life look like this in his realist novels: worn objects and patient old people, observed by a young man who cannot join them.
To Hadley, Dick writes, the ordinary sights of evening now seem full of life and beauty. "He wanted to stand and look as long as he could; he was achingly aware that even as he watched, it was changing, fading, altering. The old woman finished watering and put the sprinkling can away. The gray tomcat lingered, urinated on some ferns, and then strolled off. One by one the children gave up playing and straggled into the house."
"Changing, fading, altering." This is the most tender paragraph about Hadley in the second half of the novel, and it is a farewell. He knows, without saying so, that he is about to lose this street. The three verbs pile up the way his feelings do: he cannot stop time, so he tries to store it. Then Dick lets each part of the picture leave: the can is put away, the cat strolls off (after a joke at the expense of the ferns), the children go in. The scene empties exactly as Hadley's attachment to it will. Read after the next chapter, the walk is the last calm moment he has as a husband and father.
"It was getting dark. The summer air sank into coldness. Night was coming on, and with it came tiny dancing bits of opaqueness: the fluttering bodies of dark nocturnal insects. Here and there lights came on. The sounds of people dimmed and faded as windows were closed against the rising coolness."
The cold comes in. The Bay Area summer evening turns cool fast, and Dick uses it. Light gives way to "opaqueness," people to insects, open windows to closed ones. Coldness will be the master image of these two chapters: Marsha's face "like polished bone," Hadley "frigid as iron" in the motel, the "bitterly cold" night, the "frozen motor." The first chill is only weather.
Lamb chops and a parcel
The same gesture, indoors. Hadley does at his kitchen door what he did on the street: stands and tries to hold "the sight" as long as he can. The home is shown as warmth and noise and light, "a blaze of light," frying, boiling, a fan still running from the heat of the day. The fan left on after the evening turns cool is a small sign of Ellen's distraction, and the baby sleeping "fretfully" will come back in the next chapter, when Hadley lifts him out of his bassinet in the middle of the night. Nothing here is wrong; that is the point. What breaks the scene comes from outside.
"Presently Ellen turned. 'Oh,' she said. 'Hello!'"
"'Hello,' Hadley said. The sight, the vision, slipped away through his fingers and was gone. 'I'm home.'"
"'Tired?'"
"He nodded. 'I really am.'"
"Ellen came over and peered up at him intently. She stood up on tiptoe, then quickly kissed him on the mouth. 'Dinner's almost ready.'"
"'I see it is.' Gratefully, he seated himself at the table. 'It looks good. Anything I can do?'"
"The vision... was gone." As soon as Ellen speaks, the picture he was holding becomes ordinary life again and slips away. He cannot have both the vision and the person. The exchange that follows is the plainest, kindest dialogue the Hadleys have in the book: hello, tired, a kiss on tiptoe, "Anything I can do?" Ellen "peered up at him intently," which suggests she has been watching his moods for weeks and is relieved to find this one gentle.
"'Just sit.' Ellen put the creamed corn on the stove. 'Everything's almost ready.' She brushed a lock of brown hair from her eyes and halted briefly to slip her bra strap over her shoulder. 'It's been hot today. Real Indian summer.'"
"The kitchen was still hot from the fumes of cooking. The girl's face was streaked and flushed with perspiration; shiny drops of moisture had slid down her bare arms, down her neck and into her blouse. She smiled fleetingly at Hadley and began getting plates from the drainboard. He smiled back at her."
"'How'd it go today?' she asked."
"'All right.'"
Two words for the day. This is the evening of the day Chapter 14 covered: the new manager's routine, the quarrel with Wakefield, the talk with Alice on the stairs, "What I believe in is bullshit." He tells his wife "All right." Hadley shares nothing of his inner life with Ellen in this part of the book, and that silence is the ground on which Marsha's note lands.
"Ellen disappeared into the living room; she was setting the table in there. When she came back there was a large square package in her arms, wrapped in brown paper, tied with heavy packing twine. 'Look,' she said. 'This came back.'"
"Hadley's heart stopped beating. 'Back?'"
"'Your pictures. Some woman dropped them off, some friend of the Golds'.' Ellen placed the package in his lap and went on with her cooking. 'You left them over there, remember?'"
"'Yes,' Hadley said slowly. That was what he had told her. 'I did.' He stared at the package uncomprehendingly. 'When did she come?'"
The lie comes home. In July Hadley took his paintings to Marsha's flat, hoping she would admire them, and the night ended on the coast road with his slur and her refusal. To Ellen he said he had left them at the Golds'. Now the lie is delivered to his own kitchen, wrapped in brown paper, and Ellen repeats it back to him in perfect trust: "You left them over there, remember?" Dick gives Hadley's reaction in one line: "That was what he had told her." The narrator does not need to say that he lied; the sentence is flat with guilt. "Hadley's heart stopped beating" is hyperbole, but it is the fear of a man whose two lives have just touched.
"'About an hour ago. She just dropped them off... I didn't recognize her. Tall, thin, an older woman... about thirty. She had a huge dog with her.'"
"'Did... she come alone?'"
"'I guess so. There was a car outside; I heard it drive off. Look inside the package; I think there's a note for you.'"
"An older woman... about thirty." Ellen, who is young, calls a woman of thirty "older," and the guess matches the narrator's first sight of Marsha at the gathering in Chapter 3 ("She was perhaps thirty") and Hadley's own guess in Chapter 9 ("About... thirty"), when Marsha claimed to be twenty-six. Everyone who sees her puts her at about thirty; she will tell Hadley tomorrow night that she is thirty-two. The "huge dog" is Tertullian, the white wolfhound. Hadley's question, "Did... she come alone?", is the giveaway question of a jealous man: he wants to know whether Beckheim was in the car. He does not yet know what the note says. Tomorrow Hadley will tell Marsha "You met Ellen already," as if this moment on the doorstep had been an introduction.
The note
"Stuart... Ted and I have broken completely. I'm through with the Society; it's not for me. I'll tell you all about it when I see you. Maybe tomorrow? I'll come by the store; I'm staying in San Mateo with friends. Sorry I kept your pictures so long... I want to talk with you about them... they're pretty good."
Marsha's note, in pencil, tucked into the parcel of paintings
What the note says, and how. The note is short and does three things. It announces the break ("broken completely," "through with the Society") without a reason, holding the story back for a meeting. It sets the meeting at the store, his ground, not hers. And it ends with the one thing Hadley most wanted to hear in July: his pictures are "pretty good." The physical details tell against the confident words. The envelope is "crumpled and stained" and was never sealed, the paper is lined notepaper, the message is in pencil: this was written in a hurry, perhaps in the car, by someone who had not planned the gesture far ahead. "A woman's efficient script" is the narrator's phrase, and "efficient" is the word Marsha always earns: controlled, competent, a little cold. Ellen saw that the envelope was open and either did not read it or said nothing. The text does not tell us which.
"He sat for a long time holding the penciled note. It wasn't until Ellen roused him that he put it away and got to his feet."
"'Time to eat,' she was saying. 'What's the matter with you? Don't go to sleep until later... get yourself a chair and let's get started.'"
"Blindly, dazed with growing fury, he searched for a chair."
"'Are you hungry?' Ellen asked hopefully."
"'I'm starved,' he muttered savagely."
"'I hope you can stand lamb chops again.'"
"Hadley didn't answer. He seated himself and stiffly began unfolding his napkin."
Fury, not joy. A reader might expect the note to delight him: the woman who refused him has left her lover and wants to see him. Instead he is "dazed with growing fury." The rest of the chapter explains why. Marsha has come into his home and handed his secret to his wife; she has put the meeting on her terms ("Maybe tomorrow?"); and her return reopens a wound he had closed with the store and the promotion. The dinner talk keeps the two worlds side by side: Ellen's "hopefully," his "savagely," the joke about lamb chops "again" (they are a family on a budget), the stiff unfolding of a napkin. The section ends without the meal. Dick cuts straight to the next night.
Marsha's vigil
"Polkas and ballads, and a Spanish guitar. She closed her eyes, and the people danced wildly to the accordions and violins. Clapping their hands, guzzling beer, long skirts whirling, laughter, warmth...the tinny blur of simple people enjoying themselves... Marsha Frazier listened as long as she could stand it, and then she snapped off the radio and opened her eyes."
A change of point of view. For the first time in the novel we are inside Marsha's head, and for the length of the vigil the chapter is hers. The radio gives her a picture of peasant pleasure, "simple people enjoying themselves," and she cannot stand it for long. The contempt fits the editor of Succubus, but here it is also loneliness: she is alone in a parked car on a Friday night, waiting for a married man.
Friday night. The note said "Maybe tomorrow? I'll come by the store," and she has come, a day late, and she does not go in. She waits for closing, so that she can have him alone. The avenue is at its busiest: late Friday opening was usual for small-town shops in the period, and Modern stays open until nine. The teenagers in their "stripped-down cars" (hot rods) are seen from Marsha's car as a kind of animal health, "Young, healthy," and the drive-in where Hadley and Marsha buy milk shakes at the start of the next chapter is their ground. The "August haze" confirms the month that Ellen called Indian summer.
Hadley seen from outside. Through Marsha's eyes we see the man everyone else in Cedar Groves sees: tall, youthful, neat, selling to a young couple. It is the "young blond-haired man in a clean-cut blue suit" of Chapter 5, the good salesman and good mixer, now in shirtsleeves on a warm night and doing his job well. The picture is brief because she cannot hold it any better than he could hold the street; he "faded back into the depths of the store."
"One by one the people left the store. Each time, Hadley stood a moment holding the door wide, saying good night to them, smiling and waving out into the evening darkness. Laughter, the easy banter of summer-evening business. Marsha gritted her teeth and suffered through the interminable. It was nine-thirty before the last person was out, and the door finally locked."
The clock and the door. The waiting is told by the clock: almost nine, nine-ten, nine-thirty. A bank clock on the main street is the town's official time, and the Bank of America, A. P. Giannini's bank, had branches in nearly every California town by then. Marsha "exulted" when a couple is turned away, which is a nasty and honest touch: for one night she wants his business to fail. Hadley, by contrast, is at his best: holding the door, smiling, joking.
The closing routine. Dick lists the manager's closing tasks as carefully as he listed the opening routine at the start of the novel:
- Lock the front door and pull the shade, so no new customers come in.
- Serve those already inside, then let them out one by one.
- Turn off every set, checking knobs and plugs; dim the fluorescents.
- Empty the cash register, "setting the tape": the register's paper tape is the day's record of sales, made ready for tomorrow's takings.
- Plug in the night-light over the safe, the "ghostly blue" light that greets whoever opens up in the morning.
- Switch off the outside lights, lock up, and try the knob.
The safe, the night-light and the key in Hadley's pocket will all matter again before the novel ends.
The phone call. The call is never explained. He leans against the tube checker, jaw slack, kicking at unopened stock, and then laughs. It could be Ellen (to say he will be late, which would fit his joke in the next chapter, "I usually disappear Friday nights"), Fergesson at O'Neill's, or a customer. The text leaves it open, and from Marsha's seat the only point is that it takes forever. "Kicking intermittently at an unopened stack of brown packages" is a good manager's detail: deliveries not yet dealt with, in his first week in charge.
The crosswalk
"Lips pressed tight, Marsha started the motor of the car and hurriedly backed out into traffic. Ignoring a honking bus, she swung over to the center lane; at the next intersection she made a screeching left turn onto the side street. Jamming on the brakes, she halted just beyond the lights of the intersection, the rear of the Studebaker blocking the white-painted crosswalk."
"Hadley came down the sidewalk, swinging his jacket and whistling soundlessly. She waited until he had stepped off the pavement and into the crosswalk before she pushed open the car door. Apparently he was a trifle nearsighted; he didn't recognize her until she spoke to him."
"'Hop in.' She gunned the motor. 'Hurry up.'"
An ambush. Marsha does not walk up to him; she cuts across a bus, takes a screeching turn and blocks his path with the car, so that he steps off the curb into her open door. Her driving is like her talk: fast, commanding, a little reckless. "Apparently he was a trifle nearsighted" is a new fact about Hadley, offered only from her point of view ("Apparently"). He is "whistling soundlessly," a man pleased with his day for a moment, until he sees her.
"Something awful." This is the central image of these two chapters, and Dick puts it in Marsha's eyes, not Hadley's, so that we see the change from outside. The language is the language the novel has used for Hadley's buried self: "below the level of individual consciousness," "impersonal," "blind innerness." Earlier in the week it was the "archaic fury" he feared in himself; in Chapter 16 it will be the resentment that "did not seem really to be his sole property." The phrasing is close to possession: Hadley "had gone away" and something else looks out. Whether that is an excuse or a diagnosis is the moral question of what follows, and Dick does not let it be an excuse. Hadley keeps deciding, coldly and in advance, at every step.
"Another car had made the turn after her; it slowed to a resentful halt and shifted into second."
"'Come on,' she repeated nervously, her composure shattered. 'I have to get the hell out of here.'"
Chance, and the decision behind it. The narrator says the car behind them "decided things": Marsha could not wait in the crosswalk, so Hadley had to get in or let her go. It is the theme of Chapter 14 ("random chance, without meaning") turned into a traffic incident. But the chapter soon contradicts its own sentence. A page later we learn that "he had made up his mind to get in the car," and later still that "Everything had been thought over... in the silent hours of the previous night." The random car is the story he could tell himself; the decision was already made. The car behind does not honk (the bus honked earlier); it only halts, "resentful," like most people in the novel.
The car he hates
Displaced hatred. He memorised the dashboard on the July nights: the long parked talk about Beckheim in Chapter 9, the drives to and from San Francisco, the coast road in Chapter 12. Now the car carries all of that humiliation, and he can hate it without having to hate her face. The clean, low-swept look was the Studebaker's selling point in these years (the postwar models came from Raymond Loewy's design studio and were famous for looking modern), and "dapper" suits Marsha's taste for fine design in the service of ugly ideas, the same taste that made Succubus beautiful.
"'You're acting childish,' Marsha said finally."
"'Damn it, look at me! You're not going to sit there like a sullen child; sit up and behave like an adult!'"
"'What the hell do you want?' Hadley said brutally. 'I thought I'd seen the last of you.'"
Bread. As on the walk home, he takes refuge in the simplest thing in sight: the smell of bread from a factory working through the night. It is the same longing for plain nourishment that comes back in a moment (orange juice, a lettuce and cheese sandwich). Marsha twice calls him a child ("childish," "sullen child"), which is half true and is the role she gave him in July, when he was the shy young painter. He answers in a new voice, "brutally."
"The hard, smooth flesh of the woman's face drained perfectly white. Like polished bone her cheeks glistened, cold and stark in the reflected streetlight. 'Don't talk to me like that,' she said in a thin, icy voice. Without warning she jammed on the brakes; the car screeched to a bucking, jerking halt. 'Get out of here. Go on... get out!'"
"He made no move to go. He sat with his arms on his knees, hands dangling loosely in his lap, still not looking at her. There was no incentive to go; he had made up his mind to get in the car and that was that. The decision had been made; he had no intention of unmaking it."
"The decision had been made." She orders him out and he stays, not from desire or love but from a kind of mechanical resolve. Dick says it three ways in two sentences ("made up his mind," "The decision had been made," "no intention of unmaking it"). This is the cold, watchful part of him that the earlier chapters kept showing, now running the man: he has a plan and will follow it whatever she does. The "polished bone" face is the first of the chapter's skull and ice images for Marsha, and it shows that she is not in control either.
"'Look,' Marsha said in a choked, uneven voice. 'There's no point in going on acting like this. Is there? You don't have to treat me like an enemy... I'm not your enemy.' Pleadingly, she muttered: 'Did you get my note?'"
"'Sure.' Hadley stirred a trifle to rest his arm on the windowsill. 'You walked right into the apartment and handed it to my wife; how could I miss it?'"
The grievance. Here is the reason for his fury: she came into his home. (Ellen said the woman "just dropped them off"; Hadley's "walked right into the apartment" is his version, angrier and perhaps exaggerated; see the flags.) For Hadley the two worlds, Ellen's and Marsha's, have to stay apart, and Marsha has carelessly or deliberately joined them. Her "I'm not your enemy" gets sarcasm in return, and the scene changes place.
"They were parked in the middle of the street, in a black, deserted block of the factory district. A few blocks ahead was the railroad track, the loading platform and opaque shape of the station building. Inert cars were parked here and there. Nothing moved."
"'Let's get out of here,' Hadley said morbidly. 'I hate this kind of neighborhood.'"
The factory district. The dark blocks by the station are the industrial back of Cedar Groves, the part of town his customers do not live in. He hates it, and the hatred is class feeling as much as mood. The railroad and station belong to the Southern Pacific line down the Peninsula, which ran through every town between San Francisco and San Jose, and which a town like the fictional Cedar Groves would have grown up around.
"Ted was the only Negro"
"Marsha shifted into low and started up the car. As the car crawled forward her hands were visibly shaking; she bit her lip and gazed convulsively straight ahead. Swallowing, she asked: 'Were you surprised?'"
"'About what?'"
"'That... I'd left Ted.'"
"He thought about it. 'No,' he answered finally. 'It seems natural. He probably wasn't the first.'"
"'Not at all,' Marsha admitted in a stricken whisper. 'One of a long line. But he was the first...' She couldn't get out the word. 'What you said. Ted was the only Negro. There never was any other; I wanted to tell you that.'"
"'It's not important.'"
"'You brought it up. About him... that night. I know what you said; so do you.'"
"'I'm sorry about that,' Hadley said distantly. 'Anyhow, it doesn't matter. Let's forget it.' He pointed out the window at the red glow of the Farmers' Commercial Trust Building. 'If you turn on that way you'll pass my place. You can let me off practically anywhere.'"
The first thing she needs to say. Of everything Marsha might open with, she chooses to answer the slur he used on the coast road in Chapter 12, which treated Beckheim's race as the shameful fact about her. She wants him to know that she is not, as his word implied, a woman who goes with Black men as a habit: "Ted was the only Negro." The sentence is meant as a defence and is itself a confession of how much the slur hurt, and of how much of its prejudice she shares. Hadley's "He probably wasn't the first" is a sneer about her many lovers, and she agrees ("One of a long line") with a flatness that shows how far down he has already pushed her. His apology is "distantly" given and followed at once by directions home. He is not sorry; he wants the subject closed because it makes him look bad. The bank building's "red glow" sits over the exchange like a warning light.
A CLOSER LOOK: race, sex and who gets to be ashamed. Both characters treat a white woman's affair with a Black man as something that needs explaining, and the novel lets their prejudice speak in full. Marsha's "the only Negro" assumes Hadley's view that there would be something worse about more than one. Hadley's coast-road slur, and his "It's not important" now, show that for him Beckheim's race was a weapon, not a belief he will stand behind. It helps to remember the legal setting. California's ban on interracial marriage had been struck down by the state supreme court only four years earlier, in Perez v. Sharp (1948), the first such ruling in the country; in many other states such marriages stayed illegal until Loving v. Virginia in 1967. Marsha, a self-declared fascist who met Mosley, chose a Black prophet as a lover, and the contradiction is the point of her character: her racism is real and also unstable. Dick shows all of this from inside, without endorsing any of it. The reader should notice that Beckheim, the one person both of them say is good, is never allowed to speak for himself in these scenes; he exists here only as the measure of two white people's guilt.
Pictures and lithographs
"Presently, as they drove along, Marsha said faintly: 'I liked your pictures.'"
"'So you said in the note.'"
"'I mean it.' She appealed to him, agitated, eyes wild. 'You don't believe me? Isn't that what you wanted? Isn't it important to you anymore?'"
"'In a way,' Hadley said noncommittally. 'I'm glad to know what you think.'"
"Gripping the wheel rigidly, Marsha said: 'When we get hold of some money we're going to try some lithographs. Have you worked with lithography?'"
"'No.'"
"'Are... you interested?'"
"Hadley sighed. 'No.' He really wasn't."
The thing he wanted, refused. In July her praise would have meant everything. Hadley painted, took his canvases to her, and dreamed of being an artist in her world. Now she offers praise and a future ("we're going to try some lithographs," with a "we" that might mean the magazine, or her and him), and he says "No." The refusal is partly punishment, but the narrator adds "He really wasn't" interested, which is worse: the painter in him has gone quiet since he became manager. There is also a buried irony for readers who remember Chapter 9. In the Golds' living room, showing off to Marsha, Hadley claimed of a college magazine he never worked on, "We tried various lithographic techniques," a pure invention. Her question tonight may grow from that lie, since she has reason to think he knows the craft. Tonight he tells the truth: he has never worked with lithography. Her "When we get hold of some money" is a reminder that Succubus is always short of cash.
The manager's body, by the numbers.
- "Thirteen hours" on his feet: said twice, here and when he tells her to lower her voice. If the store closed at nine-thirty, he came in at about half past eight in the morning.
- "The dozen cups of coffee": about one an hour, the fuel of a man who cannot leave the floor.
- Friday is the long day: the late opening that Marsha watched from the car.
Against all this the body asks for cold, thin, clear orange juice and a plain sandwich. The craving is the same one he had for the smell of bread: something simple and clean. In Chapter 10 Marsha carried a glass of orange juice to her café table "with grave intensity" while she lectured him about Wagner; whether Dick meant the echo or not, the drink now belongs to a man too tired for ideas.
The plan behind the act. This paragraph overturns everything the scene has pretended. His directions home, his "You can let me off practically anywhere," his boredom, are all a performance. He does not expect to go home tonight. He decided in "the silent hours of the previous night," that is, on Thursday night after the note and the lamb chops, lying beside Ellen. "Of his own free will" answers the narrator's earlier claim that a random car "had decided things." And then the motive, said plainly: "he enjoyed hurting her." Dick does not soften it. The phrase "grimly enjoyed the ride" is one of the coldest in the novel.
"My little kingdom"
"'There it is,' he said, indicating the building. 'You want to come in awhile? You can meet my family... You met Ellen already. I'll show you Pete.' Sadistically he continued: 'How about having dinner with us? We haven't eaten... I eat when I get home.'"
"The woman had more courage than he had realized. Or he had misjudged her feelings about him. 'No thanks,' she said icily. 'Maybe some other time. I don't feel very well tonight; I don't want anything to eat and I don't want to meet anybody.'"
Using the family as a weapon. The invitation to dinner is the cruellest move yet, and the narrator names it: "Sadistically." He offers her the sight of his wife and baby, the family she came into yesterday, at the moment she has told him she has nobody. Marsha's answer is controlled and dignified, and the narrator, still in Hadley's view, admits he had underrated her.
"Apparently she had accepted the fact that he was going to get out and leave her. She had rallied; he had to admire the stoic jutting of her chin and the bleakness of her eyes. Beyond doubt, she would be able to weather it. It was tearing her apart, but she could endure it; she, too, had made up her mind."
"'Well,' she said thinly, 'it was nice talking to you again.' She glanced at him briefly. 'You're looking well.'"
"'I should be. I'm manager of the store now.'"
"'Oh?' She nodded, 'Fine. More money?'"
"'Lots more. Power, too... I get to boss people around.' He added, 'All my responsibility, the whole place. Ordering, buying, making decisions. My little kingdom.'"
"My little kingdom." He boasts, and the boast is half sincere and half a parody of himself. The managership was the reason he gave Alice for staying in Cedar Groves, and here it becomes a way of telling Marsha that he no longer needs her world. "Power, too... I get to boss people around" is meant to sound ugly, and it is the first time Hadley says out loud that he likes power. "Little kingdom" is also the image of Fergesson's store as a world in miniature: the "microcosmos" that Hadley, earlier in the week, feared he might blindly destroy. The chapters that follow test how long he can keep it.
The confession
"Marsha parked the car across from his apartment house; it was, he noticed, almost the same place where she had let him off that night. Turning off the motor and lights, Marsha swung around to face him. Defiant and pale, she said: 'I can see you're going to make me pay for that night. All right, I'm paying. But why? What was I supposed to do?'"
"'Forget it,' Hadley said, his hand on the door handle."
"'No,' he said idly."
Back to the spot. The car stops "almost the same place where she had let him off that night," the July night of the coast road, and he notices it. Marsha understands his game exactly ("you're going to make me pay for that night") and gives her side: she hid the affair with Beckheim because it was "not something you can tell people," and then she could not sleep with Hadley while living with Ted. Her moral line ("it isn't fair, I can't do that sort of thing") is real, and it fits with what she says later about Beckheim's goodness. His "No," given "idly," answers her last question and shows he is not really listening.
"'Stop acting,' Hadley said cruelly."
"'I'm...' She cleared her throat; her voice was weak, almost inaudible. 'I'm not acting. I'm in love with you.'"
The month, the letters, the declaration. "All this last month" dates the gap between the coast road and this Friday: about a month, July into late August. The letters started and torn up explain the crumpled, unsealed envelope in the parcel: this one finally got sent, by hand. The sob is described with physical violence ("shoved open her mouth," "rigid jaws"), as if grief were forcing its way out against her will. Hadley's "Stop acting" is the cruelty of a man who has been fooled once and will not be fooled again, and who also cannot bear to be moved. Her answer is the plainest sentence she says in the book.
"'Are you going?' Marsha said, the ragged edge of hysteria creeping into her voice. 'Good night, Stuart Hadley. Maybe I'll see you again sometime.'"
"'Calm down,' he told her."
"'I'm calm.'"
"'Then lower your voice.' He pulled the door shut and reseated himself. 'I'm too tired to stand any shouting. I've been working in that store thirteen hours; I've had my share of noise for the day.'"
Love as depravity. This is one of the strangest reactions in the novel, and Dick gives it great care. He blushes, as if he had caught her doing something shameful in public. Two things seem to be at work. He had planned a night of sex and revenge, and love was not in the plan ("something he hadn't anticipated"); and love, offered by the woman who hurt him, threatens to make him feel something he cannot control. His instinct is to leave. He stays, and the reason he gives is noise. Note "Good night, Stuart Hadley": Marsha's habit of using his full name, which in Chapter 10 she made into a little game of words, now sounds like a formal goodbye.
The Pledge of Allegiance
"With a tremendous effort Marsha managed to get control of herself. 'Can I expect you to stay?' she asked haltingly. 'For a couple of minutes, at least?'"
"'A couple of minutes, yes,' Hadley answered."
"With great care Marsha said: 'It offends you to have me say how I feel? But that doesn't change it; I still mean it. I still feel it.'"
"'Don't say it again,' Hadley said fiercely. Restlessly, he shifted around, trying unsuccessfully to make himself comfortable. 'It doesn't mean anything. It's empty, worthless.'"
"'Not to me,' Marsha managed."
The argument. Hadley's theory of love talk is simple and bleak. Words like "I love you" are ritual formulas, like the school pledge or the lyrics of a hit song: everyone says them, someone must have meant them once, but no adult expects to meet a person who believes them. The comparison is telling for a man of his age and time. The flag salute was a daily school ritual of the 1930s and 1940s, and loyalty was the public religion of 1952, the year of loyalty oaths and loyalty boards. Hadley lumps patriotism and romance together as things "they make you say." It is the same suspicion of official language that made him say, in Chapter 14, that what he believes in is "bullshit." The point is sharpened by the fact that he is talking to a fascist, who believes in nothing that is said in schools.
The Pledge Hadley would have said. Outside facts, for the comparison:
- Written by Francis Bellamy for the magazine The Youth's Companion in 1892, for school ceremonies marking the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus's voyage.
- The words "my Flag" were changed to "the Flag of the United States (of America)" in 1923 and 1924.
- Congress put the Pledge into the federal Flag Code in June 1942, and in December 1942 amended it so that the pledge was said with the right hand over the heart. Before that, many schools used the "Bellamy salute," an arm stretched out toward the flag, which had come to look too much like the fascist salute.
- In 1943, in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, the Supreme Court ruled that schools could not force pupils to salute or recite.
- "Under God" was added in June 1954, two years after this scene, so the Pledge Hadley mocks did not yet contain it.
So the detail "hand over your heart... all the time you're growing up" is only partly accurate for a boy born about 1927, who would have started school with the outstretched-arm salute and switched in his teens (see the flags). Dick, born in 1928, grew up with the same change.
"'That's what I sound like?' Marsha asked briskly."
"Marsha laughed, a dry brittle humorless breaking sound. 'You're bourgeois... it reminds you of sex. You're afraid it'll lead to something physical.'"
Two theories of the blush. Hadley allows, for a moment, that the fault might be his: "Maybe I'm the only person who can't stand to hear about it." Then he says that her declaration makes him "ashamed of you," as though she had made "a disgusting noise," revealing "an animal layer." Marsha, the intellectual, diagnoses him in her own terms: he is "bourgeois," a respectable young husband frightened by anything that leads toward the body. It is a neat reading, and in a minute he will prove it wrong in the ugliest way. He is not afraid of the physical; he is afraid of the feeling.
"'Don't kid yourself.' Hadley turned to gaze intently at her. He continued to study her until, self-conscious and uncertain, Marsha shrank away and involuntarily glanced over her blouse and skirt. 'No,' Hadley said, 'that's not it. I'm not worried about realities; I'm not avoiding things that exist. Are you?'"
"Marsha started to speak, then changed her mind."
"'You're the one,' Hadley said. 'You're afraid; that's why you talk like that... That's why you pour out phony talk of that kind. You don't really feel love... you feel what I feel. But you can't say it; you can't talk about it. You're like everybody else; they talk that way because they're afraid to talk about real things.'"
"'What real things? What do you mean?' Two spots of high, bright color glowed in her cheeks. 'Don't you believe I meant what I said?'"
"With an impatient wave of his hand Hadley dismissed her words. 'You know what really exists between us; it's the same thing that exists between any man and woman sitting like we're sitting. This is the only relationship; everything else is a lot of hot air.'"
Turning her own creed on her. Hadley's speech borrows the voice of Succubus. Marsha's magazine preaches that civilised talk is a mask over the primitive and the biological; in Chapter 10 she lectured him on the "natural primitive combat" of the young. Now he uses that creed against her. Love is "phony talk," a cover for what "really exists," the "only relationship" between "any man and woman." He has learned her lesson too well. Under his gaze she checks her clothes, as if he had undressed her by looking, which is exactly what he intends.
"'You can spiritualize it all you want, but what it really boils down to is simple biological reality.' He reached down and closed his hand around a fistful of the woman's tweed skirt."
"After a moment Hadley admitted: 'No. I had a lot of hot-air ideas, a lot of pink-cloud illusions, like everybody else. But I've come around to viewing things more realistically.'"
"Pink-cloud illusions." The honest answer: no, he did not always feel this way. The "hot-air ideas" were his July dreams: painting, Beckheim's message, a romance with a brilliant woman, a life bigger than Cedar Groves. "Realistically" is the word the novel's sharpest cynics use. Hadley has not become wise; he has become disappointed, and he calls disappointment realism. "Pink cloud" was ordinary slang for a dreamy, rose-coloured state of mind.
Why she left Ted
"Marsha found a cigarette and got it between her lips. She lit up and sat scratching mechanically at the button on her sleeve. Finally she asked: 'Do you want me to tell you why I left Ted?'"
"'If you want to gabble about it.'"
"Marsha flinched. 'I... don't know if I can stand this.'"
"'You want me to get out now?'"
"She considered. 'No.' Brightly she said: 'Well, I'll go back to the beginning; I feel better when I can talk about it. I don't believe that look on your face means anything; I think you're listening to me. Aren't you?'"
"'Yes.'"
"Gabble." The word turns her story into noise before she starts. Marsha's answer is remarkable: she decides that his face is a mask and that he is really listening, and he admits it ("Yes"). This is the one moment in the scene when the truth gets past his guard. She talks, as she says, because talking helps her, and the story she tells is the most sympathetic account of Beckheim in the novel.
"'Is that why you started living with him?'"
Goodness as a body. "Right away" means right after the coast-road night in July: she went back "for a couple of days" and left. Beckheim's response was silence and work, which she found worse than any quarrel. Her portrait of him is close to a saint's life. His goodness is not a choice or a moral effort; it is "part of his physical body," as if he were made of different stuff. His pull is "like gravity," the force no one chooses. "He drew you...didn't he?" reminds Hadley of his own hour at the Watchmen's meeting in July, when he felt that power. And "It wasn't some kind of conspiracy" answers the gossip that a white woman's affair with a Black preacher must be a scheme on one side or the other.
"She gazed past Hadley, troubled and somber. 'But you know, even living with him, sleeping with him, I never got close to him. He's a long way away; he's always listening to things I can't hear, seeing things I can't see. His mind is...' She shrugged. 'You know; you tried to reach him. You can't. He's not for any one of us.'"
"'I know,' Hadley said. 'I'm out, too.'"
"He's not for any one of us." This is the most exact thing said about Beckheim in the book, and Hadley agrees with it: "I'm out, too." Both of them tried to own a piece of the prophet, she as lover and he as disciple, and both found that he belongs to his vision and to "things I can't hear." It is the old problem of the holy man who cannot be a husband or a friend. The phrase "I'm out" also covers Hadley's whole July: the Society, the magazine, the painting, the hope of a new life. He means he has left all of it.
"'But...' She laughed. 'Well, you saw him eat, didn't you? Eating is nothing for him; he just pushes food between his teeth, back and forth, like a machine. It's the same way with any physical thing for him...he does it, he goes through it, has it, gets it over with. But it never really involves him; it never really touches him or gets down inside him.'"
"He took the way he gives." Marsha's description is precise and sad. Beckheim accepts a flat, a meal, a woman, with the same open hand he uses to give: "Like a child... trustingly." He does not exploit, but he does not stay. The memory of him eating "like a machine" goes back to the dinner at her flat in Chapter 11, which Hadley watched. The image is unkind but not hostile: she describes a man whose body simply does not hold his attention. "A month or so" gives the length of the affair, which fits with a beginning in early summer; "Hardly anybody knows; the Golds don't know" explains why the news shocked Hadley in Chapter 12 and why the Golds have said nothing about it.
"'He's not against sexual relations?' Hadley inquired."
"'Women always make a big thing out of it,' Hadley said."
"Or so she seemed to think." The narrator, sitting in Hadley's head, warns us that Marsha's sense of having hit bottom is wrong: there is further to go, and the next chapter takes her there. Her frankness about the affair is the frankness of exhaustion. The routine she describes (bath, clothes, work at the desk, bed, sleep) is the domestic life of a man for whom sex is one more bodily task, and her complaint is the human one: "I wanted it to mean more." Hadley's reply is a stock line of male contempt, and it contradicts what he said ten minutes ago, that sex is the "only relationship" there is. In his own theory he makes as big a thing of it as anyone.
"We're not worthy"
"'Don't blame it on me.'"
"'Oh, yes. That night, when you said that.'"
The slur, paraphrased. At this point Marsha repeats, word for word, the racial slur Hadley used for Beckheim on the coast road in Chapter 12. This guide does not reprint it. The sentence that follows is the one that matters: "I couldn't stand it, because it was true. He is a Negro; I can't forget that; neither can you."
"Because it was true." Marsha's logic is twisted and revealing. She does not say the slur was false; she says it hurt because the fact underneath it, Beckheim's race, is something neither of them can "forget." The word did not insult Beckheim in her mind so much as expose the two white people who heard it. Hadley's "I told you I'm sorry!" is angry, a man tired of being reminded of what he said.
"'It's too late for that. That's what I mean...neither of us is good enough. Neither of us measures up to him; we're not worthy. Isn't that so? When you said that word, and when I responded, I knew we weren't fit to be around him.'"
"Hadley nodded begrudgingly. 'All right.'"
"'Is it true?' she persisted."
"'Yes.'"
Two people who fail a test. Here is Marsha's real reason for leaving: not that Beckheim was cold, but that Hadley's word, and her own response to it, showed her that she and Hadley share a prejudice that makes them unfit for a good man's company. "When I responded" is honest: she admits that the slur found an answer in her. The idea that one ugly word reveals a whole self is very much Dick's, and it ties the race theme to the theme of the hidden self in Hadley that rose up at the crosswalk. Hadley's two answers, "All right" and "Yes," are the second and third admissions he has made tonight; the scene is built so that each time the truth gets through, he says one word.
"'You would have left him anyhow,' Hadley said."
"'Of course. But not for a while, not so soon.'"
A CLOSER LOOK: Beckheim as a measuring stick. Marsha's speech completes the shape the novel has given Beckheim: the good Black man whose goodness shows up the failings of the whites around him, and who must be left behind so that the white story can go on. "So we're in it together" makes her and Hadley a pair joined by shared guilt, and "your kind" joins them by race and class. "The sweet Nordic blond type" is a giveaway phrase from a woman who met Mosley: her attraction to Hadley is partly racial taste, the "Nordic" ideal of fascist propaganda, said lightly. Dick lets her say "The kind of life I want is something ugly," then take it back ("Not ugly, exactly"), which is as close as she comes to naming what she is. Read with care, the scene is a portrait of how prejudice and self-contempt feed each other, not a celebration of either.
Marsha's life, second version
"'How many men have you lived with before?'"
"'Christ,' Hadley said. 'I was only ten years old.'"
"Curious, Hadley asked: 'By now are you legally anybody's wife? Did you remarry?'"
"'You know that part. I married an Army major while I was stationed in England. Timmy and Pat are his children.'"
"'You're still married to him?'"
"'Yes.'"
"Hadley brooded. 'I don't know whether to believe you or not.'"
"'It's the truth.' She coolly blew a cloud of smoke at him. 'It doesn't matter; I don't know where he is, probably in New York with somebody. Last time I saw him he was living with a wealthy society woman... he'll get along. Of that I'm positive.'"
A question about men, an answer about years. Hadley asks "How many men" and Marsha answers with her age, her children and a war story, never giving a number ("there were a number of them; I've lost track"). The story is a romance of the 1930s and 1940s: the country girl from Denver who wants to be a newspaperwoman, the baby at eighteen, the "very wonderful" young engineer married at last in 1940 and killed in the war, service in England, a meeting with the British fascist leader, a second husband who is now with "a wealthy society woman" in New York. Hadley says what the reader thinks: "I don't know whether to believe you or not." His "I was only ten years old" turns her history into a measure of their age gap, a gap that will matter to him in the motel.
| Point | Chapter 9 (July, at the Golds' and in the car) | Chapter 15 (August, in the car) |
|---|---|---|
| Her age | "I'm twenty-six" (Hadley guessed "About... thirty") | "I'm thirty-two years old" |
| First child | "Timmy was born when I was sixteen" | Charlotte, "my first daughter," born 1936 when she was eighteen |
| Children | Timmy and Pat | Timmy, Pat, and Charlotte at school in Oregon |
| The Army major | "I'm divorced. I was married to an Army major... During World War II." | "I married an Army major while I was stationed in England"; still married to him |
| Pat | Hadley sees that Pat is "three at the most" and "the war had been over seven years," so the wartime story does not fit | "Timmy and Pat are his children"; the problem is not addressed |
The arithmetic does not add up.
- Eighteen in 1936 makes her 34 in 1952, not 32. Thirty-two would fit 1950.
- Charlotte born in 1936 would be 16 in 1952, not 14. Fourteen would also fit 1950.
- Both figures agree with each other for 1950, which may mean Dick worked out her history for an earlier date (the novel was written in the early 1950s) and did not update it, or that Marsha shaves two years off everything.
- Hadley "only ten" in 1936 gives a birth year of about 1926; later in the novel Fergesson thinks of him as "twenty-five years old. Born in 1927."
- In Chapter 9, "twenty-six" with Timmy born at sixteen made Timmy about ten; in this version Timmy and Pat are children of a wartime marriage in England, so Timmy cannot be older than about nine, and Pat, at "three at the most," was born years after the war.
Checking the war story. Outside facts make Marsha's account hard to believe, which may be Dick's intention:
- The Women's Army Auxiliary Corps was the American women's army service created in May 1942; it became the Women's Army Corps (WAC) in July 1943, the month its first battalion arrived in England. So a WAAC posting to England is possible only in a narrow window of 1943, and most American servicewomen who went there did so as WACs. (Britain had a "Women's Army Auxiliary Corps" only in the First World War.)
- The Office of War Information was a civilian agency set up in June 1942, with an office in London; army women were detailed to many agencies, so "attached to" is plausible.
- Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, was interned under Defence Regulation 18B from May 1940 to November 1943, then kept under house arrest. An American servicewoman meeting him in that period is very unlikely.
- "In 1940, just before the war" is true only from an American point of view: Britain had been at war since September 1939, the United States from December 1941.
- Denver is in Colorado, a Mountain West state, though "midwestern" was a loose word for the interior in common speech.
Taken together with the Chapter 9 version, the history looks partly invented. Marsha has a gift for turning herself into a story, as Hadley does; in Chapter 9 the narrator said, of the two of them, "Neither knew a thing about the other." Tonight that is still true.
IN PRACTICE: testing a story against itself. Hadley's "I don't know whether to believe you or not" is the problem every bank faces when it takes a customer's account of where their money came from, and every team that relies on a language model's account of a person or a company. Marsha's two life stories fail not because any single claim is impossible but because the dates do not agree with each other or with the outside record: an age that fits the wrong year, a child too young for the war story, a service that did not exist in the right form, a meeting with a man who was in prison. The same check exposes a confabulated biography from an AI system, which, like Marsha, tends to produce fluent detail that falls apart on arithmetic.
"I'm suffering"
"She didn't continue, and Hadley had nothing to contribute. After a time he reached behind him and again opened the car door."
"'Where are you going?' Marsha demanded quickly."
"'Home, of course. I'm hungry. I want to eat dinner.'"
"Her gray eyes fixed on him, Marsha said: 'You really aren't going to forgive me, are you? You're going to make me suffer for not going to bed with you that night.'"
"He didn't have to answer; it was obvious. But that was not the whole story. 'I believe you,' he said aloud, 'when you say you couldn't have. I believe you wanted to, but you couldn't go through with it.'"
"'Then why make me suffer?'"
"'Because,' Hadley said simply, 'I'm suffering. And I want to share it.'"
The confession that explains the chapter. Hadley opens the door a second time, a tactic now, not an impulse; he has learned that the threat of leaving makes her give. Her question is direct and his answer is the most honest thing he says in the novel so far. He believes her reasons for July. He does not punish her because she was wrong; he punishes her because he is in pain, and pain wants company. "Simply" is the narrator's word, and it is chilling, because the motive is so plain and so childish. It is also a link to the rest of his week: the young man who told Alice that what he believes in is "bullshit," who mocks the Pledge and love songs, has found the one thing he believes in, and it is the sharing of misery. The next chapter shows what that sharing becomes.
"'Don't go,' Marsha said tensely, reaching out and touching his arm. 'Stay with me. I'll do whatever you want; there aren't any strings to it, nothing. I'm free; I'm completely cut loose. I saw Ted for the last time yesterday. It isn't the same as it was; now it's different.'"
"'I see,' Hadley said thoughtfully. 'In other words, you've decided you would like to go to bed.'"
"The woman's face withered. She huddled back in a stricken heap, gray eyes swimming."
"'Well?' Hadley demanded. 'Yes or no?'"
"She nodded mutely without speaking."
"'Answer me!' he demanded."
"'Yes.'"
"Yes or no?" The bargaining is brutal. Marsha offers herself without conditions ("no strings"), and Hadley translates the offer into the crudest terms and makes her accept the translation. A nod is not enough: he demands the word out loud. This matters for the next chapter, where she begs him to stop and he says "It's too late to back out." The "Yes" is extracted under pressure, by a man who has been tormenting her for an hour, and the novel makes the pressure visible. "I saw Ted for the last time yesterday" is Thursday, the day the parcel came; it does not sit easily with the earlier "I left Ted right away" or with the Chapter 14 report that Beckheim had already left San Francisco for Los Angeles (see the flags).
"Hadley reflected. 'I'm hungry. I want something to eat first.'"
"After a struggle she managed to find words. 'We can stop at a drive-in.' Groping feebly for the ignition key, she got the motor going, and then the headlights. 'Please, will you close the door? I can't drive with it open.'"
"'Sure,' Hadley said easily, pulling it shut."
"Tears running down her cheeks, Marsha released the parking brake and edged the car out onto the dark, silent street."
The coldest ending. Having won, Hadley thinks about his stomach. "I want something to eat first" puts her below a sandwich, and "Sure," said "easily," is the ease of a man who has got what he came for. Marsha drives in tears. The car door that he opened twice as a threat is finally shut, and with it the possibility that he will go home to Ellen tonight. The orange juice and sandwich he wished for an hour ago become the milk shakes and sandwiches at the drive-in that open Chapter 16.
How the chapter is built
The chapter has two halves joined by a cut. The first, Thursday evening, is all Hadley and all tenderness: the slow walk, the street he tries to hold in his memory, the kitchen, the kiss, and then the parcel that undoes it. Dick ends that half with a napkin being unfolded and no meal eaten. The second half, Friday night, opens inside Marsha's head, the only extended passage from her point of view in the novel, so that we see Hadley first as a charming young salesman in a lit doorway and then as a face with "something awful" looking out of it. Once he is in the car, the point of view slides back to Hadley, and the long dialogue is built as a series of tests. Each time Marsha offers something (the note, the praise, the confession, the story of Ted), he refuses it, and each time the truth breaks through he gives a one-word answer: "Yes," "All right," "Yes." Twice he opens the car door to leave. The pattern ends with the reversal of all those one-word admissions, the "Yes" he forces out of her. Under the dialogue runs a second line that the reader sees and Marsha does not: the decision made "in the silent hours of the previous night," which makes every refusal a performance.
The shape of the chapter. Holding on (the street, the kitchen) gives way to letting go (the vision "slipped away"). A secret crosses from one world to the other (the parcel). Then a long reversal of July: in Chapter 9 Marsha was the confident one and Hadley the shy young man inventing a past; tonight he is in command and she is the one telling stories that may not be true. In Chapter 12 she said no in a parked car; tonight he makes her say yes in a parked car "almost the same place."
| Who | In this chapter | What it shows |
|---|---|---|
| Stuart Hadley | Walks home slowly; hides his fury at the parcel; punishes Marsha for an hour; mocks love as the Pledge; admits "I'm suffering"; forces "Yes" | A man who has decided in advance and enjoys the cruelty, and who also cannot bear to be loved |
| Marsha Frazier | Returns the paintings; waits outside Modern; ambushes him; confesses love; tells why she left Ted; gives a new history | Courage and self-deception together; her prejudice and her self-contempt are bound up with each other |
| Ellen Hadley | Cooks, kisses him, hands him the parcel and the lie that came with it | Trust, and the domestic life he is about to betray |
| Theodore Beckheim (offstage) | "The finest man who ever lived"; "He's not for any one of us"; ate "like a machine" | The moral measure the two white characters fail; never allowed his own voice here |
| The car behind | Halts "resentful," forcing the decision | Chance as an excuse for a choice already made |
The decision before the decision. The narrator tells us twice that chance decided things and once, a page later, that Hadley decided the night before. Read closely, the chapter is a study of how people describe their own choices: a random car, a slammed door, a tired body, a woman who "wanted it." Hadley's real decision was made in silence and then dressed up as a series of accidents. It is worth keeping that pattern in mind for the next chapter, where he will again act as if the night is something that is simply happening to him.
Flags for this chapter.
- "Real Indian summer." Ellen uses the phrase in late August ("August haze" the next night). An Indian summer is properly a warm spell in autumn. Possibly loose speech, possibly a slip.
- Delivered or walked in? Ellen says the woman "just dropped them off"; Hadley says Marsha "walked right into the apartment and handed it to my wife." Either Ellen understated it or Hadley exaggerates in anger.
- "Maybe tomorrow?" The note suggests Friday, and she comes on Friday, but she does not come into the store as the note promised; she waits outside.
- When she left Ted. "I left Ted right away... I only went back for a couple of days" does not sit easily with "I saw Ted for the last time yesterday," and Chapter 14 already placed Beckheim on the road back to Los Angeles.
- Staying in San Mateo. The note says she is staying with friends in San Mateo, though she has her own flat in San Francisco; she says she "drove back up to San Francisco" after the break. The reason is not given (perhaps Beckheim's things are still in the flat).
- Ages and dates. Thirty-two and eighteen in 1936 do not agree for 1952 (34); Charlotte would be 16, not 14; both fit 1950. The Chapter 9 version (26, divorced, Timmy at sixteen) conflicts with this one throughout. Hadley "only ten" in 1936 makes him about 26, against Fergesson's later "Born in 1927."
- The war story. The WAAC posting, the OWI, and the meeting with an interned Mosley are hard to fit together (see the box above); "midwestern" for Denver is loose.
- "Hand over your heart... all the time you're growing up." The hand-over-heart form only became standard in December 1942, when a boy of Hadley's age was in his teens.
- (missing noun); "back-probably" (hyphen for a dash). Quoted as printed.
- Prejudice. The chapter contains a racial slur (Marsha repeating Hadley's word from Chapter 12, paraphrased here), the period term "Negro," Marsha's "sweet Nordic blond type," and Hadley's sexual contempt ("Women always make a big thing out of it," "simple biological reality"). All are the characters', shown critically.
- Correction to the earlier edition of this guide. The short version said a car behind them "honks." In the book it is a bus that honks, earlier, and the car behind "slowed to a resentful halt."
Outside facts checked for this chapter.
- Pledge of Allegiance: written by Francis Bellamy for The Youth's Companion, 1892; wording changed 1923 and 1924; added to the Flag Code June 1942; hand over heart replaced the Bellamy salute by an amendment of December 1942; West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, decided 14 June 1943; "under God" added 14 June 1954.
- Women's Army Auxiliary Corps: established May 1942, converted to the Women's Army Corps July 1943; first WAC battalion in England July 1943.
- Office of War Information: created June 1942, abolished September 1945, with an overseas office in London.
- Sir Oswald Mosley: detained under Regulation 18B, May 1940 to November 1943, then under house arrest.
- Interracial marriage: California's ban struck down in Perez v. Sharp (1948); nationwide in Loving v. Virginia (1967).
- Indian summer: a spell of warm weather in autumn, recorded in American English from the late eighteenth century (Crèvecœur, 1778).
- Studebaker: the postwar Studebaker cars were styled by Raymond Loewy's design studio and were known for their low, modern look.
Takeaways from Chapter 15
- The walk home is a farewell. Hadley tries to hold the ordinary street "as long as he could," knowing it is "changing, fading, altering," and the kitchen scene repeats the gesture until Ellen's voice ends it.
- The lie comes home in brown paper. The paintings he said he left at the Golds' are delivered to Ellen by "an older woman" with a huge dog, and the note inside announces Marsha's break with Ted. He reacts with fury, not joy.
- Marsha watches, then ambushes. The only long passage from her point of view shows Hadley as a charming salesman, then as a face through which "something awful" looks out.
- The decision was made the night before. The narrator first blames a random car, then admits that Hadley had decided "in the silent hours of the previous night" and that "he enjoyed hurting her."
- Love disgusts him. Her "I'm in love with you" strikes him as "an unspeakable depravity." He compares love talk to the Pledge of Allegiance and pop lyrics, and reduces everything to "simple biological reality."
- Beckheim is the measure both fail. Marsha's account ("Goodness is part of his physical body," "He's not for any one of us") is the novel's fullest portrait of him; the slur on the coast road showed her that "we're not worthy."
- Her history changes. Thirty-two, not twenty-six; still married, not divorced; three children, not two; a war in England and a meeting with Mosley that the dates make hard to believe.
- The motive is spoken. "I'm suffering. And I want to share it" is Hadley's plainest statement of himself so far.
- The "Yes" is forced. He makes her say it aloud, then asks to eat first, which sets up the motel and its violence in Chapter 16.
San Sebastian Heights
When and where. The same Friday night as the end of Chapter 15, late in August 1952, running past "almost one thirty" on Saturday morning. Places in order: a drive-in on the edge of Cedar Groves; the freeway south ("cars moving at high speed from San Francisco to San Jose"), which is the Bayshore Highway; a cutoff with "a gas station, a few roadside bars, some houses, a factory"; a hill road up to San Sebastian Heights, "a tract" overlooking "an immense housing development"; the subdivision's shopping centre; a motel with a red sign, "Third cottage to the right"; then back north across the freeway median to Cedar Groves, the Hadleys' apartment, a side street "by the rear loading platform of a locked-up grocery store," and the first bar downtown. San Sebastian Heights is fictional.
Who is here.
- Stuart Hadley: driving, then in command of every step; by the end "A harsh, cruel face, older than he remembered it."
- Marsha Frazier: thirty-two by her own latest account; frightened, hopeful, then assaulted and beaten.
- The drive-in girl: wraps the food and carries off "the little metal tray."
- A high school youth: white shirt, dark jeans, sideburns, walking to "his own hot rod."
- The motel manager: "a waddling figure in a heavy overcoat," red-faced and suspicious.
- Ellen, asleep, and Pete, taken from his bassinet.
- The bartender, "a stubbled gorilla of a man," and three other drinkers.
- Offstage: Dave and Laura Gold; Bob Sorrell, Hadley's brother-in-law ("The big bastard"); Beckheim.
Edition note and content warning. This chapter contains a rape, told from the rapist's point of view, followed by a beating. The guide names these acts for what they are and describes what happens, but does not quote the book's most graphic sentences; one of them also contains a word this guide does not use. Dialogue dashes appear as "..." in quotations.
The drive-in
"'It takes me back,' he said to Marsha."
"After a moment she murmured, 'In what way?'"
"'I haven't had a car since college. Sitting here like this reminds me of the old days, when I was dating Ellen. And before that; when I was a high school kid, like that fellow over there.'"
A carhop drive-in. The "little metal tray" is the tray that clipped to the car window at the classic carhop drive-in, where food was brought out to parked cars: the teenage meeting place of postwar California. Hadley "had the girl wrap them up," which means he is not planning to eat here. The place takes him back to dating Ellen. On the night he is about to betray her, his memory goes straight to their courtship, and it will go there again at the motel. "I haven't had a car since college" also tells us something about money: the Hadleys have no car, and he walks to work, and Marsha's little Studebaker is a luxury to him.
"A high school youth in a white shirt, sleeves rolled up, arms brown and fuzzy, wearing dark jeans, his heels scraping noisily, hair long and plastered down, sideburns all the way to his jaw, walked in front of the Studebaker to his own hot rod."
"'Were you like that?' Marsha asked feebly. She had begun to regain some of her poise. 'I can't believe it... You're so blond.'"
"'I dressed that way. Dave Gold and I both dressed that way, except that Dave wore a coat, a dirty brown tweed coat.'"
The boy he was. The youth is the uniform of the early 1950s tough kid: rolled sleeves, jeans, greased hair, long sideburns, a hot rod. Marsha's "You're so blond" says that she cannot picture the clean, fair young man in the role of a greaser; the remark ties back to her "sweet Nordic blond type" an hour ago. Hadley's memory brings in Dave Gold, his high school friend from the chess club and the Young People's meetings, in "a dirty brown tweed coat," the intellectual's version of the same costume.
"'Do you still see the Golds?' Marsha asked."
"Hadley sobered. 'No. Not since that day up in San Francisco when my brother-in-law dumped them off. That day they came to you for a ride.'"
"'They were certainly... chastened,' Marsha said. 'I never found out what happened; they just mumbled.'"
"'I dumped them,' Hadley said moodily. 'I sat there and let him walk over them. The big bastard... And I didn't do a thing; I joined in, actually.'"
The first confession of betrayal. The day in question is the July outing with his sister Sally and her husband Bob Sorrell, when Bob humiliated the Golds and left them in San Francisco, and they had to call Marsha for a ride home. Hadley now tells the truth about his part: "I sat there and let him walk over them... I joined in, actually." It is a frank admission, and it prepares the speech about loyalty in the motel, where he will say "I betrayed my friends... that was the worst of all." The Golds have been his oldest friends, and the novel has already shown him drifting from them; here he says that he dropped them.
Hadley takes the wheel
"He stepped from the car and came around behind it to the other side. Opening the door he said: 'Move over.'"
"Marsha edged uncertainly away from the wheel. 'Why?'"
"'I'm going to drive. I want to see how this thing runs.' Hadley slid in behind the wheel and slammed the door. 'Are you ready to go?'"
"'Yes,' Marsha said nervously, 'I guess so.'"
Taking control. In July Marsha always drove, and Hadley sat beside her, "the familiar interior" memorised from the passenger seat. Now he puts her in the passenger seat of her own car. It is a small act and a large one: from this moment every decision is his, and at the end of the night he will drive away in this car and leave her without it. Her "Yes... I guess so" is the second yes he has had from her tonight, and it is just as uncertain.
"Hadley started the car and backed it from the lot, onto the road. Beside him, the woman watched anxiously as he shifted into high and gained velocity."
"'You do well,' she said."
"'Why not? I've been driving since I was a kid.' Slowing for a light he said: 'This isn't a bad little car. Cold-blooded... It's sluggish as hell... but it's smooth.'"
"'It doesn't use much gas,' Marsha said. 'It's cheap to run.' She clutched the two bags of food, hers and Hadley's. 'Where... are we going?'"
"Cold-blooded." Applied to an engine, "cold-blooded" means slow to warm up and run smoothly from cold, and it is a fact we will see: at the end of the chapter it takes "five minutes to warm up the frozen motor." In Chapter 9 Marsha said the same thing in her own way, "Takes a minute to warm." The word also describes the man at the wheel tonight. Marsha's reply is a car owner's commonplace: the small Studebaker of these years, the Champion, was sold on its fuel economy. She holds both bags of food in her lap, the passenger now, and asks the only question that matters. He does not answer.
The suicide lane
"'Take it easy,' Marsha said faintly. To their left, beyond the dividing strip, searing headlights shot past in a bewildering trajectory. She squinted and sank down against the door. 'I don't like this lane...it's too close to the other side. And they go so darn fast.'"
The Bayshore at night. The road "from San Francisco to San Jose" along the Bay is the Bayshore Highway, US 101. Through the late 1940s and early 1950s it was being rebuilt as a divided freeway, three lanes each way with a median strip, after years as an undivided road so deadly it was known as "Bloody Bayshore." Hadley crosses two lanes in a moment and takes the inner lane, next to the "dividing strip," with oncoming headlights just beyond it. Marsha, a fast driver in town, is frightened here. The roles of Chapter 15 have reversed: then she drove recklessly and he sat sullen; now he drives at seventy and she sinks down against the door.
"Ignoring her, Hadley reached down and threw in the overdrive handle. Beneath them the motor sound instantly ceased; the car seemed to fly above the surface of the highway. There was no sound but the roar of wind, nothing visible except the whirr of headlights to their left. 'You keep this out?' Hadley asked her."
"'For town driving... I forget to put it back in.' Lamely she murmured, 'I'm not on the highway much; I'm usually driving around San Francisco.'"
How the overdrive worked. Many American cars of the period, Studebakers among them, offered an overdrive unit behind the three-speed gearbox, made by Borg-Warner. On the dashboard was a T-handle:
- Pulled out, it locked the overdrive out, so the car drove as an ordinary three-speed. Marsha keeps it out "for town driving."
- Pushed in ("threw in"), it allowed the overdrive to engage. Above about thirty miles an hour, when the driver lifted his foot briefly, the unit shifted into a higher ratio, so the engine turned more slowly for the same road speed.
- The result is just what Dick describes: the motor note drops away and the car seems to glide. Overdrive also saved fuel on the open road, which fits Marsha's "cheap to run."
The detail shows that Dick knew cars and that Hadley knows them better than their owner. It is one more small mastery: he is better than she is at her own machine.
"They were between towns. On each side of the highway lay black fields, and occasional power lines. The sky was overcast; the wind that rushed about the cabin was chill and acrid with the odor of the Bay."
"'Aren't you afraid you'll get a ticket?' Marsha asked apprehensively."
"'Not in suicide lane. It's almost impossible to stop a car driving in this lane.' A moment later he added: 'Anyhow, we're not going far.'"
"Suicide lane." The term first belonged to the shared middle lane of three-lane two-way highways, which drivers in both directions used for passing and where head-on crashes were common; the old Bayshore had such lanes, and they gave it its name. On a divided freeway it is a looser, darker joke for the fast lane against the median, where a patrol car would find it hard to pull a speeder over. The name is hard to miss on this night. Hadley is driving as if he did not mind dying, and "we're not going far" is both a fact and a threat.
"He eased the car over to the right and allowed it to drop down to sixty. When he was going fifty he cut into the extreme right-hand lane. To their left, cars swept past them and disappeared into the darkness beyond."
"Marsha shivered. 'It makes me a little sick, driving that fast. I always wonder what would happen if a tire blew.'"
"'We'd be Swiss steak.' Hadley slowed to forty, then to thirty-five. Ahead was a cutoff of sorts, a minor paved road leading to a cluster of neon-lit buildings: a gas station, a few roadside bars, some houses, a factory. At a little over thirty he made the turn and left the freeway."
"Swiss steak." The joke is grim and domestic. Swiss steak is a cheap cut of beef pounded flat and braised, a weeknight dinner of the period, the kind of meal Ellen would cook; Hadley means they would be beaten to pulp. The deceleration is told in numbers, seventy, sixty, fifty, forty, thirty-five, "a little over thirty," as precise as a driving lesson. He knows exactly where he is going, and Marsha has never been there.
San Sebastian Heights
"'Where are we?' Marsha asked."
"'Almost there. We'll be drinking our milk shakes soon.' He made a wide turn and brought the car around the far side of the cluster of buildings. Turning up a side road he shifted into second and began to climb the side of a gloomy hill. Trees and buildings wavered past on both sides; they were slowly rising into a small roadside town."
"'I've never been here before,' Marsha said, with visible distaste."
"'This is San Sebastian Heights... a tract.' The car had reached the top of the hill; Hadley brought it to a halt and pointed. Ahead of them the ground dropped breathtakingly; a wide valley lay spread out, a solid expanse of neatly arranged lights. They were looking down at an immense housing development, a subdivision so large that its edges were lost in the night haze."
"'Every house is exactly alike,' Hadley said as he let the car begin its descent. 'California ranch style, it's called.'"
The view from the hill. The chapter is named for this place, and the view is one of Dick's great images of the 1950s: a valley filled from edge to edge with "neatly arranged lights," every house "exactly alike." Marsha's "visible distaste" is the city intellectual's contempt for the suburbs, which Succubus would call the mass society. Hadley shows it to her almost with pride, as a local guide would. It is his world, the world of young couples buying their first house that his customers come from, and the tract is the future that Cedar Groves is turning into. The point is sharpened by what the motel is for: he has brought her to the edge of the suburb to do the thing the suburb hides.
"California ranch style." Outside facts on the house Hadley names:
- The ranch house, a long, low, single-storey house with an open plan, wide eaves and glass doors to a back garden, was made popular in the West above all by the designer Cliff May, whom Sunset magazine called the "Father of California Ranch Houses" in the 1930s.
- Sunset's book Western Ranch Houses (1946) spread the style to builders and buyers.
- After the war, May and the architect Chris Choate sold standard ranch plans to tract builders, and many thousands of nearly identical houses went up from them. The Bay Area Peninsula was one of the regions where such subdivisions spread fastest in the late 1940s and 1950s.
So Hadley's "Every house is exactly alike" is not a satirist's exaggeration: the tract ranch house was built from a few plans, repeated across whole valleys.
"'Here we are,' he said."
The new suburb, closed for the night. The tract comes with its own administration building and shopping centre: a supermarket, a dime store, a clothing and a shoe store, a drugstore, a bar, a filling station and a launderette. It is the self-contained suburb of the period, built all at once with the houses. At this hour only the drugstore and the bar are lit. There is no television store in the list, and Hadley, the salesman, does not remark on it.
The motel
"Ahead of them rose the luminous red sign of a motel. He shifted into second and crawled up the driveway, past the first ring of cottages, past the black square of lawn, and up to the cabin marked office. A Vacancy sign was out; Hadley came to a halt and pulled on the parking brake."
"'There's always an empty,' he explained leisurely. 'It's too far off the highway; they built it when most of these houses were for sale and people came down from San Francisco to look at them. Now this outfit can't pee a drop.'"
A business that has missed its moment. Hadley gives the motel's history like a businessman: it was built to lodge house-hunters from San Francisco while the tract was selling, and now that the houses are sold it stands too far from the highway to catch travellers. "This outfit can't pee a drop" is crude slang for a business that cannot make a cent. The analysis is the same kind of judgement he makes about Modern and its location. Its cottages stand in a ring round a lawn, the older auto-court layout of separate cabins.
"From the motel office came a waddling figure in a heavy overcoat. Muttering and peering, the man approached the car and flashed his light into the cabin. 'Evening,' he said suspiciously, examining the faces of the two people. 'One left; you're lucky.'"
"Hadley grinned starkly and reached for his wallet. 'Good for us. How much is that?'"
"'Four fifty,' the man grunted; in his heavy red face his eyes glittered and shifted. 'In-state, are you?'"
"'That's right,' Hadley agreed, a five-dollar bill held out. 'Which cottage is it?'"
"'What the hell,' the man said, resigned. 'No kids, I suppose.' He fumbled in the pocket of his overcoat for his receipt book. 'Yeah, I have to have the money in advance,' he said, accepting the bill. 'Some people get up before I do.'"
"One left; you're lucky." It is a lie, and both men know it; Hadley has just said "There's always an empty." The manager's questions are those of a man who knows what kind of couple he is looking at and wants to protect himself. "In-state, are you?" matters because of federal law: taking a woman across a state line for "immoral purposes" was a crime under the Mann Act, and a motel near a highway could be drawn into a case. "No kids, I suppose" is asked so that he can say, if needed, that he asked. "Money in advance" because couples like this leave before dawn. His "What the hell" is the shrug of a man who has decided not to care.
Why "In-state" mattered. Outside facts on the motel keeper's question:
- The White-Slave Traffic Act, called the Mann Act, became law on 25 June 1910. It made it a federal crime to transport a woman or girl across state lines "for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose."
- In Caminetti v. United States, decided on 15 January 1917, the Supreme Court held that the Act covered non-commercial affairs too. The case arose from two young married men from Sacramento who took their mistresses to Reno, across the Nevada line.
- For decades afterwards, the law was used against unmarried couples who crossed state lines, and hotel and motel keepers were wary of guests from out of state with no luggage.
A California couple staying in California were outside the federal law, whatever the state might think, so "In-state" was the answer that let the manager take the money. The detail is short and exact; Dick knew the world of the roadside motel.
The prices of the night. Using the change in the U.S. consumer price index from 1952 to 2024 (prices about 11.8 times higher), as a rough guide:
- The cottage: "Four fifty," paid with a five, about $53 today.
- Hadley's drink in the bar: he pushes forward a dollar bill, about $12.
- The money he leaves on the dresser for Marsha: a ten-dollar bill, about $118.
- What remains in his wallet: "Only thirteen dollars," about $154, near "the end of the month" before payday.
The ten dollars is more than twice the price of the room. It is far more than the bus or train fare back to San Francisco, which is why Hadley thinks she might "grasp the intended irony."
"With the stub of a lead pencil he wrote out the receipt, copying the names from the identification papers in Hadley's wallet."
"'Okay, Mr. and Mrs. Hadley,' he said, tearing off the receipt and handing it to them. 'Third cottage to the right.' He handed them the keys and waddled sullenly back to his office. 'Sweet dreams,' he said, and disappeared inside."
"Hadley promptly started the car. 'These places are more private,' he explained, 'once they let you in.'"
"Mr. and Mrs. Hadley." The manager copies Hadley's name from his identification and gives Marsha the name of Ellen. Neither of them corrects him. It is a small, bitter touch: on paper Marsha is his wife for the night, and the real Mrs. Hadley is asleep in Cedar Groves. "Sweet dreams" is the manager's sour joke.
The cottage
"In a moment they were parked in front of the dark little cottage. Hadley pocketed the car keys, shut off the lights, and slid out onto the gravel walk. As he mounted the steps to the cottage Marsha came slowly behind with the sacks of food. The door fell open, and the two of them entered, Hadley a step ahead as he felt for the light switch."
"'It would be hard to sin here,' he said as he pulled down the shades."
A monk's cell. The room is described in the language of religion: "a monk's cell," "austere," "ascetic," and Hadley's joke, "It would be hard to sin here." Dick sets the worst act in the novel in a place of bare white purity, which makes it look even worse, and it also recalls Beckheim's ascetic goodness, the religious world Hadley has turned his back on. "Hadley pocketed the car keys" is quietly important: from here on he holds the keys to her car. And the memory: "years ago he had brought girls to this motel...one of them had been Ellen." He has brought Marsha to the place where he once brought his wife before their marriage, so the night is a repetition as well as a betrayal. The inspection of the bathroom and shower is a man checking that his memory holds.
"'Yes, they certainly keep it nice,' Marsha admitted. Shivering, she began wandering fretfully around. 'It's cold; light the heater, won't you?'"
"Hadley touched a match to the dwarf gas heater, and in a moment the room sweated with warmth. He lit a floor lamp and turned off the glaring overhead bulb. In the softer light the colors of the woman's clothes attracted his attention; he noticed for the first time that instead of slacks she was wearing a brightly colored print blouse and a tweed skirt."
"Amused, he observed: 'I'd hardly know it was you.'"
"Self-consciously, Marsha lifted her hands to her breasts. 'Why do you say that?'"
"'You look almost feminine. It does you good... that outfit works out nice.'"
The skirt. In July Marsha wore slacks, the uniform of the bohemian woman of the period, and Hadley read her as hard and mannish. Tonight she wore a print blouse and the tweed skirt he grabbed in the car, clothes chosen, perhaps, for him. He notices only now, "for the first time," and his compliment is an insult: "almost feminine." Her hands go to her breasts as they went to her clothes in the car when he stared at her: she is afraid of being looked at, and she has reason to be.
"He threw himself down on a stiff straight-backed chair and accepted the two paper sacks of food. As he laid out the packages and white pasteboard cartons he said: 'I'd be willing to bet we're the only people here. I didn't see any other cars; it's possible all the other cabins are empty.'"
"'Don't say that,' Marsha said apprehensively. 'It's so morbid; I saw lights in some of them, I think.'"
"'Ghosts,' Hadley pronounced."
"'Stop it!' Marsha paced tautly around the room, long-legged, lithe. 'Do you have your cigarettes? I left mine in the car.'"
Alone in the court. Hadley enjoys frightening her with emptiness: no other cars, perhaps no other guests, only "Ghosts." The talk makes plain that no one would hear her, which the next hours will prove. Her "Stop it!" is the first of several pleas, and it is the one he obeys, because it costs him nothing.
"Hadley tossed her his pack. Carefully, he pulled the lid from a pasteboard carton. It contained ice-cold grapefruit juice; it was the only kind of juice he had been able to find. Gratefully, he gulped it down. Presently Marsha seated herself and daintily unwrapped a chicken-salad sandwich."
"'I wish we had something hot,' she murmured. 'To cheer me up.' Eyes large and dark she said: 'I'm lonely. All you do is just sit... drinking that damn juice.' Plaintively, she went on: 'I wish you'd pay some attention to me.'"
"'I will,' Hadley said soberly."
The juice at last. In Chapter 15, tired after thirteen hours, he wished for "Orange juice, plenty of it. Cold and thin and clear." The drive-in had only grapefruit, and he drinks it "Gratefully." His body's simple wants are still the gentlest thing about him. Marsha wants something else: warmth and attention. "I will," said "soberly," is a promise that becomes a threat. Then the meal is laid out exactly: his milk shake and ham and cheese sandwich, her chicken salad and the potato chips "the girl had scooped into the bottom of the sacks."
"He finished his juice and opened his milk shake. Sipping it, he began gnawing placidly on his ham and cheese sandwich. Marsha nibbled unhappily on the potato chips the girl had scooped into the bottom of the sacks."
The phone call he does not make
"'There's a pay phone up at the office,' Hadley said."
"'Who do you want to call?'"
"'My wife.'"
"'Oh,' Marsha said, her cheeks coloring. 'Well, maybe you ought to...' She glanced up bravely. 'What are you going to tell her?'"
"'It's Friday night; I usually disappear Friday nights. For my regular weekly binge.'"
"'Doesn't she mind?'"
"'She minds,' Hadley said, 'but she's not surprised.'"
"My regular weekly binge." He mentions the call and never makes it; nothing in the chapter shows him going to the office. The joke about a "weekly binge" may be a lie meant to shock Marsha, or a truth the novel has not shown us. Nothing earlier depicts Hadley disappearing on Friday nights, and his talk of Ellen tonight does not fit a man who drinks every week. Either way, Ellen is waiting at home with no word, and "She minds... but she's not surprised" makes her into a wife who has given up expecting anything better.
The face he cannot hold. This is a startling confession, given in the narrator's voice. Away from Ellen, Hadley loses her image; early in the marriage he feared he would pass her in the street without knowing her. Set beside the opening of Chapter 15, where he tried so hard to hold the street and the kitchen "as long as possible," it shows the other side of that effort: he cannot keep people in his mind unless they are in front of him. It also echoes Ellen's "I didn't recognize her" about Marsha. The theme of the novel's title is a voice from the street that cannot reach anyone, and here is a husband who cannot remember his wife's face.
"Neither of us has a trace of loyalty"
"'I would have gone to bed with you,' he said aloud to Marsha, 'even though I'm married... even though I've got a son. But you wouldn't go to bed with me.'"
"'No,' Marsha said tightly. 'I couldn't.'"
"'You almost did.' He grinned ironically. 'If I had taken off my shoes, you would have.'"
"Marsha's thin fingers tore apart her chicken-salad sandwich. 'Maybe. I don't know now. I wanted to.'"
Back to July. He returns to the back-road night of Chapter 12 as a man returns to a wound. "If I had taken off my shoes" is a sour joke about how close it came, and her answer, tearing the sandwich apart, is honest: "I wanted to." She has said it twice now, in the car and here. He believes her, as he said in Chapter 15, and it makes no difference.
"'Let's face it,' Hadley said. 'We're both the same...neither of us has a trace of loyalty in us. You'd betray Beckheim; I'd betray my wife. We're doing it now.'"
"'I don't consider that I'm betraying Ted. I left him; he knows we're finished.'"
"'You betrayed him when you first showed up at the store that day. And I betrayed Ellen a long time ago. Maybe that's what's wrong with us... Maybe that's why we can't find roots anywhere. We've cut our roots by our lack of loyalty. Who are you loyal to? Anybody?'"
"Marsha didn't answer."
Loyalty as roots. Hadley's theory is that a person without loyalty to people cannot have roots, and a person without roots cannot believe in anything. He dates Marsha's betrayal of Beckheim to "when you first showed up at the store that day," the day she first came into Modern, and his own betrayal of Ellen to "a long time ago," before Marsha existed for him. It is a moral argument made by a man about to commit the worst betrayal of all, and the irony is that it is true. Marsha has no answer to "Who are you loyal to?" because she has spent her life, by her own account, moving from one man and one cause to the next.
"The fault is in me." This is Hadley's most complete self-diagnosis in the novel, and it is lucid. He has been loyal only to "an abstract ideal" (the Watchmen's message, art, the dream of a better life), never to a person: not to Fergesson, who has just made him manager; not to Ellen; not to the Golds, whose humiliation he confessed at the drive-in an hour ago; not to "my country, the society into which I was born." Then the turn inward: the search for "somebody I can put my faith in" fails because the fault is his own. The phrase echoes Cassius in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves," turned into a confession. It is a speech of real insight, and the chapter's horror is that insight changes nothing. He understands himself perfectly and goes on.
"Marsha said: 'But we're rebels, Stuart. We're trying to bring in a different world.'"
"'We're not rebels... we're traitors.'"
"There was silence."
Rebels and traitors. Marsha reaches for the romantic self-image of Succubus and the Society: rebels bringing "a different world." Hadley denies it in a sentence that may be the novel's moral summary of both of them. In the language of 1952, the year of loyalty boards, "traitor" was the heaviest word there was, and Hadley turns it on himself. Dick gives the silence after it a paragraph of its own.
"'And,' Hadley finished, pulling down the window shade, 'we're not even loyal to each other. Do you trust me? I sure as hell don't trust you; I know you'll run out on me the same way you ran out on Beckheim when it suited your whim. We're both worthless to the core.'"
"'Don't say that,' Marsha protested. Jerkily, she reached toward him. 'Here, have some of my chicken-salad sandwich; I can't finish it.'"
"Hadley bellowed with laughter. 'All right,' he said. 'Maybe that'll change things. I'll celebrate my understanding of myself. If we had something to drink we could make it a real occasion.'"
The sandwich. Marsha's answer to "worthless to the core" is to offer him half her sandwich, a gesture so small and motherly that he roars with laughter. It is the most human moment she has in the chapter, and it shows that she cannot meet his argument; she can only try to feed him. "I'll celebrate my understanding of myself" is bitter wit, and the wish for a drink is the cue for the bottle.
"Giving him the sandwich, Marsha said: 'I'm going out to the car; I'll be right back.' She opened the door and quickly disappeared outside into the darkness. He could hear her crunching rapidly across the gravel, opening up the car, and rummaging inside it."
"A moment later she returned with a fifth of Haig and Haig. Closing the door after her she held the bottle up breathlessly, her cheeks flushed, out of breath and panting. 'Okay?' she gasped."
"'Okay,' Hadley said, taking the bottle from her. The woman's hands were icy; the bottle itself was moist with night mists. 'You better go over and stand in front of the heater,' he told her. 'I'll pour.'"
A fifth of Haig and Haig. Haig and Haig was a well-known blended Scotch whisky, sold in the United States in its famous pinched bottle; a "fifth" is a fifth of a U.S. gallon, four-fifths of a quart (about 757 millilitres), the standard spirits bottle in America until metric sizes replaced it around 1980. A good Scotch kept in the car is part of Marsha's style, and she brings it like a gift, breathless, eager to please. The car must have been left unlocked; Hadley still has the keys he pocketed. Her icy hands and the misty bottle carry the cold into the room. "I'll pour" puts the drink, like everything else, in his hands.
The whiskey
"He emptied the remains of the milk shakes into the bowl in the bathroom, washed out the pasteboard cartons, and tilted the whiskey into them. Marsha was sitting in a little heap on the couch when he returned, her eyes wide, hands pressed together, face drooping and sad."
"'What's the matter?' Hadley asked."
"'I... didn't think it would be this way.' She smiled forlornly up at him, her lips twisting. 'I was coming back to you; everything was going to be wonderful. The two of us...you know.' She accepted her cup. 'Thank you.'"
Scotch in milk-shake cartons. There are no glasses, so a good whisky goes into rinsed paper cartons that held milk shakes: the luxury and the cheapness of the night in one image. Marsha's "I didn't think it would be this way" is the collapse of the hope behind her note: she came back for a love affair and has been given a cross-examination. Her polite "Thank you" for the cup is pitiful.
"'Haven't you felt that way each time?' Hadley asked relentlessly. 'Whenever you pick up a new one, don't you hope it'll be the one?'"
"Marsha huddled together and gazed miserably down at the floor. Mutely, she shook her head."
"'I know I always do,' Hadley continued inexorably. He sipped the whiskey and stood watching her. In him there was almost no feeling for the woman; in a kind of detached way he enjoyed what he was doing. 'I guess I'll keep on,' he said, 'until I get too old to hope.'"
"'Drink your whiskey,' Hadley said."
"Dutifully, like an abandoned child, she lifted her cup and drank."
Drink that clarifies. For some drinkers alcohol blurs; for Hadley tonight it sharpens. His thoughts become "cold and hard-etched," the room "metallic, brilliant," and the people in it unreal, "imitation and artificial." This is the first clear appearance of a feeling that runs through Dick's later fiction: the sense that the world is a fake, a stage set, and that other people may not be real. Here it is not metaphysics but dissociation, the mental state that lets a man do something terrible while feeling nothing. "No escape for him" means that drink will not even give him the excuse of being drunk.
"'Drink,' he said again, harshly."
"For an instant the woman sat gripping the bulky pasteboard cup. Then wretchedly, convulsively, her fingers clenched around it; the cardboard crumpled and gave; dark rivulets of whiskey oozed through her fingers and onto the carpet. A pool of liquid, like animal urine, formed at her feet. Her head fell forward; she slid limply down, in a loose heap."
The cup breaks. Ordered twice to drink, she crushes the cup instead, and her collapse is shown through the spilled whisky, described with deliberate ugliness as "like animal urine." The image degrades her as the night will, and it recalls the phrase Hadley used in the car in Chapter 15, when her talk of sex disgusted him: "an animal layer." She is not drunk; she is broken.
"Hadley set down his cup and knelt beside her. 'I'm sorry,' he said. But still he felt nothing at all; the inside of him was frigid as iron. Putting his hand out he brushed her dark auburn hair back from her eyes. 'I don't mean it. I'm tired.'"
"She nodded."
"'And it's this damn stuff.' He stood up, grabbed the cup of whiskey, carried it to the door, and tossed it outside. The cup splattered against the steps; he slammed the door and turned back to Marsha."
Gestures without feeling. He kneels, apologises, strokes her hair, blames fatigue and then the drink, and throws his own cup out of the door. Every one of these is a kind gesture, and the narrator tells us that "still he felt nothing at all; the inside of him was frigid as iron." The distance between act and feeling is the chapter's key. "I don't mean it. I'm tired" is what a husband says after a quarrel; Hadley says it as a formula.
"'I'm okay,' she said. 'Will you get me my purse? I put it on the dresser.'"
"He found her purse and handed it to her. Marsha wiped her eyes, blew her nose, and sat clutching her handkerchief."
"'Do you want to go back?' Hadley asked her."
"'Do you?'"
"It was a good question. But he had already thought out his answer; he had known how he felt before he left the store. 'No,' he said. 'I'm not going back. I'm going through with this.'"
"'Me, too,' she whispered. She got unsteadily to her feet and turned toward the bathroom. 'Excuse me. I'll be right out. Please.'"
The last way out. He offers her the chance to go back, and she turns the question round. His answer was "thought out" in advance, "before he left the store," which matches Chapter 15's decision "in the silent hours of the previous night." The purse "on the dresser" is where, three hours later, he will leave the ten-dollar bill. Her "Me, too" is a whisper, given by a woman who has been crying on the floor; the novel shows what kind of consent this is, and the next scenes show that even this much is taken back and overridden.
"It did not seem really to be his sole property"
"When she came out she was smiling. She had washed her face and put on a little makeup. But her eyes were swollen and red; her lips trembled as she approached him. 'I guess I don't look very appealing,' she said pathetically."
"'You look good enough,' Hadley answered noncommittally. She had brushed her hair and put on some kind of scent; cologne, probably. Or perfumed deodorant. He didn't especially care; to him, the woman was an empty, depersonalized shape without particular attraction."
"He was conscious of the core of resentment he had carried as long as he could recall; beyond that there was not much else. And the resentment itself was not something he completely understood, or controlled... It did not seem really to be his sole property."
The resentment that is not his. This is the key passage for understanding Hadley in the novel, and it explains the "something awful" that Marsha saw at the crosswalk. Under everything there is a "core of resentment" as old as his memory, which he neither understands nor controls, and which "did not seem really to be his sole property." It belongs, the sentence suggests, to something larger than him: his class, his generation, the frustrated young men of the postwar boom, perhaps the "archaic fury" the novel named in him earlier. It is a striking idea and a dangerous one. The novel uses it to show how a man can feel that his violence is impersonal, almost borrowed, and it never lets that feeling count as an excuse: every step tonight is "thought out," chosen and carried out by him. Against it stands Marsha, reduced in his eyes to "an empty, depersonalized shape," the classic precondition for cruelty.
"Bring your lunch pail"
"Wistfully, Marsha said: 'Would you do something for me? As a sort of present?'"
"'What is it?'"
"'I wish you'd kiss me first.'"
"Hadley smiled. 'You'll do. Bring your lunch pail.'"
"'What does that mean?'"
"'An Army phrase. It means...' He put his hands on her thin shoulders. 'That's difficult to say. In this case it means that you make me feel a little ashamed.'"
A phrase that means shame. "Bring your lunch pail" sounds like the language of the working man and the barracks: turn up, be ready to work. Hadley calls it "An Army phrase" (this guide has not been able to trace it as a fixed expression; see the flags), and then gives it a meaning of his own, "you make me feel a little ashamed." Her request for a kiss, "As a sort of present," is so humble that it shames him for a moment, and he hides the shame in a joke she cannot understand. It is the last flicker of feeling in him before the bed.
The end of awe. In June and July Marsha was the brilliant editor, older, worldly, "haughty, erudite," and Hadley was in awe of her. Without the pose, she is "frail and slight," and his awe has gone. The novel's whole movement between them is in this sentence: the woman who intimidated him has become a person he can hurt. He allows the embrace "For an interval" and then turns his back.
"'Not the couch,' he decided. 'There's a little sort of bed that slides out; it's more comfortable.'"
"'All right,' she said hopelessly."
"They slid the bed out from the inner workings of the couch. In the dresser Marsha found sheets and blankets. Carefully, intently, she made the bed; the sheets were crisp and starched and perfectly white."
"As she straightened up, Hadley snapped off the lamp. The room dropped into darkness, except for the gleam from the bathroom light filtering past the half-opened door. 'Is the front door locked?' he asked her."
"'You... think it would be a good idea?'"
"'I think so,' he said, going over to turn the bolt. 'This time, at least.'"
"This time, at least." He knows the motel's slide-out bed, more of the memory of earlier visits. Marsha makes it "Carefully, intently," like a wife, and the starched white sheets continue the room's purity. "This time, at least" points back to some other time, perhaps the parked car with its doors open on the back road in July, perhaps the earlier nights in this motel; the novel does not say which. Either way, he turns the bolt himself, and it seals her in.
The rape
Content note. This section describes a rape and a beating. The guide states plainly what happens and quotes the words spoken, but it does not reproduce the novel's most physical sentences.
"Hadley removed his tie clasp and loosened his necktie. 'Let's go,' he said. 'Take your clothes off.'"
"Her fingers plucked helplessly at the zipper of her skirt. 'I...,' she began, and broke off."
"'Could... I have a cigarette first?' she begged."
"'No.' He took hold of her and moved her toward the bed; she stumbled and sank down, groping for something to hold on to. 'Come on; let's not stall around.'"
Orders. From "Let's go" onward Hadley speaks only in commands, and Marsha only in broken beginnings ("I...") and requests he refuses. A cigarette, a few minutes, is the smallest thing she could ask for, and he says "No." "Let's not stall around" treats her fear as a delay. The two of them undress without speaking or looking at each other; nothing in the scene resembles the lovemaking she came back for.
"Marsha pushed the blankets aside with her body; she slid to the far side, against the wall, and he got in beside her. For a moment he gazed impassively down at her; under his cold scrutiny the woman fearfully drew away, legs tight together, shoulders hunched, arms folded rigidly. Finally, when he didn't say anything, she blurted: 'Stuart, for God's sake, please stop it. Please leave me alone!'"
"Methodically, he reached down and caressed her. ... She gave a little moan and shrank away, jamming herself against the wall until he took hold of her and firmly pulled her back."
"'It's too late to back out,' he said. 'You made the bed; now get ready to lay.'"
"Please stop it. Please leave me alone!" Whatever she whispered earlier ("Me, too"), Marsha withdraws it here in the plainest words there are, and her body says the same: drawn away against the wall, legs together, arms folded. Hadley's answer, "It's too late to back out," is the rapist's argument that consent once given cannot be taken back, and his pun on the bed she has just made ("now get ready to lay") turns her own care into a trap. What follows is rape. The novel narrates it at some length; the guide will not reproduce it. In summary: he forces himself on her while she shrieks and struggles, and he watches her "calmly... from a great distance," feeling nothing, until she pushes him away.
"Without comprehension, she watched him stub out his cigarette, take hers from her, and stub that out, too. It wasn't until he again pushed her down and tossed the sheet aside that she realized it had only begun. Bitterly, furiously, she fought; she struck him on the chest, scratched his face, bit him, screamed and cursed and wailed, tried futilely to kick him away."
The second time. The pause is the cruelest part. He gives her the cigarette he refused before, as if the worst were over, and then takes it away. Her curled "fetal posture," the body of a hurt child, is to him only "something to think about." The second assault she fights with everything she has: blows, scratches, bites, screams, curses, kicks. There can be no doubt in any reader's mind, and Dick leaves none, that this is rape. The narrator gives the motive in the language of the resentment passage: "Without emotion, his mind aloof and remote," Hadley pours into her "all his hatred, all the misery, the resentment, that lay like a dank, stagnant pool deep inside him." Sex has become, for him, a way to discharge hatred onto someone else's body.
A CLOSER LOOK: how the novel tells the rape.
- It does not soften it. For a 1952 manuscript, the scene is extraordinary in its frankness: no fade-out, no hint that she "really" wanted it, no romantic language. Her refusals are given in direct speech, and his coldness is stated again and again ("frigid as iron," "impassively," "Methodically," "Without emotion"). Many novels of the period presented forced sex as seduction; this one presents it as violence.
- But the camera stays with him. We are inside Hadley's detachment, not her terror. Marsha is "the woman" and, at the worst moment, "the girl," a grown woman older than Hadley described with the word men of the period used for women of any age. The narration's own coldness risks sharing the act's view of her as a body.
- The novel ties it to a pattern. The forced "Yes" he demanded in the car in Chapter 15, the refusal of the cigarette, the bolted door, the order to drink, the ten dollars left on the dresser: everything is control. This is the reading that the text supports most strongly, and it matches what is now understood about rape as an act of power and hatred more than desire.
- The resentment passage. The passage before the bed can be read as a theory that something larger than Hadley acts through him. The novel does not let that become an excuse; he plans, measures, and chooses at every step. A reader should hold both: Dick is trying to understand where such hatred comes from, and he shows a man fully responsible for it.
After
"When he had finished with her he got up from the bed and covered her with the sheet and blankets. The night was bitterly cold; it was almost one thirty. Marsha lay in a shivering stupor, breathing harshly through her mouth, her body wet and slack, arms dangling limply at her sides. She stirred a little as he brushed her hair away from her face..."
"Silently, without turning on the light, Hadley put on his clothes. He was standing by the dresser, fixing his necktie and buttoning his cuffs, when the woman spoke."
"'Stuart?' she whispered."
"He came momentarily over. 'What do you want?'"
"'I guess you're leaving.'"
"'That's right.'"
"'In the car?'"
"Hadley sat down to put on his shoes. 'I'll leave you enough money to get back to town; it's on the dresser.'"
"After an interval she managed to say: 'Thanks.'"
"Thanks." He covers her and brushes back her hair, the same gestures as after the whisky, and dresses in the dark with the care of a man going to work: tie, cuffs, shoes. Her questions show that she has understood everything. "In the car?" means: you are taking my car. His answer avoids the question and tells her about the money instead. And she thanks him, the reflex of politeness surviving in a woman in shock. It is one of the most painful words in the book.
"Hadley put on his coat and examined himself in the bathroom mirror. His face was stark, expressionless. A harsh, cruel face, older than he remembered it. The soft, puffy flesh around his neck seemed gone; the cloudy blue of his eyes had faded to a bleak stonelike color, without trace of emotion."
The mirror. Earlier in the novel his face was "pale and puffy" in the mornings, the face of a soft young man. Tonight the mirror shows "A harsh, cruel face, older," with eyes the colour of stone. The change is in the narration as if it were physical, as if the night had remade his face to match what Marsha saw at the crosswalk, "something awful" looking out "through his eyes." It is the face of the man the rest of the novel will follow.
"Turning away from the mirror, he reentered the living room and stopped to bend over the prone form of the woman. Marsha dragged herself up a little on the bed and tried to make him out; she reached up hesitantly, started to speak, wanted to touch him."
"'Stuart?' she said."
"'What?'"
"For a moment she rested silently, leaning against the wall, watching him, trying to speak, struggling to find something to say. He could see it all in her face; he stood waiting dispassionately, prepared to hear anything she had to offer."
"'Take... care of yourself,' she said feebly."
"'I will,' he said. And very deliberately raised his arm."
The beating
"Instantly, animal-like, she rolled back down; with a faint moan she crawled to one side and scrabbled from the bed, covers clutching and dragging at her. As she crossed in front of him he measured the distance, calculated her swiftly moving body, the direction of her panic, and then smashed her slightly below the cheekbone, aiming at her faintly luminous teeth."
"He could not see what became of her. In the darkness she sank back against the bed, plucking soundlessly at her face, turning on her side, thrashing and trying to creep away from the bed. He leaned over, located her head, and systematically battered her with his open hand. She snarled, a hoarse grunt of hatred and pain, and clawed viciously up at him."
"'Crazy!' she spat saliva and blood. 'You're a crazy beast!' She threw up her hands and shuddered away from him; her voice became aimless, a random jumble of terror. 'Beast...' He followed after her."
The door closed after him, and cut off the sight."
"Take care of yourself." Her last words to him are tender, almost a mother's, said after he has raped her twice, and he answers "I will" and raises his arm. Nothing provokes the beating; it is planned in the very sentence: "very deliberately," "measured the distance, calculated." The open hand, used "systematically," is a detail that makes it worse, the blow of a man punishing a child or a servant. Her "You're a crazy beast!" is the only judgement anyone in the novel speaks to his face tonight, and it is spoken through blood. "He followed after her" leaves the rest unsaid. The last sentence is cinematic: the door closes "and cut off the sight," as if Hadley, and the narrator with him, simply stop looking.
The car, the baby and the bar
Stealing her car. He takes Marsha's Studebaker with the keys he pocketed when they arrived, leaving her beaten, without a car, at a motel miles from the city in the small hours. "Takes a minute to warm," Marsha said of the same car in July; tonight it takes five. To get back north he drives straight across the freeway's median strip, illegal and dangerous, the reckless driving of the suicide lane turned into a getaway.
"When he reached Cedar Groves he turned off the freeway, into the town. The streets were dark and deserted. He reached his own apartment house without incident, parked his car with the motor still running, and hurried up the steps and down the corridor."
"Ellen was asleep when he entered. Soundlessly, he passed through the bedroom to Pete's bassinet. With a jagged sweep he gathered up the baby along with his blankets: he carried the bundle back out, through the living room, and into the corridor."
"A moment later he climbed back into the Studebaker. He carefully wrapped Pete in the wool blankets and placed him on the backseat. The baby stirred fretfully; a few dismal wails bubbled from between his wet lips. Hadley slammed the car door and started it forward. He turned the corner and headed for the downtown section."
He takes Pete. This is the chapter's last shock, and it is told without any explanation. Hadley goes home, passes his sleeping wife without a word, takes his baby son from the bassinet "With a jagged sweep," and drives away. Ellen will wake to find the baby gone and no word from her husband. "Carefully wrapped" is the one sign of tenderness: he wraps the child in wool and lays him on the back seat. What he means to do with Pete the chapter does not say; the closing lines speak of a "plan." Earlier in the same day, talking to Alice, he said of the world, "I won't get out from under it... Maybe Pete will," and "Maybe somebody will survive." The theft of the child may be connected to that wish; the next chapters must answer.
A baby left in a locked car. Hadley leaves Pete, an infant, alone on the back seat of a locked car on a dark side street on a night described as "bitterly cold," and goes drinking. The windows are rolled up "Cautiously," which shows that he is thinking of the child's safety in some sense, from the cold or from strangers. It is still child endangerment by any standard, then or now, and the reader is meant to feel the danger.
"Hunched over at the counter, he got out his wallet and examined the contents. He had left a ten-dollar bill on the dresser for Marsha... He wondered if she would grasp the intended irony. Only thirteen dollars remained in the wallet; it was nearing the end of the month and his paycheck was just about due."
"'What'll it be?' asked the bartender, a stubbled gorilla of a man. The only other patrons were two hulking Negro laborers and a demure pimpish-looking youth in a black leather jacket, a bottle of beer before him, a toothpick between his lips."
"'Scotch and water,' Hadley said, pushing a dollar bill forward. 'No ice.'"
Prejudice in the bar description. The narration describes the bartender as "a stubbled gorilla of a man" and the other drinkers as "two hulking Negro laborers" and a "pimpish-looking youth." "Negro" was the usual polite term of 1952, but here it is joined to "hulking" in a passage that uses animal and criminal imagery to make the late-night bar look menacing. The scene does not reflect on this, and a modern reader should notice the stereotype.
"Thirteen dollars wouldn't carry him far. Enough for this evening, perhaps; but it wouldn't last beyond that. And he could not possibly get his plan into motion tonight; he would have to wait until Saturday night."
"Sooner or later he would have to stop at the store. He needed his paycheck... The thought stuck in his mind, lodged there as he accepted his drink and gulped it down, methodically, systematically. The first of a series."
The plan. The chapter ends with the word "plan" and no explanation of it. Hadley needs money, so he will have to go to Modern for his paycheck, to the store where, that very day, he worked his first day as manager; the plan cannot start until "Saturday night." The last words repeat the words of the beating: "methodically, systematically." He drinks as he beat her, as a task, the first drink "of a series." Whatever the plan is, it involves the child sleeping in the locked car outside and a man who has cut, in a single night, every tie he spoke of: wife, lover, employer, friend.
How the chapter is built
The chapter is a single journey, out and back, and it gets darker at every stop. It begins in the warm light of a drive-in, with Hadley remembering his youth and the Golds, and moves through his taking of the wheel and the reckless run down the Bayshore to the hilltop view of San Sebastian Heights, the suburb of identical houses. Then it narrows: the shopping centre with only a drugstore and a bar lit, the motel office, the monk's-cell cottage, the bed. Inside the cottage the scenes come in an order that reads like a trial: food and talk; the phone call he does not make and the wife whose face he cannot hold; his confession that neither of them has any loyalty; the whisky and her collapse; the offer to turn back, refused; the resentment that "did not seem really to be his sole property"; the kiss; then the rape, the pause, the second rape, and the beating. The last movement reverses the outward drive at speed, across the median strip, home to take the baby, and on to a bar, where the chapter ends on the word "plan" and a drink taken "methodically, systematically." The narrator stays with Hadley throughout, as Chapter 15's second half stayed with Marsha, and the coldness of his mind becomes the coldness of the telling.
The shape of the chapter. Out and back. On the way out Hadley talks about the past (the Golds, the girls he once brought to the motel, Ellen); in the cottage he talks about himself with real insight ("the fault is in me," "we're traitors"); and then insight turns into action with no change in direction. Each of Marsha's attempts to reach him (the milk shakes, the half sandwich, the whisky, the kiss, "Take care of yourself") is met by a harder act. The chapter's moral point is in that sequence: self-knowledge does not stop him, and the more clearly he sees himself, the more coldly he goes on.
| The back road (July, Chapter 12) | San Sebastian Heights (August) | |
|---|---|---|
| Who drives | Marsha, in her own Studebaker, there and back | Hadley, after "Move over," and then alone in her car |
| The drink | Jameson, a fifth she bought "for us," drunk lukewarm from one glass | A fifth of Haig and Haig from her car, drunk from milk-shake cartons |
| Where | A parked car on a gravel road at midnight, doors open | A bolted motel cottage at the edge of a tract |
| What drives Hadley | "Not a sexual thing" but "a gathering drive for revenge" | "Almost no feeling for the woman"; "frigid as iron"; the old "resentment" |
| Her refusal | She gives in, then refuses: "No, I'm not going to"; tonight she remembers it as "I couldn't" | "Please stop it. Please leave me alone!"; this time he does not stop |
| How it ends | A slur, a slap, and a silent drive home at seventy | A beating, ten dollars on the dresser, and her car taken |
Flags for this chapter.
- "His car." After the motel the narration says Hadley "parked his car with the motor still running." The car is Marsha's Studebaker, which he has taken; the phrase may reflect his point of view, or it may be a slip.
- Cold in August. The night is "bitterly cold" and "frigid," and the Studebaker's motor is "frozen" and takes five minutes to warm. Bay Area nights can be cool and foggy in late summer, but frost is very unlikely; the language is emotional weather more than meteorology.
- "Saturday night." At about 1:30 a.m. it is already Saturday, so "he would have to wait until Saturday night" means the coming evening, nearly a day away. Read it that way, not as "tonight."
- "Bring your lunch pail." Hadley calls it "An Army phrase." This guide could not trace it as a fixed Army expression; it may be soldiers' slang Dick knew, or his invention. Hadley's own gloss is the only meaning the text gives it. It is also odd in his mouth: Ellen says earlier in the novel that he has a certificate saying he is "permanently ineligible," so he never served, so the phrase is borrowed.
- The suicide lane on a divided road. The "suicide lane" was properly the shared middle lane of a three-lane highway, used for passing in both directions. The Bayshore freeway sections had a median, so Hadley's use of the term for the fast lane is loose speech.
- "Mr. and Mrs. Hadley." The manager copies "the names" from Hadley's papers, which can only give his name; Marsha is entered under his. Not an error, but worth noticing.
- "Each time" and "always." Hadley's "I know I always do" and the girls he brought here "years ago" suggest a past of affairs that the novel has not otherwise shown; his "regular weekly binge" on Fridays is also new and may be a taunt rather than a fact.
- "The girl." The narration calls Marsha "the girl" in the rape passage, though she is older than Hadley; this is period usage, and in that passage it reads badly.
- The baby. Pete is left alone in a locked car outside a bar at night. The chapter does not comment.
- Prejudice. The bar description ("a stubbled gorilla of a man," "two hulking Negro laborers," "pimpish-looking") uses animal and criminal imagery, with the period term "Negro" attached to menace.
- Its comparison table set the July "No, I'm not going to" against a forced "Yes" here; the forced "Yes" belongs to the car in Chapter 15, and tonight's words are "please stop it."
Outside facts checked for this chapter.
- The Bayshore Highway: opened in the 1920s and 1930s as a fast road down the Peninsula, nicknamed "Bloody Bayshore" for its accident rate (in 1939 alone, 276 accidents and 19 deaths were recorded). Rebuilt as a divided freeway in stages from the late 1940s, with three lanes each way and a wide median; finished to San Jose in 1962.
- "Suicide lane": a popular name for the centre lane of a three-lane highway, shared by traffic passing in both directions.
- Overdrive: Borg-Warner overdrive units, controlled by a dashboard T-handle and engaged above a set speed by lifting the foot from the throttle, were offered on Studebakers and other American cars of the period.
- California ranch house: popularised by Cliff May, called by Sunset magazine the "Father of California Ranch Houses"; Sunset's Western Ranch Houses appeared in 1946; May and Chris Choate later sold standard plans to tract builders across the West.
- The Mann Act (White-Slave Traffic Act), signed 25 June 1910; Caminetti v. United States, 242 U.S. 470, decided 15 January 1917, extended it to non-commercial affairs in a case of a Sacramento to Reno trip.
- Haig and Haig: a blended Scotch whisky brand, sold in the U.S. in its pinched bottle; a "fifth" (four-fifths of a quart, about 757 ml) was the standard American spirits bottle until metric sizes came in around 1980.
- Prices: U.S. consumer prices rose roughly 11.8 times from 1952 to 2024, which gives the conversions in the money box.
Takeaways from Chapter 16
- The drive-in brings back his youth. Waiting for milk shakes, Hadley remembers the Golds and the friends he dropped; the memory of an earlier betrayal opens a night of worse ones.
- He takes the wheel. "Move over" begins the reversal of July: he drives her car at seventy in the suicide lane, and from then on everything is in his hands, including her keys.
- San Sebastian Heights is the suburb seen from above. "Every house is exactly alike... California ranch style." The motel at its edge was built for house-hunters and now "can't pee a drop."
- The motel knows. "In-state, are you?", money in advance, and "Mr. and Mrs. Hadley": Marsha is entered under his wife's name.
- He cannot hold Ellen's face. Away from her, her image recedes; early in the marriage he feared he would pass her in the street and not know her.
- He knows exactly what he is. "Neither of us has a trace of loyalty in us"; "We're not rebels... we're traitors"; "the fault is in me." The insight is real and changes nothing.
- The resentment is older than he is. It is a "core" he has carried as long as he can remember, which "did not seem really to be his sole property," and he chooses to act on it.
- It is rape, twice. Marsha says "please stop it. Please leave me alone!" and fights; he answers "It's too late to back out." The novel names his coldness at every step.
- The beating is planned. After "Take care of yourself," he raises his arm "very deliberately," measures, and strikes. She calls him "a crazy beast."
- He takes her car and his son. He leaves ten dollars as an "intended irony," drives home, lifts Pete from the bassinet, and leaves him locked in the car outside a bar.
- The chapter ends on a plan. Thirteen dollars, a paycheck due at the store, Saturday night, and a drink taken "methodically, systematically. The first of a series."
"I Want My Money"
When and where. Saturday late in August 1952, the day after the Friday night of Chapters 15 and 16. The chapter's clock: 10:00 a.m. White's call to O'Neill Appliance; noon, Fergesson's deadline; 2:00 p.m. White stops by in the store truck; 4:00 and 5:30, Fergesson gives up; 7:30 p.m. the poker game begins in the basement of Modern TV ("The store had been shut an hour and a half," so Modern closed at six on Saturday); about 8:15 the break and the thudding overhead; then, in Hadley's strand, sunset, the walk, the lecture he cannot enter, the crowd coming out "much later," the fight, a filling-station men's room, a ten-minute walk along Freemont Avenue, the cellar, and a bar "around the corner." Places: O'Neill Appliance on the highway; the sidewalk outside it; Fergesson's home (one sentence); Modern TV Sales and Service, its front door and its basement storeroom; a parking lot beside a cheap café (a "twenty-four-hour lot"); a "little square of park among the hulking warehouses and factories"; a drugstore; the Society hall, "the familiar squat yellow structure" where Hadley heard his first lecture in June; the curb where the Chrysler waits; a filling station; Modern again; the neon-lit bar.
Who is here.
- Jim Fergesson: owner of Modern TV and, now, O'Neill Appliance; host of the monthly game; angry, then "stonily resigned," then, for a moment, close to tears.
- Jack V. White: senior salesman; brings the news "calm, almost pleased"; banker at the game.
- Ellen Hadley: on the telephone only; "disciplined but vacant," then furious.
- Joe Tampini: the young salesman, at the game for the first time, "shy, silent."
- Ed Johnson: brings the case of beer; has a theory about smog; his wife is at the lecture.
- Louis Garfinkel: the loudest joker at the table; winning.
- Henry R. Porter: openly racist from his first line.
- Stuart Hadley: unshaven, sick, a dime to his name, then twenty-three cents, then a hundred dollars.
- Pete Hadley: about two months old, wet, hungry and locked in a car.
- The usher: "a towering Negro wearing a shiny black suit and an armband."
- Theodore Beckheim: seen for a moment getting into his car behind "an elderly woman in a heavy fur coat"; a white driver.
- Laura and Dave Gold: out looking for Hadley on Ellen's behalf.
- The bartender: knows Hadley by name ("Sure, Stu").
- Offstage: Alice Fergesson, "stricken," waved good-bye; Marsha, as the "tall skinny gal" who left "literature"; Johnson's wife.
Content note. This chapter contains racist talk by the poker players (one uses the most offensive slur for Black Americans three times in two sentences, and Fergesson uses another), sexual talk about Marilyn Monroe, heavy profanity, an antisemitic slur spoken by Hadley, a street fight, and the continued neglect of a baby. The guide quotes Hadley's slur once, because the fight and the next chapter turn on it, and paraphrases the poker players' slurs. Dialogue dashes in the book appear as "..." in quotations.
Ten o'clock Saturday morning
"Jim Fergesson was busy sweeping out O'Neill's place when Jack White phoned to give him the news. It was ten o'clock Saturday morning; the August day was not yet hot. Cool, damp sunlight filtered down over the highway and parked cars and shopping people."
The owner with a broom. The chapter opens where Chapter 13 left Fergesson's ambition: he has bought out Bud O'Neill and now runs two stores, so he spends the busiest morning of the week at the new one, on the highway, and leaves Modern to the manager he has just made. The first image is of the owner sweeping out his own shop, a man who does the menial work himself, as he did when he opened Modern at dawn in Chapter 4. The weather is set with care: "Cool, damp sunlight," a Bay Area August morning before the heat, and a highway of "shopping people," the Saturday trade the two stores live on.
"'Call his home,' Fergesson said angrily. An ominous chill settled into his bones; it stayed there. 'He probably overslept. He was working until past nine last night.'"
"White's calm, almost pleased voice came back in his ears. 'I called his home; he isn't there. He didn't come home after work last night. His wife's a mess; she doesn't know what she's saying. Something about the kid being gone. Apparently Hadley sneaked in late last night and took the baby with him on his binge.'"
White's pleasure. Fergesson's first reflex is to excuse Hadley: he "probably overslept," because he "was working until past nine last night." That fits Chapter 15, where Modern stayed open on Friday night and Marsha waited outside until Hadley came out. The "ominous chill" is the first sign that Fergesson fears worse. Jack White is "calm, almost pleased," and the narrator lets the phrase stand. White is the senior salesman who was passed over when Hadley was made manager (Chapter 13), and he has known about Marsha since Chapter 10, when he told Hadley to "keep your pants buttoned." His report is already a story with a moral: a "binge," a wife who "doesn't know what she's saying," a husband who "sneaked in." He gets the facts right and the tone wrong.
"Fergesson hung up and dialed Hadley's number. A moment later he was talking to Ellen."
"'Where is he?' Fergesson demanded. 'He didn't come to work, and this is Saturday.'"
"'He's not here,' Ellen answered bleakly. Her voice wavered and receded, then returned, disciplined but vacant. 'He never came home except to pick up Pete. I was asleep; it must have been in the middle of the night. I woke up and the baby was gone.'"
"'How do you know it was Stuart?' Fergesson demanded suspiciously."
"'His key was still in the door... I found it standing wide open.' Her voice gained momentary strength. 'If I had any sense I'd leave him. But I'm not going to. It isn't his fault; it's your fault and everybody else's. He's only trying to live. He just wants his life.'"
The key in the open door. Chapter 16 showed the taking from Hadley's side: he left the Studebaker running, went in, gathered up Pete "along with his blankets," and went out again. Ellen's account adds what he did not notice: he left his key in the lock and the door "standing wide open." Keys run through the last part of the novel. Tonight Fergesson tells Johnson "The key's in the lock" at Modern's front door; at the end of this chapter Hadley's own key to Modern still turns; in Chapter 20 it will not. Here the abandoned key is the sign of a man who no longer means to come home.
"It's your fault and everybody else's." Ellen's defence of her husband is the novel's argument in a sentence, and she makes it to the one man who has most power over him. "If I had any sense I'd leave him. But I'm not going to." Then she turns the blame outward: "It isn't his fault; it's your fault and everybody else's. He's only trying to live. He just wants his life." This begins the chain of fault statements that runs to the end of the book: the bystanders' "His own fault" in Chapter 18, the German couple's "It was your fault!" and Hadley's "Sure... My fault" in Chapter 19, Fergesson's "It's my fault" in Chapter 20, and "It isn't anybody's fault" in the last chapter. Ellen does not yet know about the motel. She knows only that the baby is gone and that Stuart took him, and her first loyalty is still to him.
"'If he doesn't show up sometime today,' Fergesson said, 'he's finished. I'm not going to have him around the store. Tell him that.'"
"She flared up wildly. 'You and your damn store. And you wonder why he's the way he is. He's not a person to you... you never cared about him. Maybe he's dead; maybe they're both dead.'"
"Gripping the phone Fergesson said: 'He's sleeping it off in some jail, more likely. Being manager was a little too much for him. I'll give him until noon and that's it.' He slammed down the receiver and stalked away, trembling with rage."
Two diagnoses. Ellen and Fergesson give rival readings of the same man in four lines. To Ellen the store is the disease: "You and your damn store. And you wonder why he's the way he is. He's not a person to you." To Fergesson the cause is weakness: "Being manager was a little too much for him." Both have evidence. The novel has shown the store pressing Hadley flat (Chapters 1, 4, 9) and has shown Hadley failing every test of nerve. Ellen's "Maybe he's dead; maybe they're both dead" is the first time anyone says aloud that the baby is in danger. Fergesson's "sleeping it off in some jail" is closer to the record than he knows: Hadley woke in a cell in Chapter 1. His deadline, "until noon," is his answer to fear. He hangs up "trembling with rage," and the rage hides the fear the narrator showed a page earlier.
"It hadn't taken long: just a few days. If Hadley could have waited one more day for his binge... Shakily, Fergesson lit a cigar and stood in the entrance of O'Neill Appliance gazing sightlessly out at the flow of traffic moving along the highway. Blind rage hung over him like a cloud. Just a few days. He reached for the phone and called Jack White at Modern."
"Just a few days." The promotion dates from the dinner in Chapter 13, and Chapter 14 showed Hadley's first days in the job. Fergesson's repeated phrase is the bitterness of a man who bet on someone and lost almost at once. "If Hadley could have waited one more day for his binge" is a store owner's thought: Saturday is the selling day, and a binge that started after closing time tonight would have cost the store nothing. It is also a thought that accepts the binge as normal and minds only the timing. The cigar, the shaking hands, the "sightless" stare at the highway: Dick gives Fergesson's anger a body, as he gave Hadley's resentment one in Chapter 16.
"I'm not calling off our game"
"'If he comes in, call me,' Fergesson instructed. 'Better yet, have him call me.'"
"'All right,' White said; he sounded harassed. In the distance the sound of people and TV sets was audible."
"'Can you and Tampini hold it alone?'"
"'I suppose so.'"
"'I'll see you tonight,' Fergesson said. 'You're playing with us, aren't you?'"
"'Sure,' White said. 'Whatever you say.'"
"'I'm not calling off our game,' Fergesson said grimly. 'Not for anything Stumblebum does. I'll see you after dinner, at the regular time. I've got the chips here; they'll do.'"
A Saturday short-handed. With Hadley gone, Modern on its busiest day is left to White and Tampini, and White already sounds "harassed," with the noise of "people and TV sets" behind him. The man who sounded "almost pleased" an hour ago now carries the extra load, which is one reason for his pleasure and one reason for his tiredness. Fergesson's reply to the crisis is to keep his routine: "I'm not calling off our game... Not for anything Stumblebum does." "Stumblebum" is the store's nickname for Hadley, used by White and Fergesson behind his back; on this day it stops being a joke.
"'Are we going to play here?' White asked."
"'We always do, don't we? Why should this time be any different?'"
"'I'll get the big display room cleaned up, then,' White said. 'Say, Tampini probably wants to play.'"
"'Fine,' Fergesson said. 'Let's see what he's like; I can tell a lot about a man by the kind of poker he plays.' He hung up the phone and returned to his work."
Poker as a test of character. Fergesson's line about judging a man "by the kind of poker he plays" sets up the evening as an examination. The young salesman Joe Tampini is about to be tried at the table, on the night the man Fergesson promoted has failed every other test. The game is held at Modern because "We always do"; in fact it is held in the basement, not in "the big display room" White offers to clean up.
Noon, two, four, five thirty
"By noon Hadley had not come in. At two o'clock Jack White showed up at O'Neill's in the store truck, on his way back from a delivery. He and Fergesson talked briefly out on the sidewalk."
"'Maybe the bastard's dead,' White said, unperturbed. 'His wife calls every fifteen minutes. She called the police, the jail, the hospitals, everything she could think of. Friends, relatives, bars... the whole works.'"
Ellen's search, reported secondhand. The deadline passes in one flat sentence. The rest of the afternoon reaches us through White, who repeats Ellen's own fear ("Maybe the bastard's dead") in a voice that is "unperturbed." What Ellen is doing is told in a list: "the police, the jail, the hospitals... Friends, relatives, bars," and a call to the store "every fifteen minutes." Dick never shows her alone in the apartment; we see only the frequency of the calls, which is enough. The list also tells us what Ellen expects: an arrest, an accident, a bar. She does not think of a motel, and she does not yet think of the Society hall, though by evening the Golds will.
"Fergesson kicked a bit of trash from the sidewalk into the gutter. 'He's finished. If he comes in send him around here and I'll pay him off. I don't want to have anything more to do with him.'"
"'You're being a little rough,' White observed."
"'It's my business. You think a man who'd do this could manage a store?'"
"White shrugged indifferently. 'He's had a lot on his mind. This whole stuff, the sudden load...' He broke off and started up the truck. 'But do what you want; you're the boss.'"
White's two faces. The man who sounded "almost pleased" at ten o'clock now offers the only word of mercy Hadley gets all day: "You're being a little rough... He's had a lot on his mind. This whole stuff, the sudden load." White is both right and safe. He names the cause Ellen named in the morning, the weight of the new job, and then withdraws: "But do what you want; you're the boss." He can afford to be fair because the decision is not his and the outcome favours him; the managership is free again. Fergesson's answer turns on the word "business": "It's my business. You think a man who'd do this could manage a store?" The plan already in place, "I'll pay him off," is the plan he carries out tonight, almost word for word, when Hadley comes in.
"By four o'clock Hadley had not appeared and there was no reason to think he would. Fergesson's tension mounted; by five thirty he was too upset to work. Ignoring customers, he phoned Modern and got hold of Joe Tampini; White was too busy to come to the phone."
"'Any sign of him?' Fergesson demanded."
"'No sir,' Tampini said dutifully."
"'His wife still calling?'"
"'Yes sir. All the time.'"
"'All right,' Fergesson said, stonily resigned. 'He's not coming in. It's too late.'"
"He hung up the phone and didn't call again. There was no point to it; the inevitable had happened."
"Ignoring customers." The detail measures how badly Fergesson is hit. This is the man who in Chapter 4 opened Modern alone at dawn and treated every sale as a duty; by five thirty on a Saturday he cannot work and ignores the people in front of him. His fear has outrun his anger. Tampini's "No sir" and "Yes sir. All the time" are the young man's whole part in the chapter until the last line of the poker scene, "dutiful" and nothing more. The verdict "It's too late" anticipates the end of the book, where Fergesson will say the same thing about himself. The narrator's phrase, "the inevitable had happened," is Fergesson's point of view, and the novel has been asking for sixteen chapters whether anything about Hadley is inevitable.
Fergesson's Saturday clock.
- 10:00 a.m. White's call; Ellen's call; the noon deadline.
- Noon "By noon Hadley had not come in." The deadline passes without comment.
- 2:00 p.m. White in the store truck: Ellen calls "every fifteen minutes."
- 4:00 p.m. "no reason to think he would."
- 5:30 p.m. "too upset to work"; "It's too late."
- 6:00 p.m. Modern closes (worked out from "shut an hour and a half" at 7:30).
- 7:30 p.m. Fergesson unlocks Modern with the table, cards and chips.
- About 8:00 the game begins ("its usual course for half an hour" before the break).
- About 8:15 the break, the thud, the marchers, the talk of Stumblebum.
If Ellen kept calling "every fifteen minutes" from ten until White's report at two, she called Modern about sixteen times; by half past five she is still calling "All the time."
The poker players arrive
"That evening he gulped down a hurried dinner, grabbed his blue serge coat, waved good-bye to his stricken wife, and drove swiftly down the darkening street to Modern TV Sales and Service. He ignored the people roaming everywhere and concentrated on parking his car. From the car he lugged a heavy card table, four decks of cards, and two huge packages of chips."
Alice, "stricken." One adjective carries Alice Fergesson's whole share of the day. She and Ellen arranged the promotion between them (Chapter 13), and she has spent the evening watching her husband gulp his dinner. Whether she is stricken for Ellen, for Hadley, or at her husband's mood is left open. The "people roaming everywhere" are the Watchmen arriving for Beckheim's Saturday lecture; Fergesson does not look at them and "concentrated on parking his car," the first of several refusals to see them. The blue serge coat is his evening dress; by the break he will have shed the tie and the vest.
"It was seven thirty. The store had been shut an hour and a half. The interior was dim and silent as he quickly made his way downstairs to the storeroom where all the immense cardboard cartons of television sets were carefully stacked on each other."
"Fergesson accepted the case of beer from Johnson and took off with it. 'Stay up here and watch; send them down as they come. The key's in the lock.'"
"'Who the hell are all those people wandering around out there?' Johnson said. 'The streets are full of them.'"
"'Some kind of nut cultists,' Louis Garfinkel said, pushing into the store. 'Los Angeles type. There's a lecture going on or something.'"
The cellar and its door. The game is set in the storeroom among the television cartons, the stock that Fergesson's business stands on, "carefully stacked." The front door is worked like a club entrance: Johnson stays "up top" to let the players in; "The key's in the lock." The phrase repeats the morning's image of Hadley's key left in his own door, now with the opposite meaning: a door kept by friends against the street. Two kinds of membership will be checked at two doors tonight, Fergesson's friends at Modern and the card holders at the hall. Garfinkel's "Los Angeles type" places the cult where Bay Area people of 1952 liked to place all cults, in Southern California, and Johnson's question about the "climate down there" picks up the joke.
A CLOSER LOOK: the poker players' racism. Henry R. Porter's first words in the novel are the most offensive slur for Black Americans, used three times in two sentences, ending with a dehumanising phrase for Beckheim taken from the language of livestock and slavery. The guide does not reprint the words. Nobody at the door objects. The point Dick makes by letting the line stand is that the same contempt the Society's members meet in the street is the ordinary talk of respectable white businessmen in a locked shop. Beckheim's movement draws its members from the people Porter despises, and its leader's dignity on the platform is a standing answer to talk like his. Porter's line is period prejudice, stated plainly, and the novel presents it as ugly, not as local colour.
"'My theory,' Johnson said, 'is that it's the smog. The smog is from factories; it's man-made and it's full of metallic wastes. The metallic wastes get in their brains by being snuffed up through the nasal passages, and that's why they're so nutty.'"
"'I would say,' Garfinkel disagreed, 'that the smog works its way up their ass.'"
Johnson's science. Ed Johnson's smog theory is a small comic set piece: a pseudo-scientific account of why people join cults, offered by a man whose own wife, we learn an hour later, is at the lecture. It is a crank theory about cranks, the kind of explanation the novel's businessmen use to keep the Society at a distance. In 1952 Los Angeles smog was in the newspapers and the science of it was new: in June 1952 the Caltech chemist Arie Haagen-Smit published his finding that the smog was produced by hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides reacting in sunlight to form ozone, not by metal dust from factories. Johnson's "metallic wastes" are wrong on the facts of his own year. Garfinkel's reply is the first of his crude jokes; he is the table's loudest voice and, by the break, its biggest winner.
"Jack White arrived, wiping the remains of his hurriedly gulped meal, served across the counter to him at the Golden Bear Cafeteria. A few minutes later Joe Tampini came trailing shyly along; this was the first time he had been permitted to play in the monthly poker game."
"At the top of the stairs Fergesson and White met briefly. 'Any sign of him?' Fergesson murmured."
"'I was going to ask you,' White said. 'No, nothing.'"
"'The damn fool,' Fergesson said bitterly. 'He had everything in the world, and he tossed it away.'"
"He had everything in the world." This is Fergesson's sincere view, and it is the gap between him and Hadley stated in one line. To the owner, "everything in the world" is a wife, a son, a good job and a promotion to manager at $300 a month plus a share of the gross (Chapter 13). To Hadley these are the "burden" and the "store" that Ellen blamed in the morning. Both men use totals: Fergesson's "everything in the world" here, and Hadley's "all your friends and relatives and your stores and all your TV sets and your poker game" at the end of the chapter, which throws the same everything back in his face. Tampini, "permitted" for the first time, is being promoted into the circle on the very night Hadley falls out of it. White eats "across the counter" at a cafeteria between closing and the game; the salesmen's working day leaves no room for dinner at home.
Jacks or better
"'You're banker this time,' he said to Jack White. The flat stained notebook was passed to White, who began making entries under the various names. Chips were distributed. The men unfastened their belts, accepted initial beers, belched happily, rubbed their hands and wrists, exchanged insults, grinned, and turned abruptly ruthless as the first hand was dealt."
"'Naturally,' Fergesson muttered tensely, 'this is draw. Jacks or better to open. Christ, get the antes in. Come on, White. One from you.'"
"'Anything wild?' Johnson asked, already tightly absorbed in his hand."
"'Nothing this time.'"
How the game is run. 1. Host at the head. Fergesson sits at "the head of the table," shuffles, has the deck cut. 2. A banker with a ledger. White is handed "the flat stained notebook" and makes "entries under the various names": chips are issued on credit and settled at the end, so the notebook is the game's real money, a running account kept by the man Fergesson trusts. 3. The rules. Five-card draw, "Jacks or better to open": a player may open the betting only with a pair of jacks or a stronger hand, a rule that keeps weak hands from starting the pot. Antes go in first ("get the antes in"). 4. No wild cards. "Nothing this time," Fergesson rules: the plainest, strictest form of the game. 5. The ritual. Belts unfastened, beers, belching, insults, then "abruptly ruthless." The host who chooses draw with no wild cards on this night is the man who wants rules he understands and outcomes that follow from them.
"'Give me three,' Garfinkel said."
"'We bet first, you horse's ass. Hold your damn water.'"
"'Up yours.'"
"'Cut the farting and bid,' Porter grumbled."
"The game took its usual course for half an hour. Down in the cellar of the television shop, below street level, surrounded by solid concrete and steel walls, the six men played tensely and vigorously. Around eight fifteen they paused and passed one by one into the next room to relieve themselves at the filth-stained toilet."
Six men under the street. The insults are the club's courtesy: "horse's ass," "Up yours," "Cut the farting and bid." Then Dick pulls back for the image the scene is built on: "below street level, surrounded by solid concrete and steel walls." The men have made a bunker. The six are Fergesson, White, Tampini, Johnson, Garfinkel and Porter. Above them is the street, where the faithful are about to march; somewhere across town is the man whose job the game was meant to ignore. The "filth-stained toilet" belongs with the clutter that Chapter 4 found under Modern's counter: the back rooms of the business are never as clean as the front.
"Johnson lit a fresh cigar and leaned back in his chair peacefully. 'Good game,' he said to Fergesson, who was gloomily contemplating his dwindling stack of chips. 'Right?'"
"'I'm losing heavy tonight.'"
"'Christ, you'll get it back Monday. Sell an extra TV set.'"
"Fergesson got up and stretched. He took off his tie and crammed it in his pocket. After a moment he removed his vest and unbuttoned the top buttons of his shirt."
Losing heavy. Fergesson's luck has gone with his mood. Johnson's comfort is a salesman's joke that is also a true account of where the stakes come from: losses at the table are paid back by one more sale on Monday. The whole game rests on the stock in the cartons around them. Fergesson loosening his clothes, tie into the pocket, vest off, shirt open, is the body giving way under the day's pressure, a quieter version of Hadley's undoing across town. Dick gives both men the same evening and the same strain.
The thud overhead
"While he was moving his chair around to make himself more comfortable there was a dull distant thud that vibrated through the room. After a time it came again...louder."
"'What's that?' White demanded, coming out of the lavatory with his trousers still unzipped."
"'Those marching morons... heading for that Society hall. That bunch of nuts going to the lecture.' Garfinkel seated himself and swept up a deck of cards. 'Hot dog, I'm really greased tonight! Look at those stacks.'"
"Marching morons." The phrase was a fresh joke in 1952. C. M. Kornbluth's story "The Marching Morons" appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction in April 1951, a satire set in a future where the stupid have outbred the clever and a small elite runs the world for them. Garfinkel need not have read it; the title went into common talk. Dick, who was selling stories to the same magazines that year, would have known it well. The story's premise is itself a sneer at the masses, which makes the borrowing exact: Garfinkel uses it to sneer at the Watchmen, the novel's poor and its believers. The sound comes before the sight, a "dull distant thud," then "louder," as if the street were being beaten like a drum.
Garfinkel's crude boast about his chip stacks turns into talk about Marilyn Monroe. Porter asks Fergesson, "Where'd you get that picture in the crapper?" and adds a lewd boast; someone says, "She sure as hell can't act worth a damn"; another answers with a joke about how she got to "the top of the ladder."
The picture in the crapper. The pin-up in the toilet of Modern is almost certainly the famous nude calendar photograph of Marilyn Monroe, taken in 1949; she admitted in March 1952 that she was the model, and the calendar was everywhere that year. The men's talk is the standard 1952 line on Monroe: she "can't act," and she rose by sleeping her way up. It is crude, and the guide paraphrases most of it. Dick puts it here for a reason. The men who sneer at the Society's "purity" are the men who keep a nude calendar in the shop toilet; their talk of women is the counterpart of Beckheim's talk of sin. Neither side in this novel treats women as people. The calendar will matter again within the hour, when Fergesson "grabbed the calendar and located the date" to count out Hadley's pay. Whether it is the same calendar the text does not say.
"Spirited talk continued, but Fergesson wasn't listening. He was hearing something else, the continual shuffling tramp of feet above him, the disturbing roll and boom."
"'It gets under my skin,' he muttered as he finally picked up the deck and went through the automatic motions of shuffling. 'Goddamn it, I can't play with all of them up there!'"
"'They're going inside,' Johnson pointed out. 'The meeting's beginning.'"
"'How do you happen to know?' Fergesson accused."
"Johnson colored. 'Well, my wife's going.'"
"I can't play with all of them up there." The bunker does not work. The "shuffling tramp of feet," the "roll and boom," come through concrete and steel; Fergesson cannot shut out the street, as he could not shut out Hadley's absence. His word for the marchers is not contempt but discomfort: "It gets under my skin." Then the joke turns on the joker's friend. Ed Johnson, who an hour ago explained the cultists by smog in their nasal passages, "colored" and confessed: "my wife's going." The Society is not a Los Angeles import or a fringe of the poor; it is in the poker players' own homes. The wives at the hall and the husbands in the cellar are the town split down the middle.
"Calmly counting his pile of chips, Jack V. White said: 'I wouldn't be surprised if that's where Stumblebum is. He went to the last one, I know.'"
"The deck of cards almost dropped from Fergesson's hands; he grabbed it and began cutting slowly, wrathfully. 'That's right. I remember. Ellen told me.'"
"'Sure,' White said easily. 'Stumblebum's one of the faithful. Some dame's been coming in the store after him, one of the Society's little ladies.'"
White tells what he knows. Here White's "calm" has a purpose. He counts his chips and lets the information out one piece at a time: Hadley went to "the last one"; he is "one of the faithful"; and "Some dame's been coming in the store after him." White overheard Marsha in the store in Chapter 10 ("Christ, I heard her say it") and, as far as the novel shows, kept it from Fergesson; he says it now, "easily," when it can only harm Hadley. Fergesson's "Ellen told me" refers to a conversation the novel does not show.
Fergesson's next question, shouted, uses a slur to ask whether the woman was Black. White answers: "A tall skinny gal. She left off some literature for him."
"On my time." Fergesson's first thought about the woman is racial, and he shouts it. His second is about property: the "literature" was Succubus, Marsha's magazine, which Fergesson caught Hadley reading in the store in Chapter 9, and what still rankles is that Hadley read it "on my time." Between them the two thoughts sum up the owner's limits: he can picture the Society only as a threat from Black people, and he can picture Hadley's betrayal only as theft of paid hours. "I should have known" is honest; he had the evidence weeks ago. Then he does what he did at the start of the day: he puts the routine back in place. "Deal!... For God's sake, let's get going!" The deck goes down in front of Tampini, "shy, silent," the newcomer who has not said a word at the table. The young salesman whose poker Fergesson meant to judge is the one who must now carry the game on.
In the car at dusk
"In the gloomy darkness of the car, Stuart Hadley sat holding a wad of blankets and baby clothing in his lap. Beside him, Pete wailed and twisted; his tiny arms waved futilely as he groped for something, grasped the cold empty air that swirled through the car from the parking lot outside."
The cut. Fergesson's "Deal!" is followed at once by Hadley in the car, and the jump is the chapter's method. The two strands are not separated by a heading or a line space in the narration's logic; one man shouts to get the game going, and the next sentence finds the other in "gloomy darkness" with a screaming baby. Where the Saturday has gone for Hadley the novel never says. Chapter 16 ended with him in a bar near midnight on Friday with "Only thirteen dollars"; this scene opens at dusk on Saturday, and the next paragraphs tell us only that he "slept all night in the car." A whole day of a two-month-old's life in a parked car is passed over in silence, and the silence is part of the horror. Pete "grasped the cold empty air": the baby reaching for something is one of the novel's few images of Pete as a person, and what he finds is nothing.
"Presently it entered Hadley's mind that he had been in the process of changing the baby's clothing. He sorted through the soggy, contaminated heap of garments; everything had been soiled at least once. Puzzled, he smoothed them out and started over again, hoping to find something clean, something he could use. Beside him on the seat, Pete shivered and wailed."
Diapers from a car blanket. "Presently it entered Hadley's mind" is the language of a man whose thinking has slowed to a crawl: he does not know what he is doing until he finds himself doing it. He sorts the dirty clothes, smooths them out, "started over again," as if order could make them clean. The solution he finds is a desperate one, a "greasy automobile blanket" from the trunk of Marsha's car, torn into squares. The "giant safety pin" is the only proper baby object left. Dick's three adjectives for Pete, "sick and hungry and helpless," could stand for his father as well; the next pages give Hadley the same condition, "sick," hungry enough to buy a candy bar, and helpless before an usher. The luggage compartment is a reminder that this is still Marsha's Studebaker, the car she lent him on Friday, which he has kept.
"Getting from the car, Hadley crossed the dark parking lot to the garbage can of a cheap café. He dropped the bundle of contaminated garments into the can and crunched back to the car. For a time he stood undecided; the baby dozed fitfully, breathing through his mouth, his round face pulled together into a tight frown. He should be fed, obviously. And soon."
"Making sure the air vents were open, Hadley rolled up the windows of the car and locked the doors. He left the parking lot and stepped up onto the deserted sidewalk. It was becoming evening; the sun was setting. He began to walk, hands shoved deep in his pockets."
A baby left alone in a locked car. Hadley has kept a two-month-old in a car for about a day with no clean clothes, apparently no food (he cannot remember whether he fed him), and night coming on, and now he leaves him alone. He takes one precaution, "Making sure the air vents were open," and he locks the doors, which he did the night before at the first bar. "He should be fed, obviously. And soon." is the thought of a man who knows what is needed and does not do it. Pete's "tight frown" repeats the "tight, childish frown" of the sleeping Stuart in Chapter 1; the novel has already said that the son is the father's copy. Readers should know that the baby's danger is real and that the novel does not soften it. Pete will lie in the car through this night. On Sunday afternoon (Chapter 19) Hadley will find the windows rolled down and broken glass on the asphalt, and will understand that "Somebody had noticed Pete"; a policeman watches the car.
The plan
"When he came to a little square of park among the hulking warehouses and factories, he stopped and threw himself down on a bench, to rest and ponder."
"His plan was firm, clear, and completely final. It had emerged as he drove Marsha along the freeway; into his mind the plan had come full-grown, completely developed, as if it had always existed. It was the only solution; all that remained was to put it into effect."
When the plan was born. Chapter 16 mentioned "his plan" without saying what it was: he "could not possibly get his plan into motion tonight; he would have to wait until Saturday night." Now the reader learns it, and learns its birthplace: "as he drove Marsha along the freeway," the seventy-mile-an-hour drive to the motel on Friday night. The plan "had come full-grown," "as if it had always existed," like Athena from the head of Zeus; Hadley experiences his own idea as a revelation from outside. "Firm, clear, and completely final" are the words of a man who has stopped weighing anything. "Saturday night" was the deadline because the Society's lecture is on Saturday night.
For Hadley, everything was over; for his son the world was just beginning.
The logic of the plan. 1. Self-verdict. "He was worthless; he couldn't be saved." "For him it was too late," the same "too late" Fergesson pronounced at half past five. 2. Transfer. "But it was not too late for his son." 3. The saviour. "Beckheim would take Pete and raise him." The father figure Hadley could not live up to becomes the father for his son. 4. The promise. Pete "would become what Hadley had not become," "reach the things he had failed to reach." 5. The ending. "For Hadley, everything was over." The plan is a parent's ordinary wish (that the child should have what the parent missed) carried to the point of giving the child away. It also has a gap at its centre: Hadley has not asked whether Beckheim would want a baby, how the hand-over would happen, or what Ellen would say. Ellen is not in the plan at all.
What the plan says about the novel. Hadley's whole story has been a search for a father: Fergesson, Beckheim, the remembered father "big and deep-voiced, strong" of Chapter 5. The plan reverses the search. He will not get a father, so he will make Beckheim one for Pete. It is a sacrifice in his own eyes and an abandonment in everyone else's. The "plan" is also the most honest thing Hadley has thought in the book. He has finally stopped pretending he can be saved, and he is not trying to take anything for himself. Dick allows that and still shows that it is mad: the man who reaches this conclusion has a baby wrapped in a greasy car blanket in a locked car and no idea when the child last ate.
"For an infinite period Hadley sat watching the evening sun lower itself into the hazy rim of the Bay. It wasn't until the streetlights came on and a chill wind whipped through his trouser legs that he got stiffly to his feet and began to walk."
Sunset over the Bay. Time has lost its edges: "For an infinite period." Hadley watches the sun go down into "the hazy rim of the Bay." That is loose geography. Cedar Groves is a Peninsula town (the Modern's showroom stands "south of Cedar Groves along Bayshore Highway"), so the Bay lies to the east and the real sun would drop behind the hills to the west; Dick is painting haze and water, not taking a bearing (see Flags). Late in August in the Bay Area, under the daylight saving time California had adopted by a 1949 vote, the sun sets at about a quarter to eight, which fits the cellar clock: the game starts after 7:30 and the marchers pass at 8:15. The chill again: the novel's August is repeatedly cold at night, from the "frigid" air outside the motel to the "chill wind" here and the "Cold night air" on Freemont Avenue later. The streetlights come on as a signal to move, the first of the lamps that will become "stars at last in order" in Chapter 18.
A dime and a Hershey's bar
"His clothes were rumpled and dirty from having slept all night in the car. He needed a shave; his chin was an unhealthy gray-blue. As he walked he was conscious of his uneven gait; his bones ached and he had trouble seeing."
"He came to a drugstore, entered, and selected a candy bar from the front rack. In his coat pocket he found a dime... That was all he had left... a few bits of change in his pockets."
Thirteen dollars gone. On Friday night Hadley had "Only thirteen dollars" in his wallet. By Saturday evening he has "a dime" in his coat pocket and "a few bits of change." The novel does not say where twelve dollars and more went in a day; bar drinks at the Friday bar (he paid a dollar for the first scotch, "The first of a series"), perhaps food for himself, perhaps nothing for Pete. The Hershey's bar cost a nickel in 1952, as it did from 1900 to 1969 (the company shrank the bar rather than raise the price), so the dime buys it with change to spare. His body is giving way: "uneven gait," aching bones, "trouble seeing." Each detail anticipates the next night, when he will barely see the bus coming in Chapter 18.
"Eating the Hershey's bar, Stuart Hadley wandered through town, oblivious of the strolling Saturday evening crowds. Gradually he became aware that a different group of people milled around him. He had reached the center of town; he was moving among the Watchmen of Jesus, the faithful on their way to the Society hall. Eagerly, he joined them."
The marchers from above. Here Hadley is inside the crowd whose feet Fergesson heard through the cellar ceiling. The two strands touch without meeting: the "shuffling tramp of feet" in the basement is, at the same hour or near it, the "flow of people" carrying Hadley along. Dick never makes the link explicit, but the timing (the marchers going in at about 8:15; Hadley reaching the hall after sunset) puts Hadley among the feet over Fergesson's head, or near them. "Eagerly, he joined them" is the only eager thing he does all day.
"Your card, sir"
"The flow of people carried him along, and presently he found himself facing the familiar squat yellow structure, with its glowing lights and fluttering cloth signs streaming everywhere. He held back for a while and then allowed the surge of murmuring men and women to carry him up the steps and into the barren foyer. The crowd divided and was processed into the hall itself."
"At the inner door, Hadley was stopped by a towering Negro wearing a shiny black suit and an armband. 'Your card, sir,' the Negro repeated, his hand out. 'Your membership card, sir. This is for members of the Watchmen of Jesus Society, sir.'"
"'What?' Hadley said stupidly."
"One massive hand was clapped over his arm; he was stopped dead in his tracks. 'This is not an open lecture, sir,' the Negro repeated, firmly and insistently. Behind Hadley people pushed impatiently, wanting to get past and find seats: there weren't many left. 'Do you have a card, sir? You have to have either a white or a blue card, sir.'"
The card he tore up. This is the cruellest irony in the novel's plotting. In Chapter 11 Beckheim himself wrote out a blue card for Hadley and charged him a dollar and fifty cents. In Chapter 12, on the coast road, Hadley tore it up. In Chapter 14 Wakefield told him what he had destroyed: the ordinary member gets a white card; "Only Mister Beckheim gives out blue cards," "for outstanding service," and "I think he's given out only a few dozen of them." Now the usher names both colours, "either a white or a blue card," and Hadley has neither. The one man in Cedar Groves who held the rare card is the one turned away at the door. The June lectures were open: the poster in Chapter 5 said "Admission free... Everybody invited!" Tonight "This is not an open lecture." The Society has closed its doors as it has grown, and the outsider who walked in at the beginning cannot walk in at the end.
The usher. Five "sir"s in three speeches: the usher is perfectly polite and perfectly immovable. He is described by his size, his clothes and his race ("a towering Negro," "One massive hand"), which is how the narration has described Black characters throughout, through Hadley's eyes, as bodies before persons. The armband and the processing of the crowd ("divided and was processed") make the Society a disciplined organisation, the "functioning machine" Hadley saw at the hall in Chapter 14. "Stunned, Hadley turned and shoved his way out again." He does not argue, explain that he once had a blue card, or ask for Beckheim; the question "What?" is all he manages.
IN PRACTICE. The scene at the inner door is an access-control failure with no recovery path, and it maps cleanly onto how firms manage credentials. Hadley held the highest-privilege credential the Society issues, personally granted by its head; he destroyed it; there is no record the door can check, no reissue desk, and no way to escalate to the issuer, who is on the stage inside. The usher is doing exactly what a well-run control should do (no card, no entry, politely and firmly), and that is the point: the control works and the person it was meant to admit is shut out. Banks and large enterprises face the same design question with staff badges, customer cards and digital identities. A credential system needs a lifecycle: issuance recorded centrally rather than only in the token, a revocation and reissue process when a card is lost or destroyed, a verified break-glass route for urgent cases, and a way to reach a human who can confirm entitlement from the record. When the only proof of a right is the token itself, losing the token loses the right, which is exactly what happens to Hadley. Chapter 12's take on the single-issuer card made the same point from the issuing side; this is the door side.
"Stunned, Hadley turned and shoved his way out again, down the steps and onto the sidewalk. The murmuring voices faded away as the people around him filed up the steps and into the hall. Those who were turned back gradually dispersed; in a short while Hadley was alone."
On the trash box
"Searching his pockets he brought out twenty-three cents in change. Enough for a quart of milk. But that wouldn't do. And he needed to buy clean diapers for him; cereal, diapers, another blanket... Hadley's mind blurred off in a chaotic swirl, and he gave up trying to think. Instead, he sat blankly waiting."
Twenty-three cents. Hadley's worry about the car is not about Pete's safety but about the lot: "in a few hours somebody might start checking around." Then the baby enters his mind, "Vaguely," with the question that tells the reader the worst: "had he been going to feed him, or had he already fed him?" The money has changed again. In the drugstore "a dime... His shopping list, "cereal, diapers, another blanket," is correct and impossible on twenty-three cents. A quart of milk in August 1952 cost about 25 cents delivered to the door in a typical American city, a little more at the grocery, so "Enough for a quart of milk" is about right, maybe a few cents short. "But that wouldn't do": the milk is not enough, so he buys nothing. The chain of thought breaks off in a "chaotic swirl," and he sits on a trash box, the right seat for the way he sees himself.
Hadley's money, Friday night to Saturday midnight. Using the change in the U.S. consumer price index from 1952 to 2024 (prices about 11.8 times higher) as a rough guide:
- Friday at the first bar: "Only thirteen dollars", about $154 today; a dollar of it on the first scotch.
- Saturday evening, in the drugstore: "a dime", about $1.20; the Hershey's bar costs a nickel, about 60 cents.
- On the trash box: "twenty-three cents", about $2.70; "Enough for a quart of milk."
- In the cellar: "a hundred dollars," "for two weeks," about $1,180.
- In the bar: he pays for one drink with "a twenty-dollar bill," about $236, and lays the rest out in piles.
On the Chapter 13 terms of $300 a month plus 1 percent of the store's gross, two weeks of the manager's salary would be about $140 to $150 before the share of the gross. On his old salesman's pay, which Fergesson stated in Chapter 13 as "two fifty a month... plus five percent," two weeks would be $125 plus commissions. Fergesson's hundred is a round number counted out in a hurry, smaller than the arithmetic of the promotion; the text does not explain it.
After the lecture
The lost lecture. Hadley sits through the whole lecture on a trash box and remembers none of it: "The next thing he knew." The novel denies the reader Beckheim's Saturday sermon as it denied Hadley the seat. What is left is certainty without grounds, "of that Hadley was certain," and the old childish formula, "everything would be all right." "The great black man" is Hadley's phrase for Beckheim throughout, both literal and worshipful. The plan needs only one thing, to "get to Beckheim," and it never asks what happens after.
"The hall, of course, was empty; the crowd had left it. He stood gazing in as people edged past him, bemused by the vacant stage and podium on which Beckheim had certainly just now stood."
"'Where's Beckheim?' he said to a large middle-aged woman passing with an armload of pamphlets."
"She shook her head. 'I really don't know.'"
The empty stage. The door is open now, and there is nothing behind it. "The hall, of course, was empty": the narrator's "of course" is a small cruelty, the voice of common sense that Hadley no longer has. The "vacant stage and podium" are the place where the voice he came for has just been, and the woman with the pamphlets, the Society's paper output, cannot tell him where the leader is. The organisation that processes crowds at its door has no answer for a single man asking for its head.
"Hadley hurried urgently back down the steps; suddenly he was sure that Beckheim had already left. He reached the sidewalk and peered everywhere, searching desperately, moving this way and that, unconscious of the dense crowd around him."
"At the curb waited a long oyster-yellow Chrysler four-door sedan. As soon as he saw it he knew it was Beckheim's: excitement stirred him and he raced toward it. A knot of people, white and Negro, was making its way toward the car; one of the doors was opened, and an elderly woman in a heavy fur coat climbed in."
"Behind the woman came Beckheim."
The yellow Chrysler. Dick gives the prophet a big expensive car, a Chrysler four-door in "oyster-yellow," the colour of the hall ("the familiar squat yellow structure"). A white man drives it. Ahead of Beckheim goes "an elderly woman in a heavy fur coat." These three details are the money behind the Society: a rich patron, a hired or volunteer driver, a showy car, all in a movement whose members include warehouse workers and old women from rooming houses. The "knot of people, white and Negro" is the Society's mix, which the poker players found so threatening. "Behind the woman came Beckheim" gets a paragraph to itself: it is the last time in the novel that Hadley sees him.
Headlights. "A blinding clap of brilliance" mixes sight and sound, as the novel's moments of crisis often do. Hadley "winced, ducked his head": the light of the prophet's car hits him as a blow. Lights will hurt him again in Chapter 18, where the night's buses become beasts. The man is chasing a car, not a person; the plan has shrunk to a race to the curb.
Laura and Dave Gold
"A figure directly in front of him refused to move. Hands clutched at him; in his ear shrill voices screamed and yelled. He shook the hands away; tearing himself loose he shoved against the figure. It refused to budge."
"'Stuart!' it shrilled. It was Laura Gold. Her face wild, hair disheveled, she blocked his way, arms raised, lumpy body planted against him. 'Stuart, what are you doing here? Ellen's looking everywhere for you... we knew we'd find you here!'"
"From behind Laura, Dave Gold came scurrying. He grabbed hold of Hadley's coat and dragged him away from the curb, back toward the building, out of the conglomeration of people clustered around the Chrysler. 'Where the hell have you been?' he was saying. 'Hadley, you're out of your mind... what's wrong with you? Where's the baby... is he all right? What the hell are you doing?'"
"We knew we'd find you here!" They know Hadley better than his employer does. Laura is seen through Hadley's hostility, "it shrilled," "lumpy body," the figure that "refused to budge," an obstacle more than a friend. Dave asks the only question that matters, and he is the only person all day to ask it to Hadley's face: "Where's the baby... is he all right?" Hadley never answers. Earlier chapters made the Golds the couple Hadley mocks (Chapter 3) and envies; In Chapter 16 he told Marsha that he and Dave Gold once "both dressed that way," like the hot-rodder at the drive-in. Now they come for him at night on Ellen's behalf.
"Hadley tore away. 'Let go of me,' he said thickly."
"Dave Gold kept tugging impatiently at him. People were yelling and stepping on each other; they were shoving angrily. Cars had begun to start up on all sides. Horns honked as they drove through the throngs that milled out into the street. The darkness was slashed violently by shafts of headlights. Over the murmur and shouting rumbled the motors and the swish of tires."
"'What's the matter with you?' Dave Gold shouted at Hadley. 'You damn fool... stop acting this way!'"
"Laura was trembling with apprehension. 'Let go of him,' she chattered, glassy-eyed. 'Be careful, Dave. Something's going to happen.'"
"'Shut up,' Gold grunted at her. 'What's eating you, Hadley? Are you coming with us or not?' He yanked at Hadley's sleeve. 'Let's get where we can breathe. I want to talk to you.'"
Laura sees it coming. Laura reads the moment better than her husband: "Be careful, Dave. Something's going to happen." Dave, the man of reason and argument in Chapter 3, treats Hadley as a friend who needs a talking-to, "Are you coming with us or not?" and does not see that the man in front of him is past talk. His "Shut up" to Laura is one more of the novel's husbands silencing wives. "You damn fool" is the same word Fergesson used in the cellar ("The damn fool"): the whole town has the same diagnosis.
"'Get your kike hands off me,' Hadley said, in a voice not his own."
"Gold's face dissolved and then slowly re-formed. 'Are you under the spell of that shithead?' he said."
A CLOSER LOOK: Hadley's slur. Hadley answers his friend with an antisemitic slur, and the narrator marks it at once: "in a voice not his own." The phrase has two readings and the novel keeps both. It may mean that Hadley is no longer himself, possessed by the rage that Chapter 13 called "archaic fury"; it may mean that the voice is borrowed, the stock language of American antisemitism in 1952, available to any white man who reaches for it. Hadley has used a slur before, against Marsha in Chapter 12, at the moment he wanted most to wound. The guide quotes this one once because the fight, Dave's reply, and the next chapter's voices turn on it. Dave's face "dissolved and then slowly re-formed": a man taking in the fact that his friend has turned the hatred of strangers on him. His answer is not about himself; he blames Beckheim, "that shithead," which is the Golds' reading of the whole crisis. Readers should take the slur as the novel takes it: the low point of Hadley's character, presented without excuse.
"Hadley hit him blindly. Laura screamed as Gold's glasses flew off and he stumbled backward, arms flailing. 'Get out of here, Dave!' she shrieked."
The fight. Hadley throws the first punch, "blindly," and knocks off Gold's glasses, the intellectual's emblem. Then Gold surprises him. The small "wiry" man "charged bull-like," and Hadley ends "choked, buried." The man who beat a woman in a motel room the night before cannot win a fight with a man his own size. The perception breaks down into "billowing shapes, massed shadows," the start of the half-blind state that lasts into Chapter 18. Laura's "Get out of here, Dave!" shows that she has been right all along.
The anvil. "Sparks flew as from an anvil. A numbing clang": Dick makes the head injury a blacksmith's blow. The image prepares the next chapter, where Glenn Miller's "Anvil Chorus" plays in an all-night café; the head injury and the music will meet. The "foot" and "arm" that strike him are not identified: once he is down, the crowd joins in, or Gold does, or both. The "circle of forms" he breaks through is the crowd around a street fight. The sirens "far off" mean the police are coming, and he runs.
Washing up
"After that came a vague period of running and stopping to gasp for breath and listen. There were no more people around him. Dark streets, stars overhead. Silent houses and stores. A few cars. He sat down on a curb and got out his handkerchief to wipe the blood from his smashed nose."
"He was a mess. His head still rang, and his right side ached violently. A broken rib, probably."
"He came to a filling station and got himself into the men's room. Taking off his coat he washed his face in the shiny bowl. He blotted at his hands and arms with paper towels, then sat down on one of the toilets to rest and collect himself."
"When he had regained sufficient energy he dried his face and pushed his damp hair back. He crawled into his dirty, torn coat, smoothed down his shirt as much as possible, and left the men's room."
"Cold night air knifed at him as he made his way along Freemont Avenue. Ten minutes later he unlocked the front door of Modern TV Sales and Service and headed for the basement stairs."
The inventory of injuries. A smashed nose, a ringing head, "his right side ached violently. A broken rib, probably." The "probably" is Hadley's self-diagnosis; nobody examines him. The handkerchief he uses here will be "bloody" in his pocket in Chapter 18. "Dark streets, stars overhead" is the first sight of the night sky; in the next chapter the streetlamps will replace the stars. The filling-station men's room is the second public toilet in the chapter, after the cellar's "filth-stained" one, and the "shiny bowl" is the cleanest thing he touches all day. He tidies himself before he goes to the store, smoothing his shirt "as much as possible": the salesman's instinct to look presentable survives everything. "He unlocked the front door": his key still works. This is the last time it will.
"I want my money"
"The six men playing poker peered around in shocked amazement as Hadley appeared. Fergesson lowered his hand of cards and got to his feet. 'Where the hell have you been?' he demanded, taking in the sight of Hadley's ruined face and clothing."
"Hadley held on tight to the doorjamb. 'I want my money.'"
The title line. "Where the hell have you been?" is the question Dave Gold asked an hour earlier, word for word; everyone asks Hadley where he has been, and he answers none of them. What he says instead gives the chapter its title. "I want my money" is the thought Chapter 16 planted at the bar ("Sooner or later he would have to stop at the store. He needed his paycheck") arriving at its destination. It is also a demand that reduces his whole relation with Fergesson to wages. The man Fergesson promoted to manager a few days ago walks into the private club in the cellar and asks only for what he is owed. He holds "on tight to the doorjamb": he can barely stand.
"Fergesson pushed through the gray-fogged room up to Hadley. 'Are you drunk?' He blanched as he saw blood leak from Hadley's demolished nose, down his jaw and onto his collar. 'Good God, what happened?'"
"'Somebody must have rolled him,' Jack White said softly. They all got up and came quietly over."
"'Give me my money,' Hadley repeated. He started back upstairs. 'I earned it. It's mine.'"
"'He means his check,' Jack White said."
White interprets. Twice White explains Hadley to the room. "Somebody must have rolled him" (robbed him while drunk) is the natural guess and wrong; Hadley started the fight. "He means his check" is right and deflating: White turns the cry "It's mine" into a payroll query. The men come over "quietly"; the "gray-fogged room" is cigar smoke. Fergesson's first question, "Are you drunk?", is reasonable (Hadley has been on a binge since Friday) and becomes "Good God, what happened?" when he sees the blood. For a moment the employer is a frightened older man.
"Fergesson followed Hadley up the stairs. 'Look here, Hadley... you can't come in here like this. Get out of here and go home. If you have any sense you'll go sober up and stay out of trouble. I ought to fire you for not coming in... but in view of what's happened to you I'm willing to give you...'"
"'Shut your fucking mouth,' Hadley said, heading toward the cash register. 'Get this thing open.'"
The sentence Hadley cuts off. This is the hinge of the chapter and perhaps of the novel. Fergesson, who told White at two o'clock "He's finished... I'll pay him off," has changed his mind on the stairs. "I ought to fire you for not coming in... but in view of what's happened to you I'm willing to give you..." The next words are surely a second chance of some kind: the blood has moved him. Hadley does not let him finish. The obscenity closes the one door that was opening, and Hadley never learns it was opening. "Get this thing open": the register, the only door he cares about now.
"Fergesson blinked. For a moment emotion swept across his face, a tide of dismay and pain, as if he were going to weep. Then his face closed hard and mean, without feeling, an impassive wall. 'You stupid lush,' he said. 'I'll give you one more chance to get out of this store.'"
For a moment emotion swept across his face, a tide of dismay and pain, as if he were going to weep. Then his face closed hard and mean, without feeling, an impassive wall.
The face that closes. The narrator gives Fergesson's feeling in full and then shows it shut away. "A tide of dismay and pain, as if he were going to weep" is the half-paternal care the novel has hinted at since Chapter 4, when Fergesson insisted "There's something wrong with Stumblebum" and still could not let him go. "Then his face closed hard and mean... an impassive wall": the same "wall" image the novel uses for the concrete and steel of the cellar. The man protects himself as the game protected itself from the street. "One more chance" repeats the offer of a minute ago with its meaning reversed: not one more chance to keep the job, but one more chance to leave.
"'Fuck you.' Hadley tore and punched at the cash register until it finally wheezed open. He pawed at the bills."
"Fergesson grabbed the calendar and located the date. Fingers flying, he counted out a hundred dollars, slammed in the register drawer, pushed Hadley away from it, and threw down the bills on the counter. 'All right, Hadley; here's your money. I'm paying you for two weeks. You're fired. I'll mail your bottle of celery extract to your house.'"
Paid off by the calendar. Even in a rage Fergesson keeps the books. He does not let Hadley take what he grabs; he pushes him away, checks the calendar, counts, and pays "for two weeks." The owner settles the account correctly in his own eyes, and he does it fast, "Fingers flying." Then the one joke of the scene, and it is a cruel one: "I'll mail your bottle of celery extract to your house." The celery extract goes back to Chapter 2, when Hadley bought soda water and "one of those little jars of celery extract" to make Fergesson a celery phosphate and was refused, and to Chapter 4, where Fergesson said "I won't have anybody running my store who swills celery phosphates." The health drink was Fergesson's first proof that Hadley was unfit to manage; he throws it back now as the last word. (In Chapter 20 the bottle is still under the typewriter table: he never mails it.)
"Hadley took the money and stuffed it in his coat pocket. 'Fuck you, Fergesson,' he repeated, opening the front door and stepping out on the sidewalk. 'And all your friends and relatives and your stores and all your TV sets and your poker game.' The door slammed and he was gone."
The catalogue of curses. Hadley's last speech to Fergesson is a list, and the list is everything the owner valued that day: "friends and relatives" (the men downstairs, the family business), "your stores" (plural: Modern and O'Neill's), "all your TV sets" (the cartons in the cellar), "and your poker game" (the ritual Fergesson refused to cancel "for anything Stumblebum does"). It answers Fergesson's "He had everything in the world, and he tossed it away" with its mirror: you have everything in the world, and here is what I think of it. The door that slams is the front door he unlocked with his own key ten minutes before.
The bar around the corner
"A moment later he entered the neon-lit bar around the corner and threw himself down on a stool. 'Scotch and water,' he said as the bartender turned from dice shaking and came slowly over. 'No ice.'"
"'Sure, Stu,' the bartender said. He began to fix the drink, eyeing Hadley nervously. 'How's the kid? Everything all right?'"
"'Fine,' Hadley said."
"How's the kid?" The order is word for word the one Hadley gave in Chapter 16 at the bar on Friday night: "Scotch and water... No ice." The ritual survives the collapse. This bartender knows him, "Sure, Stu," and knows there is a kid; Hadley is a regular here, around the corner from the store. The question "How's the kid?" lands with full weight on the reader, who knows where the kid is. Hadley's "Fine" is the last lie of the chapter and the most terrible. Nobody in the bar knows that a baby is alone in a locked car in a parking lot across town.
"'You look kinda knocked around.' The bartender served his drink and took a twenty-dollar bill from Hadley's crabbed fingers. 'You sure you're okay? Your nose is bleeding bad.'"
"'I'm okay.'"
"The bartender rang up change and came slowly back with it. A couple of the patrons were gazing at Hadley with horrified curiosity. 'You really got banged around,' the bartender repeated. 'What's the other guy look like?'"
"Hadley gulped down his drink and didn't answer. As the bartender moved off, Hadley dragged the rest of his money out and began arranging it in careful, even piles."
Trying to assemble, on a microscopic scale, some fragments of his shattered plan.
Even piles. The chapter ends with a man doing arithmetic with his hands. The bartender's "What's the other guy look like?" is a bar joke, and the true answer (a small Jewish friend with broken glasses, who came looking for him out of kindness) is one Hadley cannot give. The "twenty-dollar bill" breaks Fergesson's hundred; in Chapter 18 Hadley will count what is left in a bus depot: $53.22. The "careful, even piles" are order made out of chaos, like the rag diapers sorted and smoothed at dusk. The narrator names it exactly: "on a microscopic scale, some fragments of his shattered plan." The plan to save Pete has shrunk to a few stacks of bills on a bar, and the ordering hands that could not organise a day can still organise money. Hadley is a salesman to the end.
How the chapter is built
The chapter is a cross-cut in two long movements. The first belongs to Fergesson: a day measured in phone calls and clock times (ten, noon, two, four, five thirty, seven thirty, eight fifteen), ending at the card table with the deck slammed down in front of Tampini. The second belongs to Hadley and runs from dusk to near midnight without a single clock time, only "It was becoming evening," "For an infinite period," "The next thing he knew," "much later," "Ten minutes later." The owner lives by the clock; the fallen manager has lost it. The two movements touch twice before they meet. First through sound: the feet that thud over the cellar are the crowd Hadley joins. Then through talk: White guesses Hadley is at the lecture at the very hour Hadley is sitting outside it. They meet at the cellar door, and the meeting lasts a page. The chapter then ends on a coda in a bar that returns to the end of Chapter 16, the same drink, "No ice." Each strand has a door scene: Fergesson's friends admitted by Johnson ("The key's in the lock") and Hadley refused by the usher ("Your card, sir"). Each has a talk about money, Johnson's "Sell an extra TV set" and Hadley's twenty-three cents. And each has a man whose face gives way: Gold's "dissolved and then slowly re-formed," Fergesson's "closed hard and mean."
Reading the diagram. The chain runs down the chapter in order, with Fergesson's strand at the top and Hadley's below it, joined at "I want my money." The dashed arrow loops from the last box, the money in "even piles," back to the plan on the park bench: the narrator's own link, "some fragments of his shattered plan." The older diagram kept above shows the same Saturday as a cross-cut of deadline and failure; this one follows the order of scenes.
| Two clubs on one Saturday night | The poker game in Modern's cellar | The Society's lecture in the hall |
|---|---|---|
| Entry | Johnson at the front door; "The key's in the lock"; the door locked once "Everybody having come" | An usher at the inner door: "You have to have either a white or a blue card, sir" |
| Membership | Friends of the owner; Tampini "permitted" for the first time | Card holders; "This is not an open lecture" |
| Setting | "below street level, surrounded by solid concrete and steel walls" | "the familiar squat yellow structure, with its glowing lights and fluttering cloth signs" |
| Who presides | Fergesson "at the head of the table" | Beckheim on "the vacant stage and podium," unseen by Hadley |
| Records | "The flat stained notebook," entries "under the various names" | White cards for members; blue cards from Beckheim alone |
| Talk of the other side | "marching morons," "nut cultists," slurs, smog theory | Gold's "that shithead" from outside the hall; the Society's own talk is not heard |
| Women | Absent; a nude pin-up in the toilet; Monroe jokes; Johnson's wife at the hall | "men and women"; "an elderly woman in a heavy fur coat"; a woman "with an armload of pamphlets" |
| What Hadley gets | A hundred dollars, fired, a cruel joke about celery extract | Nothing: no seat, no answer, a car pulling away |
| Old guide (short version) | What the book says | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Pete is still in the car while Hadley is in the cellar and the bar | Hadley locked the car in "a twenty-four-hour lot" at dusk and never went back; the text does not mention Pete after the trash box | Implied, not stated; Chapter 19 confirms the baby stayed in the car |
| Fergesson pays two weeks and fires him | "I'm paying you for two weeks. You're fired." | Confirmed; the old guide's $140 estimate for two weeks of $300 a month is close (about $138 to $150) |
| Ellen calls the police, jail, hospitals | Reported by White: "the police, the jail, the hospitals... Friends, relatives, bars" | Confirmed, secondhand |
| White is "almost pleased" | "White's calm, almost pleased voice" | Confirmed; later he defends Hadley ("You're being a little rough") |
| (Not in the old guide) | Fergesson began to offer Hadley something before being cut off: "in view of what's happened to you I'm willing to give you..." | Added: the turning point of the cellar scene |
| (Not in the old guide) | Hadley once held a blue card, the rarer kind; the usher asks for "either a white or a blue card" | Added: the irony depends on Chapter 14 |
Flags for this chapter.
- The "big display room." White offers to clean up "the big display room" for the game; the game is played in the basement storeroom. Either White misspoke or the plan changed; not corrected.
- "Ellen told me." Fergesson says Ellen told him Hadley went to the last lecture. In Chapter 6 Ellen told Fergesson himself about the earlier Beckheim lecture, the one before Pete was born; no scene shows her telling him about the latest one. He may be running the two together, or she told him offstage. Not corrected.
- The sun and the Bay. Hadley watches the sun set "into the hazy rim of the Bay," but Cedar Groves is on the Peninsula, west of the Bay, with Bayshore Highway running south of town. A sun setting over the Bay would need an East Bay vantage. Left as written.
- A dime or twenty-three cents. In the drugstore Hadley finds "a dime... That was all he had left... a few bits of change"; after buying a five-cent candy bar he "brought out twenty-three cents in change." The second figure cannot follow from the first unless "a few bits of change" means more than the dime.
- Thirteen dollars gone. Friday night he had "Only thirteen dollars." Where about thirteen dollars went in a day the text does not say.
- "Paying you for two weeks." A hundred dollars is less than half a month on either the manager's $300 or the salesman's $250 plus commission. Fergesson counts quickly from the calendar; the text gives no breakdown. Chapter 16 says it was "nearing the end of the month and his paycheck was just about due."
- Where Hadley spent the day. The text jumps from Friday midnight to Saturday dusk. "Slept all night in the car" covers the night; the daytime hours are not accounted for.
- The parking lot. On Friday night he parked "by the rear loading platform of a locked-up grocery store"; on Saturday he is in a lot beside "a cheap café," a "twenty-four-hour lot." He moved the car at some point; not shown.
- Feeding. The novel never shows Hadley feeding Pete, and Hadley cannot remember whether he did. The guide does not assume either way.
- Cold in August. "cold empty air," "a chill wind," "The night was colder," "Cold night air knifed at him." Consistent with Bay Area summer nights and with the novel's habit; noted, not a mistake.
- The calendar. Fergesson "grabbed the calendar" at the register; the nude Monroe picture is "in the crapper." There is no sign they are the same object.
- Freemont Avenue. The text's spelling. Cedar Groves is invented, so there is no real street to check against; the spelling "Fremont" is usual in California.
- Prejudice in the narration. The usher is "a towering Negro" with "One massive hand"; Beckheim is "the great black man." Period language through Hadley's eyes, left as written.
- Prejudice in the dialogue. Porter's three slurs and dehumanising phrase; Fergesson's slur; Garfinkel's and Porter's talk of Monroe; Hadley's antisemitic slur.
- Looking ahead. In Chapter 20 Hadley's key will not fit the lock of Modern; he assumes Fergesson changed it "Saturday night" after the poker game. This chapter shows Hadley's key still working at near midnight.
Outside facts checked for this chapter.
- "The Marching Morons." C. M. Kornbluth's story appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction, April 1951.
- Marilyn Monroe's calendar. The nude photographs were taken by Tom Kelley in 1949; Monroe confirmed in March 1952 that she was the model, and the story ran nationally.
- Los Angeles smog in 1952. A. J. Haagen-Smit, "Chemistry and Physiology of Los Angeles Smog," Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, June 1952, traced the smog to hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides reacting in sunlight; his paper dismisses metal oxides as too small a factor. Johnson's "metallic wastes" theory is wrong by the science of its own year.
- The Hershey's bar. The standard Hershey's milk chocolate bar sold for five cents from 1900 until November 1969; the company changed the weight, not the price, through the 1950s.
- A quart of milk. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics city price surveys for August 1952 show fresh milk at about 25 cents a quart delivered and about 27 cents at the grocery (Albuquerque figures); "twenty-three cents... Enough for a quart of milk" is close, perhaps a few cents short.
- Daylight saving time. California voters approved Proposition 12 on 8 November 1949, putting clocks forward from the last Sunday in April to the last Sunday in September from 1950. Late-August sunset in the Bay Area therefore came at about 7:45 p.m., which fits the chapter's cross-cut.
- Money. U.S. consumer prices rose about 11.8 times from 1952 to 2024; conversions above use that factor and are rough.
- Draw poker. "Jacks or better to open" is the standard opening requirement in five-card draw: a player needs at least a pair of jacks to open the betting.
Takeaways from Chapter 17
- Two strands, one Saturday. Fergesson's day is told by the clock, Hadley's without it; they meet once, for a page, in the cellar.
- The owner's routine as defence. "I'm not calling off our game... Not for anything Stumblebum does." The game in a concrete bunker cannot keep the street out: "I can't play with all of them up there!"
- The town divided. Husbands play poker under the street while the faithful, including Ed Johnson's wife, march over their heads. The players' contempt is spoken in slurs, crank science and borrowed jokes ("marching morons").
- Ellen's verdict. "It isn't his fault; it's your fault and everybody else's." The chapter begins the chain of fault statements that runs to the novel's last page.
- The plan. Hadley believes he is past saving and that Beckheim will raise Pete and save him. It is love and abandonment in the same thought, and Ellen has no place in it.
- The card. Hadley, who once held the rare blue card from Beckheim's own hand and tore it up, is turned away for lacking even a white one. The control works; the person it was for is shut out.
- The baby. Pete is wrapped in squares of a greasy car blanket, locked in a car with the vents open, and possibly unfed. The novel does not soften it, and Dave Gold is the only one who asks.
- The slur and the fight. Hadley turns an antisemitic slur on the friend who came to find him, "in a voice not his own," and loses the fight he starts.
- The unfinished offer. Fergesson begins to offer mercy ("I'm willing to give you...") and is cut off. His face shows "a tide of dismay and pain," then closes like a wall.
- "I want my money." The relation of employer and employee ends as a cash settlement counted from the calendar, a hundred dollars and a cruel joke about celery extract.
- Even piles. The last image shrinks the plan to bills arranged on a bar: "some fragments of his shattered plan."
The Blindfold
When and where. The night of Saturday into Sunday, late in August 1952, the same Saturday as Chapter 17. The chapter has only two fixed times. Hadley thinks it is "probably past midnight" when he reaches the depot, and the waiting-room clock reads "One fifteen." The next bus back to Cedar Groves leaves in "Thirty-five minutes," so at about 1:50 a.m. Everything before the depot is undated: the street of buses and voices, the pole, the ride "up the coast" that he does not remember. Everything after it runs into the small hours: coffee, the walk, the bar, the conference over him, "The Rail is closing," the flight and the blow. The bar's closing is the last clock in the chapter, and it can only mean somewhere around two or later. Places: an unnamed street full of buses, which turns out to be the approaches of the Greyhound station in San Francisco; its loading platform and waiting room; a phone booth; an all-night café across the street; Mission Street; Market Street and its theatres; dark side streets of office buildings; Kearny Street; THE BRASS RAIL; an empty street where he is hit. Chapter 19 will reveal where he wakes.
Who is here.
- Stuart Hadley: drunk, concussed, his nose already smashed from the fight with Dave Gold, now with broken teeth; a hundred dollars down to $53.22.
- Voices in the dark: a man and a woman who pity him, a "hard and ominous" voice that wants him gone, and others who decide "He'll be all right."
- The people on the platform: "An elderly man with a rolled-up newspaper, in a faded blue business suit. A heavyset man, well dressed, vest and silk tie. A young woman in a heavy coat. A couple of sailors. A Negro workman."
- The ticket clerk: one line, "Thirty-five minutes."
- Two bus drivers: "Young men, big and good-looking," who tease him in the café.
- The waitress and the fry cook: background warmth.
- The bartender at the Brass Rail: "a small mean-looking man with close-cropped blond hair."
- The young men of the Brass Rail: a "slender youth in a sports coat," a swarm of others, and Tommy, "A tiny brown-haired youth."
- Present only in Hadley's mind: Dave Gold and Fergesson (whom he thinks are hitting him), Theodore Beckheim (the reason he came), Marsha (whose address he does not know), and, through the voices, Ellen and Pete.
Content note. This chapter contains drunkenness, vomiting and injury; a caricature of a gay bar seen through a drunk man's eyes, with the young men called "she" and "bitch" among themselves; a homophobic slur and a repeat of the antisemitic slur Hadley used in Chapter 17. The guide quotes the homophobic word once, where it shapes the scene, and paraphrases the repeated antisemitic sentence. Dialogue dashes in the book appear as "..." in quotations.
Darkness, beasts and stench
"It was dark. But not completely. Sound and motion all around him. He was moving. A great shape loomed up ahead; its blinding orbs bored into him and he ducked his head. The shape came nearer, then turned off to one side. A wave of sickening stench billowed around him. He began to choke; he floundered and twisted and spat."
No transition. Chapter 17 ended with Hadley in a neon-lit bar in Cedar Groves arranging his money in "careful, even piles." Chapter 18 begins with no place, no time and no name. Dick writes the opening in the shortest sentences of the novel, fragments of four and five words ("It was dark. But not completely. Sound and motion all around him."), so the reader is put inside a consciousness that is barely working. The "great shape" with "blinding orbs" is a bus with its headlights on; the "stench" is diesel or petrol exhaust. Nothing is named, because Hadley cannot name anything. The reader only learns pages later that this is the bus station in San Francisco.
"Another beast loomed, studied him balefully with yellow, unwinking eyes, roared and boomed loudly, and then swept past him. Again he gasped and choked in the cloud of foul-smelling wind it had released from its great behind."
The beasts. The buses become animals: they "loomed," "studied him balefully," have "yellow, unwinking eyes," roar, and release "foul-smelling wind... from its great behind." It is a crude joke and a frightening one. Hadley has spent the novel among machines he cannot master (the television sets he sells, Marsha's Studebaker, the "functioning machine" of Beckheim's hall), and now the machines are alive and contemptuous. The same yellow eyes will return at the end of the chapter as the headlights that hit him, so the first image already holds the last one.
"A hand pulled at him. He tugged away; Dave Gold was trying to hold on to him. The hand returned. Voices. Close and loud in his ear. Lights winked overhead, evenly spaced circles of yellow set in the darkness. The fumes were gone; but new shapes loomed in place of the old."
Still in the fight. "Dave Gold was trying to hold on to him." In Chapter 17 Gold had in fact grabbed Hadley in the street after the slur, and they had struggled until Hadley's head "struck something hard; sparks flew as from an anvil." Hours and miles later Hadley is still in that fight. Any hand is Dave's hand. The voices are "Close and loud," but he cannot place them. The "evenly spaced circles of yellow" are streetlamps, and Dick is about to turn them into something much larger.
"The poor bastard"
"'The poor bastard,' a voice said. A man's voice, close to him. He tried to make out the speaker, but he couldn't. He groped in the gloom; shapes flickered and winked around him. They dodged and shifted cunningly; they operated with incredible swiftness and intelligence. He moved a few steps, stumbled, and half fell."
"'Look at him.' A woman's voice."
"'Would you, if you were a man?'"
"'No.'"
A conversation he cannot follow. Hadley hears a man and a woman talking about him and cannot see them. To him they move with "incredible swiftness and intelligence," which is the drunk's sense that everyone else is fast and sure and he alone is slow. The exchange is half a conversation. "Would you, if you were a man?" answers something we do not hear, probably a question about whether he should be helped, or whether anyone would get into that state. The reader gets a scrap and must fill it in, as Hadley does all chapter. "The poor bastard" is the first verdict on him, pity mixed with distance.
"Stars at last in order"
"Hadley peered. Squinted. Circles of light, even-spaced above...stars at last in order, pattern and design. Darkness all around, black and thick. Dim shapes less dark that moved as he came near them. Keeping away from him. Cold air licked at his clothing; he shivered violently."
The cosmic order is a row of streetlamps. This is the most compressed irony in the chapter. Hadley's whole religious hunger, from the first Beckheim lecture in June to the "plan" in the park in Chapter 17, has been a hunger for order: a world that makes sense, a judgment, a design. Here, drunk and bleeding, he finds it overhead, "stars at last in order, pattern and design," and the stars are streetlights. Dick does not need to comment. The heavens Hadley wanted are municipal lighting, spaced evenly by an engineer. The shapes "Keeping away from him" are people who do not want to be near a drunk; to him they are part of the game that is about to begin.
The blindfold
"'Come here,' he grunted, holding out his arms to catch a shape. But it retreated warily. It was like a game; he was within a circle, blindfolded, trying to catch someone. Anyone. To pass the blindfold on. So he wouldn't have to keep wearing it. He was tired of wearing it. All at once he couldn't stand wearing it any longer."
The title image. The game is blind man's buff, the children's party game in which one player is blindfolded inside a ring of others and tries to catch one of them; in the traditional rules the person caught, if correctly named, takes the blindfold and becomes "it" (see Outside facts). Dick gives Hadley the game in its purest form and with its true motive: not to catch someone for the pleasure of it but "To pass the blindfold on. So he wouldn't have to keep wearing it." The sentences grow shorter and more desperate: "He was tired of wearing it. All at once he couldn't stand wearing it any longer." The blindfold is everything Hadley has carried in the novel: the job, the marriage, the baby, the dread, the sense of being blind to some truth that others see. He has tried to hand it to Beckheim, to Marsha, to Fergesson (as father), and in Chapter 17 he tried to hand Pete to Beckheim. Now he will settle for "someone. Anyone."
How the blindfold game maps onto the novel.
- The blindfolded player: Hadley, who cannot see what the world is or what he is for.
- The circle: everyone around him, who can see, who keep their distance and watch. Later in the chapter he will be "within a circle" again: the bystanders at the pole ("a ring on all sides") and the young men in the bar, who "form a safe circle a few feet away."
- The catch: the hope of handing the burden to another. Beckheim was to take the burden of meaning; Marsha the burden of the self; Fergesson the burden of judgment; Pete was to be handed to Beckheim.
- The rule of naming: in the old game you must name the person you catch. Hadley cannot even tell who is hitting him ("Dave Gold had hit him... Or was it Fergesson?").
- The game never ends: nobody comes close enough to be caught. In the bar, people do come close, and he pushes them away.
"'Come here!' he shouted. His voice rolled off and was gone in echoing shadows. Dim metallic peals that vibrated and danced around him. He was shocked by the continuing racket; he set his teeth and tensed his body, but still the racket boomed. And still the shapes kept their distance."
The echo. His shout comes back as "Dim metallic peals," the acoustics of a concrete and steel bus shed. Sound in this chapter is always metal: peals here, "a great clang" at the pole, the "Anvil Chorus" in the café, the "shrill whine" at the end. The chain of metal noise began in Chapter 17 with the "numbing clang" in his head when he went down in the fight with Gold.
The bystanders
"'Look at him. Look at his clothes.'"
"'You see very many of them?'"
"'Once in a while. Saturday night, especially.'"
"'What'll happen to him?'"
"'Hard to say.'"
"'You think maybe somebody should...'"
"'No. He'll be all right.'"
"'He better get out of here.' A new voice. Hard and ominous. Hadley stopped moving and became rigid. Fear shivered through him. He turned clumsily and began to hobble through the darkness. The circles of light passed obediently by overhead."
The hard voice. The first two voices pitied him; the third threatens him: "He better get out of here." It might be a station guard, a policeman, or just a man who dislikes drunks. Hadley obeys it instantly, as he has always obeyed authority (Fergesson's orders, Beckheim's words, Sally's judgment). Even the streetlamps obey: "The circles of light passed obediently by overhead." The order he admired a moment ago is now simply the order of things moving past him while he hobbles.
"'Look at him go.'"
"'The poor bastard.'"
"'Maybe we better...'"
"'No. Let him go. His own fault. Look at his clothes. Look at him. Look.'"
"His own fault." The verdict hardens. "The poor bastard" was pity; "His own fault" is judgment, and it is the line the novel has been heading toward. Ellen has excused him (he is an artist, "He sees something you don't see"); Marsha has excused him (society is grinding him down); Beckheim's teaching excuses everyone, since the world is ending. The voices in the dark give the plain answer, and on the next morning in Chapter 19 a frightened old German will say it to his face: "It was your fault!" Note the triple "Look." These voices are a chorus of watching. They look, they comment, and they do nothing.
The pole
"The voices faded. Hadley ran on, blindly, his hands out. Suddenly he struck violently against something hard. A great clang and waves of brightness flashed over him. He slid to his knees, and his chin struck something hard and cold. Teeth shattered and hot blood spurted into his mouth; it dribbled down his chin as he lay gasping. He moved feebly; everything wheeled around him."
"Teeth shattered." The blindfold game ends as it must, with the blind man running into something. "Hadley ran on, blindly, his hands out" is literal and figurative at once: the posture of the game and the posture of his life. The injury is ugly and permanent. In Chapter 17 he lost the shape of his nose ("his ruined nose" later in this chapter); now he loses teeth. Hadley, the "slim, blond" young man whose looks Alice Fergesson noticed at the dinner in Chapter 13, is being physically unmade. The "great clang" and the "waves of brightness" repeat the sensation of the fight with Gold ("sparks flew as from an anvil"), which is why he thinks, in the next lines, that he has been hit again.
"Dave Gold had hit him. He had to get up and hit back. Or was it Fergesson? Fergesson had hit him. There were shapes around him again. Maybe it was all of them. All of them hitting him at once. Taking a circle up, a ring on all sides."
Who hit him. Hadley's mind supplies the attackers it expects. Dave Gold did fight him, in Chapter 17. Fergesson never touched him: in the store Fergesson "pushed Hadley away from" the cash register and threw down the money, and that is all (see Flags). But Fergesson fired him, and the mind does not separate the blow from the dismissal. Then "Maybe it was all of them," "a ring on all sides": the circle of the blindfold game becomes a circle of attackers. This is the paranoid shape of Hadley's whole outlook, the world as a ring of people who see and strike, and it is also a sad truth. In one day he has been turned away by an usher, struck by an old friend, fired by his employer and pitied by strangers.
"'He fell.'"
"'He bumped into this pole here.'"
"'Maybe we better...'"
"'No. He'll be all right. Leave him alone. He'll be okay. It's his own fault.'"
The sober version. Against Hadley's ring of enemies the bystanders give the flat fact: "He bumped into this pole here." Nobody hit him. This is how the chapter works throughout: Hadley's version (beasts, stars, enemies) set against a plain outside version (buses, streetlamps, a pole). And for the third time a sentence about helping is cut off ("Maybe we better..."), and someone settles it with "It's his own fault." The bystanders have decided that the cause of his state excuses them from doing anything about it.
IN PRACTICE. "Maybe we better... No. He'll be all right." Dick writes the same failure three times: someone starts to act, the sentence breaks off, someone else decides that nothing needs doing. Social psychologists call this diffusion of responsibility. In John Darley and Bibb Latané's 1968 experiments, people who believed others could also hear an emergency were slower to help than people who believed they were alone (see Outside facts). Large organisations reproduce the street scene every day. An alert fires in a shared operations channel that forty engineers can see; a suspicious payment pattern appears on a dashboard used by three teams; an AI model's outputs drift and every reviewer assumes the model-risk team has noticed. "Maybe we better..." "No. He'll be all right." The cost of "his own fault" thinking shows up too: once a problem is labelled as someone else's fault (a careless customer, a bad upstream feed), it tends to be dropped, although the damage still lands on the organisation.
Sitting up
"Recently, or a long time ago." The gravel in his palms is evidence of a fall he does not remember, probably in the fight with Gold, when he "was dragged down to the moist pavement," or in one of the falls between Cedar Groves and here. Hadley cannot date his own injuries: "Recently, or a long time ago...one or the other." Time has stopped being a line for him. Chapter 17 began a day measured by clocks (ten, noon, two, four, five thirty); his half of that day dissolved into "an infinite period" in the park. Now even the order of his wounds is lost. The reader can do what Hadley cannot and list them: nose and probably a rib from the fight, a cut and a "numbing clang" when his head hit the pavement, broken teeth from the pole, gravel in his hands.
The loading platform
The curtain lifts. The chapter now switches from Hadley's inner version to the plain one, and Dick marks the switch with a stage image: "The curtain of darkness wavered, retreated, then abruptly lifted." Everything the reader has seen is explained in four flat sentences: a bus station, a Greyhound bus station, late at night, the loading platform. The beasts were buses; the "stars at last in order" were the "stark yellow lights set in the metal and concrete girders"; the echoing "metallic peals" were the acoustics of a steel and concrete shed. Dick does not linger on the explanation. He lets the reader do the matching, which is more unsettling than if he had spelled it out.
The audience. These are the owners of the voices, or people like them: "watching him with dull interest." Dick lists them like a cast: an old man in a faded suit, a prosperous man in a vest and silk tie, a young woman, two sailors, a Black workman. It is a cross-section of the city at one in the morning, and none of them moves. The sailors are a period detail: San Francisco in 1952, during the Korean War, was full of servicemen passing through, and in Chapter 13 Fergesson had lectured Hadley about duty to his country and "a bunch of Orientals." The "upright girder" he clings to is another pole, the second in a few minutes.
"His head ached and pounded. He reeked; his clothing was mud-soaked and filthy. Nausea swept him. He was dizzy. He staggered a little and vomited on the pavement, over his shoes and the cuffs of his trousers."
The suit, ruined. Dick is precise about the clothes because clothes have been Hadley's identity. In Chapter 10, driving him into the city, Marsha mocked "You and your suit and tie and cuffs; you look like a million bright young salesmen"; in Chapter 17 he spent the night in the car in them and wore them down into Fergesson's cellar. Now the cuffs Marsha mocked are covered in vomit. The bystanders a few minutes ago said "Look at his clothes" three times. The salesman's costume, the last thing that made him look like someone with a place, is gone.
SAN FRANCISCO
"A bus came rumbling in loaded with people, a great lit-up object that roared and thundered and flashed its immense headlights menacingly. Automatically, he moved back, away from the monster and into the shadows. And then he saw the illuminated slot above the windshield of the bus."
"SAN FRANCISCO"
Why the word terrifies him. The destination sign tells him where he is, and the knowledge produces panic out of all proportion. The city has carried a double charge all novel. It is where Hadley comes alive (in Chapter 10, riding in with Marsha, he "gratefully allowed the cold night wind to slap him across the face"), and it is where his sister Sally lives, where Marsha's world of Succubus and Hayes Hole lives, where Beckheim was found. It is also the place of everything he cannot control. Waking in it without knowing how he came is like waking inside his own worst wish. Dick's two images for the panic are both of helplessness: "a puppet on a wire," moved by something else, and "a speck tossing in an endless sea," without weight at all. The second image looks forward to the end of the chapter, when he flies "a tiny cinder" through the dark.
"He had come up the coast to San Francisco. He was alone; he had left the car back in Cedar Groves with Pete in it. Time had passed, how much he didn't know. It was late... probably past midnight."
The waiting room
"He crossed the loading platform and entered the waiting room. It was virtually deserted. Lights blazed down on the dismal benches, suitcase lockers, gum and cigarette machines, drinking fountains, discarded magazines. He located the ticket window and headed toward it."
"Halfway there he stopped and got out his wallet."
"Fifty dollars were left. Two twenties and a ten. He searched all his pockets. Ticket stub for the bus ride up the coast. Handkerchief, blood-soaked."
"Five or six match folders, from Cedar Groves bars. One pocket sagged with silver. Quarters and fifty-cent pieces, dimes and nickels. With numb despair he counted it all out. The whole thing added up to fifty-three dollars and twenty-two cents. That was all he had left from the hundred. He had lost the rest... or spent it."
The inventory. Like a detective, the reader can reconstruct the missing hours from Hadley's pockets. "Five or six match folders, from Cedar Groves bars" means he did not stay in the bar "around the corner" where Chapter 17 left him: he went from bar to bar, five or six of them, collecting matches. The "Ticket stub for the bus ride up the coast" proves he came by bus and paid for it. The "Handkerchief, blood-soaked" is from the nose broken in the fight. The heavy pocket of silver is the change from breaking bills at bar after bar; the first was the twenty he handed the bartender in Chapter 17. The arithmetic is exact and pitiless: he had Fergesson's hundred plus the twenty-three cents he already had, and now he has $53.22, so $47.01 has gone in a few hours. "He had lost the rest... or spent it" is honest: he does not know which.
Hadley's money, Saturday to Sunday.
- Before the cellar: "twenty-three cents" (Chapter 17).
- From Fergesson: "a hundred dollars," two weeks' pay. Total about $100.23.
- First drink in Cedar Groves: a twenty-dollar bill handed over for "Scotch and water... No ice."
- At the depot: "Two twenties and a ten" plus silver, "fifty-three dollars and twenty-two cents."
- Gone: $47.01, on drinks in "five or six" bars, a bus ticket up, and whatever was lost.
- Rough modern equivalents, using the guide's consumer price index multiplier of about 11.8 from 1952 to 2024: $100 is about $1,180; $53.22 about $630; the $47 spent in one evening about $555.
- Next bus back: in "Thirty-five minutes." Clock: "One fifteen."
Two weeks' pay in one night. The hundred dollars was not a windfall. Fergesson called it "your money... I'm paying you for two weeks," and Hadley had shouted "I earned it. It's mine." It is the family's money: the rent, the food and the milk for a baby whom Hadley had, a few hours earlier in the park, wanted to feed with twenty-three cents. Nearly half of it is gone on drink before the night is out. Dick does not moralise; he lets the count speak, as Hadley counts it, "With numb despair."
A ticket home
"He approached the ticket window. 'When's the next bus back to Cedar Groves?' he asked hoarsely."
"'Thirty-five minutes.'"
"Hadley bought a ticket and wandered miserably off. The waiting room was cold. He found a large wall clock and read it. One fifteen."
The sensible impulse. His first clear act is the right one: buy a ticket home. In thirty-five minutes he could be on a bus back to Cedar Groves, to the car and his son. The chapter's tragedy is partly that he holds that ticket all night. The young men in the Brass Rail will find it in his wallet ("Here's his bus ticket") and decide it is "too late" to use. The clock gives the chapter its one hard time: 1:15 a.m. on Sunday morning, so the bus leaves at about 1:50. He will not be on it.
Why he came
"He knew, of course, why he had come to San Francisco. He was still looking for Theodore Beckheim, retracing his steps back into the past, trying to find the big black man the way he had found him before. But Beckheim was no longer at the apartment on Hayes. He had left Marsha; he would not be there."
"Yet deep inside Hadley the yearning subrational need remained."
The search continues. This is the plainest statement in the book of what Hadley has been doing since June. He is "still looking for Theodore Beckheim," and the way he does it is to repeat the past, "retracing his steps," hoping to find Beckheim "the way he had found him before." The "before" is Chapter 11, when Hadley was lying on the couch in Marsha's flat in the Hayes District and "the door of the apartment opened and a man entered... the man was Theodore Beckheim." That evening was the closest Hadley came to being seen by the man he wanted for a father ("now Beckheim had really come toward him"). A few hours ago in Cedar Groves he saw Beckheim get into a yellow Chrysler without noticing him, and was refused entry to the hall. So he takes a bus to the place where the miracle happened once, as though it could happen again. Dick names the motive precisely: "the yearning subrational need," a need beneath reason, which even Hadley's own knowledge ("he would not be there") cannot touch.
"He had left Marsha." Here the narration, close to Hadley, says Beckheim "had left Marsha." Marsha's note in Chapter 15 put it the other way: she had broken with Ted and with the Society. Either version may be true from where each stands, but the novel does not settle it, and Hadley's version is the one that makes Marsha a woman abandoned by the great man, like himself (see Flags).
No address
"Again he searched his pockets; gazing with fascination at his moving hands he wondered what they were after. It was a long while before he understood: abruptly he stopped and stood limp and immobile, a wave of hopeless futility sweeping him."
"He didn't know Marsha's address."
The hands know first. A fine piece of observation: his hands search his pockets before his mind knows why, and he watches them "with fascination," as though they belonged to someone else. When he understands, the realisation is one short paragraph: "He didn't know Marsha's address." He has been to her flat. He has been driven there at night, down into "Hayes Hole," through a concrete passage between two wooden houses into a circular parking area. Barely twenty-four hours ago, in a motel in Chapter 16, he raped and beat her and drove off in her car, the car where Pete now lies. And he cannot find her. The relationship that wrecked his marriage never gave him a street number.
"The phone book was no help. No Marsha Frazier was listed, of course; that wasn't her real name. She had kept the name Frazier, but it was not legal. God only knew what it really was. He gave up and wearily left the phone booth."
A woman without a legal name. In Chapter 15 Marsha told Hadley that her daughter's father was "Don Frazier," a young engineer "killed in the Second World War," and added "It'll interest you to know we married, later. In 1940, just before the war. During the war there were a number of them; I've lost track." The phone book is the test of public identity in 1952, and Marsha fails it: "She had kept the name Frazier, but it was not legal." The point is larger than the plot. Hadley has spent the novel looking for solid people (a father, a teacher, a lover who knows what he is), and the people he finds turn out to have no fixed address in the world. Beckheim has moved; Marsha's name is not her name. "God only knew what it really was" is the narrator's shrug and Hadley's despair at once.
"After that he paced wretchedly around the waiting room. He couldn't sit still; something kept him moving, an inner ache that made his arms and legs work in spite of his overpowering fatigue. He wanted to do something... but what? What was there left?"
Motion without purpose. With the search blocked, what remains is restlessness: "something kept him moving." This is the same compulsion that kept him circling Cedar Groves all Saturday. Dick gives the mood in one question: "What was there left?" The bus home is in his pocket. He does not think of it.
The all-night café
"Finally he went across the street to an all-night café and ordered coffee. He sat hunched over at the counter, sipping the scalding coffee and rubbing his damaged mouth. His mind was dull. Now, no thoughts came. He was conscious only of his broken teeth, his ruined nose and clothing, his overwhelming sickness and fatigue and misery; nothing else."
The body takes over. The inventory of damage, "his broken teeth, his ruined nose and clothing," confirms what the reader assembled earlier: the nose from Chapter 17, the teeth from the pole tonight. "Now, no thoughts came." For a novel that has lived in Hadley's head, with its dreams of the end of the world and its "plan," this is a moment of zero: a man aware only of pain.
"Two bus drivers came in and sat down a few seats from him. Young men, big and good-looking. They glanced at him with curiosity, faintly critical and contemptuous. 'You get in a fight, buddy?' one of them asked."
"Hadley shook his head. 'No.'"
"'Celebrating?'"
Two healthy young men. The drivers are what Hadley was supposed to be: "Young men, big and good-looking," men with jobs and uniforms and an easy place in the world. Their contempt is mild, "faintly critical," and their questions are a joke. "You get in a fight, buddy?" is true and he denies it. "Celebrating?" is the opposite of the truth and he does not answer. Every encounter in the chapter has the same structure: someone looks at Hadley and guesses at his story, and he cannot or will not tell it.
The "Anvil Chorus." The record is real and well chosen. Glenn Miller's orchestra recorded Jerry Gray's swing arrangement of the "Anvil Chorus" from Verdi's opera Il Trovatore in December 1940 for Bluebird (see Outside facts). In the opera the chorus is sung by gypsies at dawn beating rhythm on anvils, a hymn to work, wine and women. Miller turned it into a cheerful band number with hammered accents. By 1952 it was a twelve-year-old hit, still on café jukeboxes, and Miller himself had been dead since December 1944, lost over the Channel during the war. For Hadley the anvil is not cheerful. In Chapter 17, when Gold fought him and his head hit the pavement, "sparks flew as from an anvil. A numbing clang echoed and reechoed through his mind." Tonight he struck the pole with "A great clang." The jukebox plays the sound inside his skull as dance music. The "nickel" is also right: five cents a play was the usual jukebox price of the time.
"It was like Jack's Steakhouse and his own kitchen all mixed together. Suddenly Hadley got to his feet and left."
Why he runs from warmth. The café is everything comfortable: warm, bright, smelling of coffee and ham, voices murmuring, a waitress chatting with the cook. Hadley flees it because it is "like Jack's Steakhouse and his own kitchen all mixed together." Jack's Steakhouse is the lunch place of Chapter 2, where "the fat, successful men" ate and where eating felt like "squatting in junior high school," the world of ordinary men he despises and fears. His own kitchen is Ellen's world, the home he has left. The café combines the two things he has been running from: the ordinary male world of work and the domestic world of wife and child. The fact that they are warm and kind does not make them bearable to him. It makes them worse.
Mission, Market, Kearny
"He wandered rapidly up the sidewalk, hands in his pockets. The cold night San Francisco wind whipped at him. He hunched over and half shut his eyes, face turned down. He crossed Mission and headed toward Market Street, his mind blank, walking mechanically forward."
The geography is real. Dick's route can be followed on a map. The city's main Greyhound terminal in these years stood at Seventh and Mission, on the block between Mission and Market (see Outside facts). If the all-night café "across the street" was across Mission, then "He crossed Mission and headed toward Market Street" is exactly the walk a man would make from it back past the depot toward the centre. Market Street's central blocks were lined with big movie palaces with neon fronts, and Dick's "Only the theaters were still open" catches a city where late shows ran past one in the morning while shops were dark. Hadley "avoided the glare of their signs," the same flinch from light he showed when the bus came in.
"For an endless period he roamed aimlessly, along silent, deserted streets, past huge office buildings. No lights showed. Only the darkness. On and on he walked. An occasional gas station glowed, then faded behind him. His heels rang in the stillness. Finally he came to Kearny, hesitated, then turned to his left."
"Turned to his left." North of Market the "huge office buildings" are the financial district, empty at night. Kearny Street runs north from Market through that district toward Chinatown and North Beach, the city's nightlife quarter, and the Black Cat, the best known bar for gay men and women in the city at the time, stood a block away on Montgomery Street. Dick does not say how Hadley picked the bar; he just "entered the first bar he reached." But the place he blunders into is in the right part of town for what he finds there. "His heels rang in the stillness" is one more metallic sound in a chapter full of them.
THE BRASS RAIL
"He entered the first bar he reached. A small place, off to one side."
"THE BRASS RAIL"
A bar set like a room he knows. Dick prints the sign on its own line, as he printed SAN FRANCISCO: names arrive in capitals, as Hadley sees them. The décor is a mixture of old saloon ("old wood," "Sawdust on the floor," "An old-fashioned upright piano") and the avant-garde ("modern prints, and a few modern originals" on black panelling). That second half belongs to Marsha's world of artists and little magazines; Hadley's own paintings came back to him in a brown paper parcel in Chapter 15. A "Brass Rail" in a saloon is the foot rail along the bar; the name promises the most ordinary kind of men's drinking place. What is inside is something else. "Automatically got out his silver": he pays in the coins from his depot count, so the reader can watch the $53.22 shrink.
"'What'll it be?' the bartender asked, a small mean-looking man with close-cropped blond hair. His voice was thin and raspy."
"Hadley studied the ancient wood paneling; he rubbed his forehead and muttered, 'Bourbon and water.'"
Bourbon now. In Cedar Groves he ordered "Scotch and water... No ice." Here it is bourbon and water. The switch means nothing in itself except that he is far past caring what he drinks. The bartender's description, small, mean, cropped blond hair, a thin raspy voice, is the one hard face in a room the narration will make soft and fluttering, and he never speaks again.
The Health Food Store again. "It was as bad as the Health Food Store." The Health Food Store is the café next door to Modern; in Chapter 3 Hadley sat at its counter by the marzipan display while Horace Wakefield carried his glass of milk over to talk. It stands in Hadley's mind for a crowd of soft, high voices that press on him. The comparison is also a comic deflation: the bar he wandered into on Kearny feels to him exactly like the coffee counter next door to his old job. "Jeans and dark turtlenecked sweaters" is the bohemian look that would later be called beat; in 1952 it marked artists and students, Marsha's crowd.
"Did you hurt yourself?"
"The young man on his right was gazing at him with interest. A slender youth in a sports coat, sweater, and silk tie. Gray slacks. Two-tone shoes. Through a haze of cigarette smoke Hadley made out two intense brown eyes, fixed on him intently, a half-smiling mouth."
"'Did you hurt yourself?' the youth inquired politely, in a lilting tenor."
"Hadley nodded dully."
"'Shouldn't you put something on it?' The youth's hand flew to his cheek. 'Good heavens, you're bleeding?'"
The first person who asks. Here is the irony Dick builds the whole chapter on. On the street a dozen ordinary people watched Hadley bleed and decided "He'll be all right." In the bar, the first person to look at him asks at once, "Did you hurt yourself?" and the second sentence is practical: "Shouldn't you put something on it?" The silk tie and "Two-tone shoes" echo the heavyset man's "vest and silk tie" on the platform, but this man in a silk tie does something. The narration still frames the kindness as suspect: the eyes are "fixed on him intently," the mouth "half-smiling." Whether the reader takes the attention as concern or as appetite is the chapter's test, and Dick plainly wants both readings in play.
"'What's the matter?' Three or four more of them appeared and crowded anxiously around Hadley. 'Is he hurt?'"
"'Did he fall down?'"
"'Did he hurt himself?'"
"A whole group of them pressed around Hadley. Inquiring hands fluttered at his face and neck like moths. 'Oh, the poor thing!'"
"'Look at him!'"
"'Oh, the dear!'"
"'Somebody hurt him. Look at his clothing!
A second chorus, the street's in reverse. The bar repeats the street almost line for line, and inverts it. The street said "Look at him." and "Look at his clothes." as evidence that he deserved nothing. The street asked whether a man would help and answered "No." The bar crowds round "anxiously." The street called it "His own fault"; the bar assumes he is a victim. Neither chorus is right. Hadley did this to himself and was also beaten; he is guilty and hurt at once. The bar has the right instinct and the wrong story; the street has a partly right story and the wrong instinct.
Contempt and comfort together. The one homophobic slur the guide quotes is here, because the scene turns on it: Hadley's first response to kindness is to insult the people offering it. The insult changes nothing. "But the hands went on fluttering." And then the extraordinary admission in the next sentences: "He closed his eyes and rested his head gratefully. The warmth of the place made him sleepy." The same man who fled the café because it was warm now sleeps in the warmth of a room he despises. "Gratefully" is the word Dick used in Chapter 10 for Hadley's pleasure in the city wind. He wants to be held, and hates whoever holds him. That is the shape of his whole history with Ellen, with Marsha and with Beckheim, and it is played out here in thirty seconds with strangers.
A CLOSER LOOK: the caricature. Dick's gay bar is built from the stock images of 1952: "lilting tenor," hands that flutter "like moths," voices "high-pitched," fluttering "squawking flight," young men who call one another "she" and "bitch" and coo "sweet" and "the dear." It is a cartoon, and a reader now should name it as one. Three things complicate a simple charge of prejudice, without cancelling it. First, the scene is told from inside a concussed, drunk man who has just mistaken buses for beasts and streetlamps for stars; the narration has already shown that what he sees is not reliable, and the young men "flickered and wavered" in his sight. Second, the bar is the only place in the novel where strangers try to help Hadley; their care is more real than anything the "normal" street offers. Third, the voices that later put Hadley on trial know things no stranger could know, which marks them as his own mind's work, and the contempt in them is his. None of this makes the portrait fair. Gay men in San Francisco in 1952 were real people under real legal threat (see Outside facts), and Dick, writing an unpublished mainstream novel, reached for the easiest image of them he had. The honest reading holds both: the caricature is crude, and the scene uses it to show how fear and longing look the same to Hadley.
"'Don't die!' voices whispered anxiously."
"'Look at him, he's dying!'"
"'No, he's just sleeping. Poor little sweet, he's all tired out.'"
"'We'll have to take care of him.'"
"'Has he got a place to go?'"
"Warm fragrant breath blew against his ear. A voice sang: 'Where do you live, sweet?'"
"Hadley grunted."
"Has he got a place to go?" This is the question that matters, and the honest answer is no. He has a ticket home and a son in a car, a wife he has left, a lover he has raped and beaten, a job he has lost and a teacher he cannot find. "Where do you live, sweet?" asks for an address, and Hadley, who has just failed to find Marsha's in the phone book, cannot give his own. He grunts.
The wallet
"'Look in his wallet.' Hands felt at his jacket; his wallet was slid cunningly out and examined. He could hear them exclaim and whisper among themselves."
"'He lives far from here.'"
"'He's lost.'"
"'The poor sweet got lost. Here's his bus ticket.'"
"'But it's too late. He can't go back now... it's been too long. He'll have to stay here.'"
The verdict on the ticket. "Cunningly" is the narration's suspicion again, but nothing is taken. The wallet tells them his address and holds the bus ticket he bought at the depot for the bus in thirty-five minutes. The crowd then delivers the sentence that sums up the novel's second half: "But it's too late. He can't go back now... it's been too long." Literally, the bus has gone: if he reached the bar near two, the ticket for about 1:50 is spent. Figuratively, it is Hadley's own verdict on his life. In Chapter 17 Fergesson set a deadline of noon and Hadley turned up at half past five. Every return he attempts arrives after the point when it could count. "He'll have to stay here" sounds like hospitality and like a sentence.
The conference and Tommy
"An intense, protracted conference followed. Hadley dozed. Arguments, angry words, a sudden flurry of spitting and slapping. He went on sleeping; it all came from a vast distance. Finally a decision was reached."
"'I'll take him with me.'"
"'You bitch, you're always favored.'"
"'Doesn't she always get the breaks?'"
Another game of cards. A few hours earlier, in Modern's cellar, six men argued over a hand of draw poker while Hadley sat on the stairs. Now a room of young men argues over Hadley himself. He is the pot. The "spitting and slapping" is a comic catfight in the caricature's terms, and the jealous lines ("you're always favored," "Doesn't she always get the breaks?") make him a prize to be won. Across the two chapters he has gone from a man who wanted to sit in on the game to the thing being played for.
"A gentle, insistent hand touched Hadley on the neck. 'Come on, sweet. Time to go. The Rail is closing.'"
"Other hands helped rouse him. 'Go along with her. She'll take care of you.'"
"'Come along, sweet.'"
"Hadley opened his eyes. A tiny brown-haired youth stood close to him, waiting excitedly, eyes bright, lips twitching avidly. 'Come with me, sweet. I'm going to take care of you.'"
"'And how,' voices agreed."
Tommy. The winner is "A tiny brown-haired youth," the smallest figure in the book next to Pete, and he is called "her" and "she." "Eyes bright, lips twitching avidly" is appetite, and the crowd's "And how" makes the sexual meaning plain. "The Rail is closing" is the last clock in the chapter: closing time in the small hours of Sunday. In Chapter 17 the narrative used closing times as judgements (the noon deadline, the hall doors shut by the usher). This one is ordinary, and still it pushes him out.
At the door
"Hadley slid from the stool unsteadily. Hands guided him; the tiny brown-haired boy had firm hold of his arm. He was led from the bar, among the hordes of well-dressed youths. At the door he abruptly halted."
"'No,' he said."
"A flurry of excitement and dismay. 'What is it?'"
"'Don't be afraid,' others put in quickly. 'Tommy'll take care of you. He'll feed you and make you well.'"
"'Yes, he'll make you.'"
"'He'll put you to bed and take good care of you.'"
"'He'll put you to bed and you can eat candies and sleep and grow fat and you won't have to do anything ever again.'"
The offer of a nursery. Read beside Chapter 17, the offer is horribly exact. "He'll feed you and make you well... put you to bed and take good care of you" is what Hadley needed to do for Pete and failed to do; it is also what he wanted Beckheim to do for Pete in his "plan." Now it is offered to Hadley, who is treated as the baby. The final sentence is the purest version of his wish all through the novel: "you can eat candies and sleep and grow fat and you won't have to do anything ever again." It is the dream of being Pete, carried and fed with no work and no choices, which is the deepest form of his laziness and his need. The pun "he'll make you" turns care into seduction. And the phrase "grow fat" connects to the voices' later charge that he is "plump" and "soft."
Hadley's answer is a second "No," and then the same antisemitic sentence he spoke to Dave Gold outside the hall in Chapter 17, word for word, now aimed at these strangers' hands on his arm. The guide quoted it once, in Chapter 17, where it ended his friendship with Gold; here it is paraphrased.
Hands on his arm. Twice in one night the same sentence is Hadley's answer to touch. Outside the hall Gold "yanked at Hadley's sleeve" and asked "Are you coming with us or not?"; in the bar Tommy "had firm hold of his arm." Both men are trying to take him somewhere, one to "where we can breathe" and talk, one to bed. The slur's target has slipped completely. That is part of Dick's point about prejudice: Hadley's hatred is not about the people it names. It is about being held.
"'What's he saying?'"
"'What's the sweet saying?'"
"Did he hear right?" This paragraph is the hinge for any reading of the bar. Dick makes Hadley himself doubt his ears: "Were they really saying what he heard?" From here on the narration gives no ordinary signals that what follows is real. The shapes "flickered and wavered," the walls "receded and dimmed," and "Even the floor under him was soft, like jelly." Hadley tries "to lock them into hardness," the effort to fix a sliding world that he has been making since he lay on the pavement trying to read the circles of light. The jelly floor matches the "soft" and "Like dough" of the coming accusations: softness is what Hadley fears most in himself, and here it spreads into the building.
"'Get away,' he grunted, flinging himself around and pulling his arms loose. 'Let go of me!'"
"His violence terrified them. They retreated in fluttering, squawking flight to form a safe circle a few feet away. Eyes gleaming, they waited watchfully. Voices whispered. Pale hands flitted and were never still."
The circle again. "To form a safe circle a few feet away." This is the blindfold game exactly, reconstructed inside the bar. On the street the shapes kept "a ring on all sides" and stayed out of reach while he groped for them. In the bar they are first close and touching, then, at his violence, they step back into a ring and watch. The game has the same rule both times: they will not let themselves be caught, and he cannot pass the blindfold on. "Squawking" sets up the hen image that follows.
The trial
"'Don't let him go,' voices said. The youth named Tommy was shoved forward. 'Don't let him get away from you. He's cute. Look at his sweet face. Look at his blond hair. His little mouth. Look at his blue eyes. Tommy, he'll get away! Your lover's going to get away!'"
"'He's not pretty,' other voices contradicted. 'He's puffy. Look at his eyes. Red eyes. Like a hen.'"
The inventory of a face. The first round is about looks, and it splits the room in two. One side lists the features that made Hadley attractive all novel: the "blond hair," "blue eyes," the young face that, at the dinner in Chapter 13, Alice Fergesson summed up as "Slim, blond, straight." The other side sees what a night of drink has made of him: "puffy," "Red eyes. Like a hen." The second set is accurate; he is bloodied, bloated, his nose broken. The voices are doing what Hadley does in front of a mirror, swinging between vanity and disgust. "Your lover's going to get away!" turns him into a romantic prize.
One paragraph, no breaks. Dick prints the whole trial as a single block of speech without paragraph breaks, which is unusual in a novel that sets nearly every line of dialogue on its own line. The effect on the page is of voices piling over one another too fast to separate, and of a mind that cannot stop the argument long enough to answer it. Nobody is identified. Prosecution and defence alternate, then merge.
The charge sheet, chapter by chapter. Every accusation in the trial is true to the novel, and none of it could be known by strangers in a San Francisco bar. Matching each line to its source shows whose voices these are.
- "He's lazy... Stupid and lazy." The charge Fergesson has made all along, as in Chapter 13, where he scolds Hadley for spending "most of yesterday standing around chewing the fat with the Basford salesman."
- "And he left his wife." Chapter 16: after the motel he drove home, lifted Pete out, and left Ellen.
- "he ran off with a whore." Marsha, Chapters 15 and 16. The word is the worst Hadley has for her and the one he would expect others to use.
- "He lost his job." Chapter 17: "You're fired."
- "he hit his best friend." Chapter 17: "Hadley hit him blindly," and Gold's glasses flew off.
- "he left his poor little baby locked up in a car." Chapter 17: Pete in the Studebaker in the twenty-four-hour lot, with blanket squares for diapers.
- "He quit!" False. He was fired, though he had long talked of quitting (see Flags). The defence lies on his behalf, as Hadley lies to himself.
- "He's an artist... He was made for greater things." Marsha's line in Chapter 10 ("You're an artist, of course. And you know it."), and Ellen's memory in Chapter 6 that "When I met him he was going to be an artist."
- "That bloated toad!... a millstone around his neck." Ellen, two months after giving birth, seen with the contempt Hadley has felt for his marriage and never quite said aloud. A millstone around the neck is the Gospel image for the punishment of whoever harms a child (Matthew 18:6), turned here against the wife instead of the man who hurt the child.
- "Until death does him part." The marriage vow, offered to Tommy. The verdict of the trial is a wedding.
A CLOSER LOOK: whose voices are these? The bar cannot know any of this. Hadley has said almost nothing since he sat down, and his wallet holds an address and a bus ticket, not a history. Dick has already shown him hearing street noise as voices and seeing lamps as stars, and in the paragraph before the trial he makes Hadley ask "Were they really saying what he heard?" The trial is best read as Hadley's own mind, split into prosecution and defence, speaking through the faces nearest him. Three things follow. Second, the defence is worse than the prosecution. The prosecution states facts; the defence (he quit, he is noble, he is an artist, his wife is a toad and a millstone) is the self-flattering story that let him do those things, and it ends by handing him over to someone else to be "made." Twenty-four hours before, in the motel, he raped Marsha and beat her. The trial calls her "a whore" and accuses him only of running off with her. Even at the bottom of the night his conscience will not name the crime against the woman, and the novel lets that silence stand. A reader should notice it, because the book's later judgements on Hadley depend on what he can and cannot admit.
"See what he was made for." The question the novel has asked since Chapter 1 is asked here directly: "What was he made for?" The answers on offer are all wrong. The salesman's job, which he "couldn't keep." The "greater things" of the artist, which he has not pursued. And Tommy's answer, "see what he was made for," which turns his old dream of being cared for into a sexual and domestic sentence. "For better or worse," "Until death": the vows he broke with Ellen come back as a joke at his expense. In Chapter 17 his plan was that Beckheim would raise Pete. Now strangers propose to raise Hadley.
Phosphorescent night leaves
"You belong with us!" This is the second half of a sentence that has run through the book. In Chapter 2 an old woman with a radio in her shopping bag told him "No, you don't belong here," the phrase that gives this guide's Chapter 2 its title. Now, at the end of a night of being refused (by the hall, by the street, by the city), someone tells him the opposite, "You belong with us!", and he runs from it. The voices fade to a single word, "...belong...", the thing he has wanted all novel, heard as a wail behind him. The images turn the young men into something not quite human, "Luminous shapes," "Pale and waxen," "phosphorescent night leaves," like ghosts or will-o'-the-wisps. They are unreal in his eyes now, which is part of how he escapes them.
"The bits of light danced and were swept away by the night wind." Dick's next phrase turns them into the magic wands of storybook fairies, a pun on the word Hadley threw at them in the bar, and then the lights are "lost behind him as he turned a corner and ran blindly."
The only living thing
"He was the only living thing. Empty, deserted streets. Great abandoned buildings. A vacant sky above. Remote stars. The wind lashed at him as he raced, mouth open, eyes half shut, gasping for breath."
The emptied city. "He was the only living thing." For a few lines Hadley is alone in a city that looks like the end of the world: "Empty, deserted streets. Great abandoned buildings. A vacant sky above." It is the picture of the emptied earth that the end-time preaching of Chapter 5 promised, and that part of Hadley has wanted, a world where the crowds and voices are gone and nothing more can be asked of him. The "Remote stars" are real stars now, far off and in no order, unlike the streetlamps he mistook for "stars at last in order" at the start. The chapter that began with pattern ends with distance.
The light and the blow
"He ran crazily, around another corner and down the center of the street. Faster and faster he raced. Behind him a great sound swelled. A vast booming sound that grew with frightening suddenness. Without warning he was illuminated. Etched in shadow against the side of a building."
"He halted, bewildered. The roar beat against his ears. A vast thundering rumble, mixed with a shrill whine. And the light. He was blinded. He moved in a dazed half circle, hands over his eyes..."
The beast returns. The chapter closes the way it opened, with a vehicle he cannot recognise. The buses at the beginning were "beasts" with "yellow, unwinking eyes"; now there is "A vast thundering rumble, mixed with a shrill whine," the sound of an engine and perhaps of brakes, and a light that throws his shadow on a wall. Dick never says what it is. Chapter 19 will: an old German couple, driving home late from Point Reyes Station, where the man's brother keeps a grocery store, tell him "We hit you with our truck. You were standing in the street." He "moved in a dazed half circle," the last circle of the chapter: the blindfolded player turning in the ring, and this time the thing that catches him is not a person.
"Something hit him. Weightless, he flew soundlessly through the night sky. A tiny cinder, drifting through the darkness, caught up by the wind. He felt nothing. There was no sound, no weight, no sensation."
"Even when he hit, there was no feeling. Only a dim realization that he was no longer moving. And then the darkness dissolved what remained of him. There was only an empty void, an infinite formless gloom, where he had been."
"A tiny cinder, drifting through the darkness, caught up by the wind."
The cinder. The image gathers the chapter's light and fire into one small, dead thing. A cinder is what is left after burning: an anvil spark gone cold, or ash from the fire of the end of the world that the Watchmen preach and Hadley has half wanted. Flying "Weightless," without sound or feeling, he has finally got what the bar offered, a state in which he "won't have to do anything ever again." The last sentence takes him to nothing at all, "an empty void, an infinite formless gloom, where he had been." "Formless" recalls the Genesis picture of the earth before creation, "without form, and void." There is nowhere lower for him to go.
"Who was he?"
"He woke up slowly. Everything was strange. With a flashing stab of panic he hunted his own identity. Who was he? Where..."
The question without an answer. The chapter ends mid-sentence, on "Where...," the book's own trailing dots. "He hunted his own identity" is literal amnesia after a blow and also the novel's whole subject. The bar asked "What was he made for?"; the street asked who would help him; the depot asked where he lived. Now he cannot answer even "Who was he?" Chapter 19 begins, "He managed to focus his eyes. He was in a small room; a strange, unfamiliar room," and the next stage of his story is told by strangers who hit him with their truck and take him home.
How the chapter is built
The chapter is built in three movements, and two of them end in a blow. The first is pure hallucination: a street of beasts and voices, the blindfold game, the run with hands out, and "A great clang" as he hits the pole. The second is a lucid interval, the only stretch in which Hadley sees plainly and acts sensibly: the curtain lifts, he reads SAN FRANCISCO, counts his money to the cent, buys a ticket home, checks the clock, looks for Marsha in the phone book, drinks coffee. It ends not with a blow but with a flight from warmth, out of the café and into the dark streets, which carries him to Kearny. The third movement is the bar, where hallucination comes back by degrees (the jelly floor, the trial, the phosphorescent leaves) and ends with the truck. The chapter's shape is a descent, a surfacing, and a second, deeper descent, with Chapter 17's anvil blow behind it and Chapter 19's waking in front.
Three motifs tie the movements together. Circles: "Circles of light," "within a circle, blindfolded," "a ring on all sides," "a safe circle a few feet away," "a dazed half circle." Light: the beasts' "yellow, unwinking eyes," the "stars at last in order," the platform's "stark yellow lights," the theatres' glare he avoids, the white faces in the bar, the "phosphorescent night leaves," and the final blinding light. Metal sounds: "Dim metallic peals," "A great clang," "His heels rang," Glenn Miller's "Anvil Chorus," and the "shrill whine" of the end. And over all of it run two choruses of "Look at him," one on the street that does nothing and one in the bar that does too much.
Reading the diagram. The chain runs down the chapter in its three movements: the hallucinated street that ends at the pole, the lucid interval that begins when "The curtain of darkness... abruptly lifted," and the bar that ends in the light and the blow. The dashed arrow loops from the last box back to the first, because after the truck he falls into darkness again and wakes asking "Who was he?", just as the chapter began with a man who did not know where he was. The older diagram kept above is a stop-by-stop map of the search for Beckheim; this one marks where Hadley sees clearly and where he does not.
| Old guide (short version) | What the book says | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Lede: he "is struck by a truck" | Chapter 18 says only "Something hit him"; the truck is named in Chapter 19 ("We hit you with our truck") | Corrected: the chapter keeps it unnamed |
| The voices repeat "Ellen's old 'real artist' defence" | "You're an artist, of course" is Marsha's (Chapter 10); Ellen said "he was going to be an artist" (Chapter 6); "real artist" appears in neither | Corrected |
| "In his confusion Dave hit him, or Fergesson" | "Dave Gold had hit him... Or was it Fergesson?" | Confirmed as Hadley's confusion; Fergesson never hit him |
| Hadley "repeats Saturday's slur" | The same sentence, word for word, as outside the hall | Confirmed; paraphrased here |
| $53.22, 35 minutes, 1:15 a.m. | "fifty-three dollars and twenty-two cents"; "Thirty-five minutes"; "One fifteen" | Confirmed; $47.01 is missing from the hundred and twenty-three cents |
| Stoumen v. Reilly, August 1951 | Outside fact | Confirmed: decided 28 August 1951 |
| (Not in the old guide) | "Here's his bus ticket... But it's too late. He can't go back now" | Added: the ticket home and the verdict on it |
| (Not in the old guide) | The trial omits the rape and beating of Marsha | Added: the silence in Hadley's conscience |
Flags for this chapter.
- "Or was it Fergesson?" Hadley thinks Fergesson hit him. In Chapter 17 Fergesson only "pushed Hadley away from" the register. Hadley's confusion, reported as such.
- "Up the coast." The ticket stub is "for the bus ride up the coast." Cedar Groves sits by the Bayshore Highway on the Peninsula, and a bus from there to the city would normally run up the Bay side. Marsha did drive in by "the coast highway" in Chapter 10, so Dick may simply use "the coast" for the whole run north. Left as written.
- "He had left Marsha." Here Beckheim left Marsha; in Chapter 15 Marsha's note and her own account said she broke with Ted. Hadley's version, not corrected.
- "He quit!" The defence in the trial says Hadley quit. In Chapter 17 Fergesson said "You're fired." The false line belongs to the voices and is part of the point.
- How the bar knows. The young men list facts no stranger could know (wife, job, friend, baby). The text gives no realistic channel, such as Hadley talking in his sleep.
- A tight clock. Between the bar near Modern late on Saturday evening and 1:15 a.m. at the depot, Hadley visits "five or six" Cedar Groves bars and rides a bus to the city. Possible, but tight, and the text gives no times.
- The bus ticket. The crowd decides "it's too late" to use his ticket. A bus ticket would normally be good for a later bus; "too late" is about Hadley, not the timetable.
- The money. $100.23 at the start of the evening, $53.22 at 1:15 a.m.: $47.01 is unaccounted for beyond "He had lost the rest... or spent it."
- Where he is hit. The text gives no street; he turns two corners after leaving the bar on or near Kearny. Chapter 19 does not name it either.
- Prejudice in the narration. "A Negro workman" on the platform; period language, left as written.
- The gay bar. A caricature in the narration and the dialogue ("she," "bitch," "sweet," fluttering hands); Hadley's homophobic insult quoted once, his repeated antisemitic slur paraphrased.
- Source dashes are rendered as "..." in quotations, and the chapter's last word "Where..." is the book's own.
Outside facts checked for this chapter.
- The Greyhound terminal. San Francisco's Greyhound depot of the period stood at 50 Seventh Street, between Market and Mission, at Seventh and Mission; it opened in 1942 and was the city's main Greyhound terminal through the 1950s (period photographs in the San Francisco Public Library collection).
- The Brass Rail. No San Francisco gay bar of that name in 1952 is recorded in the histories checked; a Brass Rail in San Diego (open from 1934, a gay bar from about 1957) is unrelated. The guide treats Dick's bar as invented.
- Gay bars and the law. The Black Cat Café at 710 Montgomery Street, a block from Kearny, had a largely gay clientele from the 1930s; the state suspended its liquor licence in 1948, and in Stoumen v. Reilly (28 August 1951) the California Supreme Court held that serving gay patrons was not by itself grounds to revoke a licence. The state kept up pressure through the decade, and Vallerga v. Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control (1959) went back over the same ground. A local history site claims "at least 34" gay and lesbian bars in the city in the 1950s; that figure comes from a single source and is reported as such.
- Glenn Miller's "Anvil Chorus." Recorded 13 December 1940, Bluebird B-10982, arranged by Jerry Gray, from the "Anvil Chorus" in Act 2 of Verdi's Il Trovatore (1853). Miller disappeared on a flight over the English Channel on 15 December 1944.
- Blind man's buff. A traditional game in which a blindfolded player inside a ring tries to catch another; in the usual rules the player caught must be correctly identified to take the blindfold, and older forms involved pushing and teasing the blind player.
- Bystander research. John Darley and Bibb Latané, "Bystander intervention in emergencies: Diffusion of responsibility," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 8 (1968): subjects who believed they were the only listener to a staged seizure reported it far more often and faster than those who believed four others could hear (85 per cent against 31 per cent before the seizure ended).
- Matthew 18:6. "Whoso shall offend one of these little ones... it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck."
- Money. U.S. consumer prices rose about 11.8 times from 1952 to 2024; conversions above use that factor and are rough.
Takeaways from Chapter 18
- No transition. The chapter opens inside Hadley's damaged senses, with buses as beasts and lamps as stars, and lets the reader translate.
- The blindfold. The title image is Hadley's life in one game: trapped in a ring, groping for anyone "To pass the blindfold on."
- The bystander street. Three times someone starts to help and the sentence breaks off: "Maybe we better..." "No. He'll be all right." "His own fault."
- The lucid interval. For one stretch he sees clearly, counts $53.22 to the cent, buys a ticket home and checks the clock at 1:15. Then he lets the bus go.
- Why he came. "He was still looking for Theodore Beckheim," retracing his steps to find him "the way he had found him before." Beckheim has gone and Marsha has no legal name or listed address.
- Flight from warmth. He runs from a warm café because it is "like Jack's Steakhouse and his own kitchen all mixed together," and then sleeps gratefully in the warmth of a bar he despises.
- Two choruses. The street does nothing; the bar does too much. Neither sees him whole.
- "It's too late." The ticket home is found in his wallet and judged useless: "He can't go back now."
- The trial. Voices list his crimes in a single unbroken paragraph, defend him with lies and flattery, and sentence him to Tommy "Until death does him part." The worst crime, against Marsha, is not named.
- The caricature. The gay bar is drawn in the cartoon terms of 1952, and the scene still makes its young men the only people who try to help him.
- The cinder. A truck he never names throws him into the dark, weightless, "A tiny cinder." He wakes asking "Who was he?"
Not Even California
When and where. Sunday, late in August 1952, the morning and afternoon after the Saturday of Chapters 17 and 18. The fixed times are few. Hadley wakes in "bleak, gray midmorning light." He thinks of Pete: "It had been twelve hours." The couple remind him "this is Sunday, you know." He steps off the Greyhound at Cedar Groves at "two in the afternoon," watches the parking lot from a café for "over half an hour," and takes a hotel room by mid-afternoon; Preovolos greets him with "Afternoon." The chapter ends before dinner, which Hadley is already worrying about. Places: the couple's old house in San Francisco (no street is named), its iron balcony, back yard and side walk between "two towering old wooden apartment buildings" on a steep hill; a city bus going down the hill; the streets toward Market Street, with "Mission and the slums" and the Tenderloin beyond; the Greyhound bus depot; then Cedar Groves: its bus depot at the edge of the factory district, the warehouse and the parking lot where the Studebaker stands, a cheap café with a jukebox, a "cheap transient-class hotel," its lobby, Preovolos's café next door, and a Standard gasoline station.
Who is here.
- Stuart Hadley: concussed, bruised, his nose "ruined," his teeth broken, his feet now jarred by the jump; out of a job since Saturday, with a five-dollar bill where last night he had fifty-three dollars and twenty-two cents.
- The old woman: "a cotton lace shawl and a shapeless dress, covered with the remains of a housecoat"; German, a "trained nurse," according to her husband; she wants him fed, then gone, then caught.
- The old man: "a brown shirt, red suspenders, baggy dark trousers, and some kind of slippers"; he drove the truck, does most of the talking, and would like a game of chess.
- The giant: a neighbour or lodger in "undershirt and dirty trousers," with "rolls of red flesh" and "tiny red-rimmed eyes," sent to catch Hadley.
- The bus driver: "a brown-faced middle-aged man," patient and weary.
- Three girls who get off the bus, and the passengers who stare.
- Two policemen watching the lot in Cedar Groves: one "in a dark Army raincoat" who crosses from a doorway, and another who comes "Out of the shadows."
- The hotel clerk: "a tall young man with sallow, pimply skin," greasy black hair, a dirty pale blue shirt; reads Mickey Spillane.
- John Preovolos: owner of the hotel, a cigar store, a used-furniture store and a restaurant; "bald, middle-aged," with "a heavy black mustache" and "two gold rings embedded in the flesh of his fingers."
- The gas station attendant, who looks at Hadley "with distaste."
- Present only in Hadley's mind or in passing: Pete, the baby in the car; Hadley's dead father, "a doctor"; and the family "in New York."
Content note. This chapter contains injury and pain described closely, and a narration that describes the German couple and their neighbour in crude ethnic and animal terms ("German peasants," "the eternal cunning of peasants," a "huge hairy paw"). No slur is used. The book's German is quoted as printed, mistakes included, and explained in the Flags. Dialogue dashes in the book appear as "..." in quotations.
An ancient room
"He managed to focus his eyes. He was in a small room; a strange, unfamiliar room. It was day; bleak, gray midmorning light filtered in the window. The sky was overcast; it was raining. Cold, moist fog lay over a dripping wood fence, a backyard littered with rusty beer cans and weeds."
Waking again. Chapter 18 ended with Hadley thrown into darkness, "A tiny cinder," asking "Who was he?" Chapter 19 opens with the next moment of consciousness and no bridge between them. The first sentence is about focusing, as if the eyes had to be made to work, and the second is a correction of itself: "a small room; a strange, unfamiliar room." Then the light and the weather: day, grey, midmorning, overcast, rain, fog. The novel has given almost every chapter of Part Three a bad sky, but this is the first rain to fall in the novel's present action (the only earlier rain is in Alice's memory of a wet Christmas Day, in Chapter 13), and it keeps falling through the rest of Part Three.
The same back yard. The view out of the window is almost word for word a view Hadley has seen before. When Marsha drove him down into the dip she calls Hayes Hole, to her flat, in Chapter 11, he got out of the car into "Cold wet fog," beside "a dripping wood fence, enclosing a backyard littered with rusty beer cans and huge weeds." Here it is "Cold, moist fog" over "a dripping wood fence, a backyard littered with rusty beer cans and weeds." And in Chapter 14, telling Dave Gold what had become of his hopes, Hadley used the same picture as a description of the world: "Instead of opportunity it's deserted hills and rusty beer cans." Dick may simply be reusing a San Francisco image he liked, but the effect on a reader is strong. Hadley has woken inside his own metaphor, in a yard that looks like the one behind Marsha's flat, where Beckheim's world first took him in.
"The room itself was ancient. An incredibly high ceiling. Yellow paint. An old-fashioned iron chandelier, hanging at the end of a twisted mass of black wiring. A chipped, white-painted wood dresser, tall and stern. Round china knobs. The floor was covered with faded, cracked linoleum. The bed was iron, wide and high off the floor. A narrow window. Tattered shades."
"Dusty lace curtains torn and heavy with age. A heap of ancient leather-bound books was propped up in a row; they filled the corner of the room in a wall-to-ceiling bookcase. Beside the bed was a cane-bottom chair. And his clothing."
An inventory in fragments. Dick writes the room the way a damaged mind would take it in, one object per sentence and most sentences without verbs: "An incredibly high ceiling. Yellow paint." It is the method of Chapter 18's opening ("It was dark. But not completely."), now applied to daylight. Everything in the room is old: an iron chandelier on "a twisted mass of black wiring," a dresser "tall and stern" (the only object given a character, and the character is a disapproving parent's), round china knobs, cracked linoleum, an iron bed "wide and high," "Tattered shades," "Dusty lace curtains torn and heavy with age," and a wall of "ancient leather-bound books." It is a room from another century, kept by people who have not thrown anything away. The last item is the one that matters: "And his clothing." The list ends, as Hadley's attention does, on the thing he will need to escape.
The first waking of the novel. The novel's first scene with Hadley, in Chapter 1, has him waking in a jail cell after a drunk: he "felt his head, his ears, his teeth, his jaw," "got into his shoes and began tying the laces," while "His hands shook." He then collected a paper sack of possessions that included "eighty cents in silver" and "two paper dollars." Chapter 19 repeats that morning, worse in every detail. He wakes in a strange room he does not remember reaching, touches a nose that has been broken, cannot tie his laces at all, and has a crumpled five-dollar bill. The novel is closing a circle: Part One opened with Hadley released from one kind of custody, and Part Three is ending with him escaping from another.
The little old couple
"It was a little old couple; two withered, fragile people huddled together, staring at him with anxious black beady eyes." "Their hair was thin and gray, spidery wisps clinging drily to their wrinkled skulls. Paper-thin skulls, weathered, aged..."
"The old woman spoke first. Her voice was thick, guttural, heavily accented. They were German; their faces were straw brown, noses large and red, lips prominent. German peasants, with large hands and feet."
How the narration sees them. The couple are introduced through Hadley's eyes, and those eyes are hostile from the first sentence. They are "withered," "fragile," "huddled," with "beady eyes" and "spidery wisps" of hair on "Paper-thin skulls." The adjectives belong to insects and to the dead. Then comes the ethnic sorting, in the order a 1950s reader would expect: voice "thick, guttural," faces "straw brown," noses "large and red," "German peasants, with large hands and feet." Seven years after the war, a German accent in an American novel carried a charge, and Dick lets the narration lean on it. The detail of the husband's "brown shirt" sits in the same paragraph. It would be easy to read it as a hint at the Nazi Brownshirts, and some readers will; but a brown work shirt with red suspenders is ordinary clothing for an old working man, and nothing in the chapter makes the couple political. The guide records the colour and declines to make it a clue.
The first words: an apology. Before she speaks English the old woman speaks German, and what she says is an apology: "Bitte... es tut uns fruchtbar leid, aber..." The printed word fruchtbar means "fertile," which makes no sense. What she means is furchtbar, "terribly": "Please... we are terribly sorry, but..." The two words differ by one transposed letter, and the slip is almost certainly a typing or typesetting error rather than Dick's design, so the guide flags it and leaves the book as printed. The point is that the couple's very first impulse is to say sorry. Only after the "aber," the "but," does the self-defence begin.
"'We hit you with our truck. You were standing in the street.' 'I know,' Hadley said."
The truck named at last. Chapter 18 ended with "Something hit him" and never said what. Here the driver supplies the noun in his first sentence: "We hit you with our truck." Hadley's answer is the strangest line in the exchange. "I know," he says, although the last thing he remembered was a roar, "the light" and a blow, and although he plainly did not know where he was a minute ago. It is the reply of a man who has stopped being surprised by anything that happens to him. The two hit-and-run pictures of Part Three now match: in Chapter 17 Dave Gold's blow knocked him down in the store, in Chapter 18 a pole broke his teeth, and now a stranger's truck has finished the night.
"'It wasn't our fault; you were just standing there. Selbstmord...' She glanced apprehensively at her husband."
Selbstmord. The old woman's second German word is Selbstmord, "suicide," followed by a broken sentence, "Er wollte selbst vielleicht," roughly "Maybe he wanted to himself" (the verb that would finish it is cut off). She is half asking her husband whether this young man was trying to kill himself, and her glance at him is "apprehensive" because the question is dangerous for both of them. If Hadley meant to die, the accident is not their fault; but it also means they have a suicidal stranger in their spare room. The novel never answers her. Hadley was standing in the middle of an empty street after running from the Brass Rail, and the reader saw him pinned against a building by the light. Whether any part of him wanted the blow is a question Dick lets the German word ask, in a language Hadley does not seem to understand.
"'No bones broken. We were driving home from the country, back from Point Reyes Station. My brother has a grocery store up there.'"
Point Reyes Station. The husband gives the only place name in the scene. Point Reyes Station is a small town in west Marin County, north of San Francisco across the Golden Gate, which had grown up as a railroad stop. It was dairy country, and a brother with a grocery there makes the couple ordinary working people driving home late on a Saturday night from a family visit. The detail helps explain why a truck was on a downtown street in the small hours: they were coming back across the Golden Gate Bridge and through the city to their own neighbourhood. The guide checked the town's history (see Outside facts). "No bones broken" is the husband's diagnosis and it may be optimistic: in Chapter 17, sitting on a curb after the fight with Dave Gold, Hadley felt his right side ache "violently" and thought "A broken rib, probably," and nothing in Chapter 19 says anyone examined his chest.
"'Ah, you were drunk, nicht wahr? Getrunken, mein lieber junge Mann.' 'That's right,' Hadley said impassively. He felt nothing, only a dull emptiness."
"Drunk, my dear young man." The husband's German is half a sentence of colloquial reassurance: "nicht wahr?" is "isn't that so?", and "Getrunken, mein lieber junge Mann" is "drunk, my dear young man," with a small grammatical slip (standard German would be "junger Mann"). The narration notes "The ghost of an uncertain smile, the faint trace of shared, covert knowledge." The old man is offering Hadley a way out that also lets the couple off: young men drink on Saturday night, everybody knows that, nobody needs to be blamed for anything. Hadley takes it "impassively," because he does not care which of them is guilty.
"My fault"
"The old man sucked in his breath excitedly; he turned to his wife and jabbed his finger at her. A flow of German followed; both of them spluttered at once, gesturing and waving their hands. Triumph glowed on both ancient, seamed faces: a weight had been lifted from their shoulders."
"'Drunk,' the old man repeated proudly. 'You see? You were drunk.' Pointing his finger at Hadley he cried meaningfully, 'It was your fault!'"
"Sure," Hadley said listlessly. "My fault."
The confession that costs nothing. This is the hinge of the opening scene and one of the quietest lines in the novel. The old couple need a verdict. A drunken pedestrian means no police, no lawsuit, no blame for the man who was driving. Hadley gives them the verdict in two words, "listlessly," and the room changes at once. For him the words cost nothing because he no longer distinguishes between faults. He has been told it was his fault all night: the voices on the street in Chapter 18 said "His own fault," and the bar put him on trial for every failure of his life. Here he simply signs the confession.
The phrase runs through the whole book. In Chapter 4 Fergesson, speaking of Alice's lost children, said "My fault... According to the doctors." In Chapter 12, after the night on the coast road, Marsha told Hadley "It's not your fault." In Chapter 14 Alice told Fergesson "I feel it's my fault." And at the very end of Part Three, in Chapter 20, Fergesson will sit in the wreck of his shop and say "It's my fault," and decide to call Ellen. Part Three thus ends on two confessions, one listless and false in its particulars (he was hit while drunk, but he was also hit by a truck), the other weary and partly true. The guide does not claim that this is the first time Hadley accepts blame in the book; it is the first time he accepts it so completely that the word stops meaning anything.
"The tension was broken. Amiable pleasure flooded the old couple; they burst into the room and came gratefully around the bed, faces radiant with joy."
"'You see,' the old man explained to his wife, 'I told you. Saturday night, junge Leute freuen sich'" ... "'You were lucky, mister,' he repeated. 'Next time you might not be so lucky. Yes, we picked you up and brought you here. We took care of you; we fixed you up.'"
"Young people enjoy themselves." The husband's German now is a proverb of tolerance: "Saturday night, junge Leute freuen sich," "young people enjoy themselves," followed by "Ich erinne mich ganz," which should read "Ich erinnere mich ganz," roughly "I remember it well," an old man recalling his own Saturday nights. He winks. The tone has swung in three lines from fear to triumph to fatherly indulgence. The couple are not villains here. They are frightened old people who have just learned they will not be punished, and they are almost giddy with it.
"Hadley knew they had been afraid to call the police, afraid to do anything but pick him up, put him in their car, and drive home with him. But he said nothing. It didn't matter... Neither their previous terror nor their present good humor mattered to him. He was thinking about Pete in the back of the Studebaker. It had been twelve hours."
What Hadley is thinking. Here is the real centre of the scene, and it is not in the room at all. "He was thinking about Pete in the back of the Studebaker. It had been twelve hours." In Chapter 17 Hadley drove Marsha's car to Cedar Groves with the baby, parked it in "a twenty-four-hour lot," and, "Making sure the air vents were open," "rolled up the windows of the car and locked the doors," and went drinking while "It was becoming evening; the sun was setting." He has spent the night in a bar crawl, a bus ride, a blackout, a beating and a road accident, and the first thought of his clear mind is his son. Everything that follows (the escape, the bus, the Greyhound, the café vigil) is driven by that one fact, though the chapter never lets him say it aloud.
Two small points need flagging. First, "twelve hours" is an undercount: California had kept daylight saving time in summer since a 1949 ballot measure, so sunset on a late-August Saturday in the Bay Area came at about a quarter to eight, and from then to midmorning on Sunday is fourteen hours or more. Hadley's count is the count of a man who has lost time. Second, Chapter 17 placed Pete "Beside him" in the car as he drove; here he is "in the back of the Studebaker." Also, the narration says the couple put him "in their car," when the husband has just said "our truck." A small slip in the book.
"Afraid to call the police." Hadley reads the couple correctly, and the narration endorses his reading. They did not report the accident; they took the injured man home. Within a few lines the husband says so himself, by threatening him with the police they avoided: "You can't make any trouble for us; you could be arrested for being drunk." The irony is exact. Hadley cannot go to the police either, because the police are about to be looking for him. Nobody in this room wants an officer at the door, and each side is bluffing the other with a threat neither will use.
Care with a price
"'Now look here,' the old man was saying to him. 'You can't make any trouble for us; you could be arrested for being drunk. Verstehen Sie? Ha,' he muttered, nodding wisely, with the eternal cunning of peasants. 'We were very good to you; we brought you here and fixed you up. We took care of you...'"
"'Look at your face'" ... "'we bandaged you. Yes, my wife's a trained nurse. We took good care of you.'"
The bargain. The old man's speech has two halves and he does not notice the join. The first half is a threat: "You can't make any trouble for us; you could be arrested for being drunk. Verstehen Sie?" ("Do you understand?"). The second is a claim on gratitude: "We were very good to you... We took care of you... we bandaged you." Both are true. They did bandage him, and a drunk pedestrian could be arrested. What the narration adds is the sneer: "nodding wisely, with the eternal cunning of peasants." That phrase is the narrator's, or Hadley's, and it is the ugliest in the chapter, because it turns a frightened old man protecting himself into a racial type. The guide comes back to it in the A CLOSER LOOK below.
It also changes how the couple's choice reads. They did not take him home only because they feared the police. They took him to the one place where someone could treat him without forms or questions, and she did. Nobody else in Part Three has given Hadley any medical care at all: not the bar in Cedar Groves, not the Brass Rail, not the man himself.
"They both watched him intently, waiting for him to say something. They were confident; they no longer had anything to fear."
"Hadley explored his face cautiously. His lips had been painted with some kind of salve. And his palms. He was bruised all over. His whole body ached, and felt alien. His clothes, heaped on the seat of a chair near the bed, were an unfamiliar bundle of rags. Were they really his?"
A body that feels alien. Hadley takes stock of himself the way he took stock of the room, part by part: lips, palms, bruises, an aching whole that "felt alien." The clothes on the chair, the suit of a television salesman, are now "an unfamiliar bundle of rags," and he wonders "Were they really his?" Chapter 18 ended with "Who was he?"; Chapter 19 begins with the smaller version of the same doubt. Then: "He wished suddenly he could see his face in a mirror." He tries to ask for one and cannot speak. He cannot even get a mirror. When he finally touches "his ruined nose," the narration notes that "It had been washed and partly repaired. Pain flashed to his temples, and he let it alone."
Why he cannot speak. "He found it difficult to speak. He tried and then gave up." The cause is not given. It could be the broken teeth from Chapter 18, the salve on his lips, the concussion, or shock. Later in the chapter "around one of his broken teeth the gum was slowly swelling and festering," which suggests the mouth is the main injury. Whatever the reason, the speechlessness matters to the scene: Hadley answers in single short sentences throughout ("I'm all right," "I know," "That's right," "I realize that," "That's fine," "Yes"), and his only long utterance is a request for food.
A peanut butter and jelly sandwich
"'Do you want something?' the old man asked. 'What do you want?' 'I want something to eat,' Hadley said."
"The two of them exchanged glances and then conferred." "'We don't have much on hand; this is Sunday, you know.'"
"Hadley hesitated and considered a long time. 'I want a peanut butter and jelly sandwich,' he said finally, with solemn conviction."
A child's order. After a long silence and "a long time" of thought, Hadley asks for the food of an American child: a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, said "with solemn conviction." The couple's eyes widen: "A what?" To an old German couple in 1952 it is a foreign dish, and the mother's offer, "Wouldn't you rather have a bowl of hot chicken soup?", is the sickroom food of their own tradition. He shakes his head. He does not want to be nursed as a patient; he wants to be fed as a boy. The request fits the regression running through Part Three, in which a man of twenty-four keeps falling back into a child's helplessness, and it lands a few lines after he has been thinking of his own infant son.
An echo, offered as a reading. In Chapter 4 Fergesson remembers that every working day for almost fifteen years Alice packed his lunch: "an apple and a peanut butter sandwich and a pint of milk." The peanut butter sandwich is the novel's food of home, of a wife who looks after a husband. Hadley's request may echo that, or it may simply be what a hurt young American would ask for. The guide offers the link as a reading and claims nothing more, since the text does not connect them.
"Again the two of them conferred. 'All right,' the old woman said begrudgingly." "'You know, you can't stay here very long,' the woman said warningly. 'We can't afford to feed you; people like us don't have very much money.' 'I realize that,' Hadley said."
"The old man licked his puffy lips; his tiny eyes flickered. 'If you stay here we'll have to charge you,' he said hoarsely. 'That's fine,' Hadley agreed."
The bill. The care now has a price. The woman says they cannot afford to feed him; the man says they will "have to charge" him. The narration gives the old man "puffy lips" and "tiny eyes" that "flickered," the face of a miser in a cartoon. Yet what they say is plausible from people who own a decaying house in a poor street, have just spent the night nursing a stranger and are being asked for a dish they do not have on a Sunday. Hadley agrees to everything ("I realize that," "That's fine") because he has no intention of staying. His agreement to pay is as empty as his confession of fault.
The money question. At 1:15 a.m. in the Greyhound station Hadley counted $53.22 in his wallet (Chapter 18). At the Brass Rail the young men went through the wallet. Now, searching his pockets on the bus, "all he had was a crumpled five-dollar bill." Roughly $48 has gone between the depot and this morning, in about the hours from 1:15 a.m. to midmorning. The text gives no explanation. He paid for coffee and probably drinks at the Brass Rail; he was searched by strangers in the bar; he lay in the street after the accident; and the old woman says outright that she has seen the photograph of his son, which is kept in the wallet. Any of these could account for the loss, and the guide accuses nobody. It is an open question in the text, and Dick may simply have stopped tracking the figure. At 1952 prices $48 was a large sum, about a week's pay for many workers (roughly $570 at 2024 prices, using the factor of about 11.8).
"Ist deiner?"
"'Don't you have a family?' the old woman asked bluntly. 'Eine Frau, und'" ... "'She cackled apologetically. 'A fine-looking boy; ist deiner?'"
The photograph. The woman's question is a mixture of German and English that only partly survives the printing: "Eine Frau, und... entschuldigen, bitte... wir haben das Bild deinem Sohn in dem..." It means roughly "A wife, and... excuse me, please... we have [seen] the picture of your son in the..." and she breaks off before naming the wallet. The German is faulty as printed: "das Bild deinem Sohn" should be "das Bild deines Sohnes," and the verb is missing. She also switches to the informal "du" form ("deinem," "deiner"), where her husband addressed Hadley with the formal "Sie" ("Verstehen Sie?"). A mother speaking to a young man as if to a boy, a husband speaking to a stranger as a stranger: the slip may be Dick's or a mark of character, and the guide notes it without choosing. Then she asks, "A fine-looking boy; ist deiner?", "is he yours?"
The photograph is real. In Chapter 11, going through Hadley's wallet card by card, Beckheim passes "the photographs of Peter and Ellen." So the couple did open the wallet. That is all the text says. Whether they took anything from it is never stated.
"'Yes,' Hadley said. He would have answered anything to get them out of the room. 'Yes, he's my son.'"
The only time he says it. "Yes, he's my son." Hadley says it to get rid of them, the narration insists: "He would have answered anything to get them out of the room." But the words are the only open acknowledgement of Pete that Hadley makes in the chapter, and they are spoken to strangers, about a photograph, while the real child is shut in a car down the Peninsula. The scene's cruelty is that the woman's question, kindly or nosy, reaches the one subject Hadley is thinking about, and he can only treat it as an obstacle.
"'Do you play chess?' the old man asked as the woman disappeared down the corridor toward the stairs. His wife yelled sharply to him, and his head ducked away. 'I'll talk to you later,' he promised Hadley. Loudly, he yelled back: 'Ich komme!'"
"Do you play chess?" The old man's last question is the most human moment the couple are given, and the chapter cuts it off at once. He wants company, a game, a young man to talk to on a wet Sunday; his wife calls him away and he goes ("Ich komme!", "I'm coming!"), promising "I'll talk to you later." There is a buried echo for readers of Chapter 3: Hadley and Dave Gold met in the high school chess club, and Hadley remembers the Young People's Socialist League meetings as "an academic lecture... like physics and chess." Chess belongs to the part of Hadley's life when he was a promising boy with a friend. The old man offers him that, without knowing it, and Hadley is already planning to go out the window.
Out the window
"Hadley lay listening. He heard them going downstairs, a muffled sound that diminished and died. Then presently, a long way off, opening and shutting sounds. Dishes. Silverware. The low mutter of arguing voices."
The kitchen argument. The house is big enough for sounds to travel "a long way off": downstairs, then cupboards, dishes, silverware, and "The low mutter of arguing voices." We never learn what the couple argue about. The natural guess is the sandwich, the bill, or the stranger in the spare room; the reader hears it only as Hadley does, as noise that tells him he has a few minutes. The household sounds of a kitchen, which in other chapters stand for home (Alice's dinners, Ellen's kitchen), here are the cover for an escape.
"Quickly, Hadley pulled himself upright and threw the bedcovers back. With a violent effort he swung his legs out of bed and onto the floor. His body was stiff as iron; he almost shrieked when he tried to pick up his clothing. His arms and hands burned like fire; he could hardly move his fingers."
"He dressed as rapidly as he could, all but his shoes. Sticking his shoes in his coat pockets he limped to the window. It was locked."
Why he runs. The chapter never states Hadley's reason for escaping, and the reader has to supply it. The couple have not imprisoned him. They have offered food, they have said he cannot stay long, and the husband wants to chat. But they have also threatened him with arrest, asked about his family, seen the photograph and named a price. Above all, Pete is in the car, and every minute in this bed is another minute for the baby. Hadley could have walked down the stairs and out the front door. He chooses the window, in pain, with his shoes in his pockets, rather than face the people who have helped him and might ask him for money. It is the same reflex that took him out of the warm café in Chapter 18: flight from anyone who has a claim on him.
"Easily, he disengaged the elaborate, rusty lock and tugged at the corroded metal handles. It wouldn't open; it was rusted and painted shut. He tugged with all his strength. All at once the window gave; with a protesting groan it slithered up. Expertly, he got his forearms under, knelt down, and strained upward, his hands knotted together. The window rose halfway. Enough."
"Easily... Expertly." Two adverbs give Hadley a competence he has shown nowhere else in Part Three. A man who an hour ago could not ask for a mirror opens an "elaborate, rusty lock" "Easily" and lifts a painted-shut sash "Expertly," with the knack of someone who has opened old windows before. Panic gives him a lucid, practical interval, like the one in the Greyhound station in Chapter 18 when he counted his money to the cent. One word, "Enough," closes the paragraph: half a window is all the room a desperate man needs.
"He scrambled out onto a narrow iron balcony. Damp mist, cold and biting, settled over him. A slowly descending blanket of acrid water. Over the rubbish-system yard, the fences, the rotting garage. He climbed over the railing and leaped from the balcony to the ground."
"His naked feet struck with stunning force. He had missed the soft grass and landed on the concrete. Sickening agony crawled up his shattered legs."
The jump. The fall from the balcony is the second blow of the day, and this one he inflicts on himself. He is barefoot, because his shoes are in his pockets; he aims for "the soft grass" and hits "the concrete." The narration calls his legs "shattered," which is the exaggeration of pain rather than a fracture, since a few lines later he walks, then runs. He lies "fighting off the rolling touch of darkness," the darkness that took him in Chapters 17 and 18, and holds it off. Above him, "Faces peered out and were instantly withdrawn. Shrill shouts. Running." The couple have heard the window.
The city in the rain. The neighbourhood is never named, but the description places it in one of San Francisco's old residential districts: wooden houses and "towering old wooden apartment buildings," concrete front steps, "a vast hill of apartments rising up into the swirling clouds of mist," and a steep street on which a bus comes "lumbering cautiously down the slippery wet surface of the hill." It is the city of Marsha's Hayes Hole flat seen from the back. The shoe that falls out of his pocket is pure slapstick, and Dick keeps it in because it slows the escape at the worst moment. Then: "His fingers wouldn't work well enough to tie the laces; he left them untied and hobbled on." In Chapter 1, in the jail, he managed his laces with shaking hands. Now he cannot manage them at all.
The giant
"A gigantic figure loomed up and cut off the street ahead of him. A man in undershirt and dirty trousers, a vast whisker-stubbled face, rolls of red flesh, bad teeth, tiny red-rimmed eyes, expressionless slack mouth. Behind the man scampered the little old German peasant couple, voices shrill and commanding."
"'Fang ihn an!' they screeched to the man. 'Hurry!'"
"Fang ihn an!" The couple's command to the giant is printed as "Fang ihn an!", which is not idiomatic German for what they mean. "Fang ihn!" is "Catch him!"; "Fang an!" (from anfangen) is "Begin!" or "Start!"; "Fang ihn an" mixes the two. Whether the hybrid is the couple's excitement, Dick's German or the typesetter's is impossible to say. The meaning is clear from "Hurry!" and from the "huge hairy paw" that reaches out. What is less clear is why the couple want him caught at all. Their stated wish was for him to leave. The likeliest answers are the bill they meant to charge, or fear that a man who leaves by the window might go to the police after all. The chapter does not say.
"A huge hairy paw reached out for Hadley. Hadley turned and awkwardly stumbled away. The hand groped, brutish and slow, as he agilely sneaked past it. Bending almost double he scuttled by a second window projection; the giant figure mutely turned and followed. It reached the projection, bending slightly to reach for Hadley. The point of the wooden support beam caught the giant just above his temple."
"'Ugh,' the man said. A look of surprise settled over his face. He turned slowly toward the projection, his arm up," fist clenched. "Hadley fled. He reached the sidewalk and dashed down the street."
The giant and the window ledge. The scene is a fairy tale in miniature: the small hero, the giant with "rolls of red flesh" and "tiny red-rimmed eyes," and the giant defeated not by the hero but by his own size. Hadley, "Bending almost double," slips under the jutting window projection; the giant, who must bend only "slightly," takes the point of the beam "just above his temple." His "Ugh" and "look of surprise" are comic, and so is the slow turn toward the beam with his arm raised, as if to punch the house. The narration calls him "It" for a sentence ("It reached the projection"), the strongest sign that Hadley sees him as a beast. The book prints "first clenched," an obvious misprint for "fist clenched"; the guide quotes around it. After a night in which Hadley's own head has taken blow after blow (Dave Gold, the pole, the truck), this is the first blow to the head that lands on someone else.
A dime, mister
"A bus came lumbering cautiously down the slippery wet surface of the hill. Hadley ran breathlessly, his skin wet with mist. Waving his arms, he shouted at the bus; it began to slow down, belching acrid fumes of carbon monoxide. The driver, a brown-faced middle-aged man, pointed sternly at the bus stop down at the end of the block."
A bus again. Chapter 18 opened with buses as "beasts" with "yellow, unwinking eyes," breathing "foul-smelling wind." Here, in daylight and in his right mind, Hadley chases a bus that is just a bus, "belching acrid fumes of carbon monoxide." The driver is "brown-faced," "middle-aged," "stern," then "patient," then speaks "with urbane weariness." He is the first adult in the chapter who treats Hadley as an ordinary member of the public, and it is to him that Hadley's helplessness shows most plainly.
"The passengers watched, some with amazement, others shocked, a few of them amused. At the stop the bus slowed to a halt; the doors flew open and three girls leaped down. Hadley clambered inside, panting and gasping, pushed past the driver, and sought the first empty seat."
"'A dime, mister,' the driver said patiently."
"Panic seized Hadley. He threw himself down on the seat and began searching his pockets. He didn't have a dime; all he had was a crumpled five-dollar bill."
Five dollars and no dime. The fare is ten cents and he has a five-dollar bill, fifty times too much and no use at all, because a city bus driver cannot change a five. It is a perfect small image of Hadley's position: he is not penniless, but nothing he has fits the demand in front of him. "Foolishly, he stood in the well, not knowing what to do, knowing only that he did not have what the driver demanded he have." That last clause could stand over the whole novel: at the store, at home, in Beckheim's hall, Hadley has never had what was demanded of him. The guide notes in the Flags that San Francisco's municipal fare may already have risen to fifteen cents during 1952.
"'Where do you want to get off, mister?' the driver asked with urbane weariness. 'Here, mister?'"
"Hadley couldn't answer. He gripped the pole and hung on tight; houses and cars flashed wetly past outside. The passengers craned their necks and peered at him with fear and curiosity, wondering what he was going to do, wondering how his torment might affect them."
The passengers. The bus is the third crowd in two chapters to look at Hadley. The street voices of Chapter 18 pitied and left him; the Brass Rail swarmed him; the passengers stare "with fear and curiosity, wondering what he was going to do, wondering how his torment might affect them." That last phrase is exact about the way a city crowd watches a damaged man: their interest is not in him but in whether he will become their problem. Hadley cannot speak, and the driver solves it by stopping. "At the next stop the bus halted and the doors slid automatically back. Hadley bounded down onto the pavement." The driver lets him ride one stop for nothing and asks nothing more. It is a small kindness, and it goes unnoticed.
"Taking a deep, shuddering breath, Hadley began walking. To his right was the downtown business section, the expanse of closed-up shops along Market Street. Somewhere beyond were Mission and the slums, the tiny hovels and dives of the Tenderloin. And the Greyhound bus depot." "He turned that way."
The walk to the depot. Hadley orients himself by the city's main street: "closed-up shops along Market Street," shut because it is Sunday, and beyond them "Mission and the slums, the tiny hovels and dives of the Tenderloin. And the Greyhound bus depot." The geography is loose. The Tenderloin lies north of Market, and Mission Street south of it, so they are not both "beyond" in the same direction; but the depot of the period stood on Seventh Street between Market and Mission, at the edge of both, and Hadley's sentence gives the feel of a district rather than a map. Then four words, "He turned that way," and the chapter jumps straight to Cedar Groves. How he paid for the Greyhound ticket is told only afterwards, in the change in his pocket.
Two in the afternoon
"It was two in the afternoon when he stepped off the Greyhound bus at Cedar Groves. Hostile, silent rain drifted down on the houses and streets; hunched over, he again began walking."
The jump cut. Between "He turned that way" and "two in the afternoon" Dick skips the walk to the depot, the ticket, the wait and the ride down the Peninsula. Hadley went up to the city in a blackout and comes back in a gap. The time is the only exact clock in the chapter, and it measures what has been lost: the car was parked at sunset on Saturday, so by now Pete has been alone in it, or has not, for some nineteen hours. The rain is "Hostile, silent," the weather taking sides.
"It took only a moment to reach the factory district; the bus depot was directly at its edge. He located the familiar warehouse and the bleak, deserted parking lot behind it. There, in the far corner of the lot, was the wet gray Studebaker, where he had left it."
"But something was wrong. The windows had been rolled down...and he had left them up. On the rain-swept asphalt something glinted; a fragment of glass. It came to him instantly: the windows had been broken and the car opened." "Somebody had noticed Pete."
What he sees and what he infers. This short paragraph is the turning point of Hadley's part of the novel, and it is worth reading exactly, because the old version of this guide got it wrong. Hadley does not look inside the car. He sees it from across the lot, notices that the windows are down when he left them up, sees a glint of glass on the asphalt, and concludes, "instantly," that "the windows had been broken and the car opened. Somebody had noticed Pete." He never confirms that the baby is gone, and the chapter never says so. The old guide's lede ("Pete is gone") states as fact what the text gives only as Hadley's inference. It is a sound inference, and the policemen in the next paragraph support it, but it is still an inference. The later chapters show that the inference was right in the way that matters: in Part Four Pete is alive and back with his mother.
"Rolled down" and broken glass. The text has a small inconsistency of description. The windows "had been rolled down," yet there is broken glass on the ground and Hadley concludes they "had been broken." Someone may have smashed one window to reach in and unlock the door, then wound the others down, perhaps to air the car or to reach the baby. Or Dick used "rolled down" loosely for "open." Either way, the sense is clear: the car that Hadley sealed, "Making sure the air vents were open," has been opened by someone else.
"Noticed." The verb is the right one, and it is chilling. A baby left in a car in a parking lot overnight is found when somebody notices: a passer-by hears crying, a lot attendant checks the cars ("in a few hours somebody might start checking around," Hadley thought in Chapter 17). The word also places Hadley among the people who did not notice. All night he forgot his son, and someone else, a stranger, did the noticing for him.
"Cautiously, he walked on past the parking lot. At a cheap café he entered and ordered a cup of coffee. Sitting at the counter by the blaring jukebox, he sipped the coffee and tautly watched the parking lot."
"It took a while, over half an hour, but eventually what he expected occurred. A policeman in a dark Army raincoat detached himself from an opposite doorway and crossed the street to the parking lot. Out of the shadows another policeman appeared; the two of them spoke a few words and then separated." They return to their posts and blend back into the dreary street.
The stakeout. Hadley does not go to the police and does not go near the car. He sits in a café "by the blaring jukebox" (the second café jukebox in two chapters, after the "Anvil Chorus" in San Francisco) and watches for "over half an hour" until "what he expected occurred." Two policemen are watching the lot, one in "a dark Army raincoat," which in 1952 means war surplus, the other appearing "Out of the shadows." They meet, exchange a few words and go back to their posts. The police are waiting for whoever comes back to the Studebaker. Hadley understands at once that the person they are waiting for is him. The narration's last phrase about them, which the guide paraphrases, has them dissolve back into the dull grey street, as if the town itself were watching.
"Hadley pushed away his coffee cup and got to his feet. He had lost Pete; and the police were out looking for him. Shoving open the door, he emerged from the warm yellow café onto the bleak rainy street. Quickly he walked off to his right, without looking back. Nobody followed him."
"He had lost Pete." Hadley's verdict on himself is five words and it is ambiguous. "Lost" can mean that the baby is gone from his keeping, taken by the police or the welfare authorities; it can also hint, to a frightened father, at something worse. The text does not resolve it in this chapter. The sentence is followed by a second fact, "and the police were out looking for him," and the semicolon ties them: losing the child and becoming a fugitive are the same event. "Nobody followed him" is both relief and desolation. He is free, and nobody wants him.
Three dollars and ninety-five cents
"There were three one-dollar bills in his pockets, change from the Greyhound bus fare. Searching carefully he brought up a fifty-cent piece, a quarter, and two dimes."
The money, one coin at a time.
- Saturday, start of the evening (Chapter 17): Fergesson's hundred dollars, $100.23 with his own change.
- 1:15 a.m. Sunday (Chapter 18): $53.22, counted in the Greyhound station.
- Midmorning, on the city bus: "a crumpled five-dollar bill," and not a dime.
- Afternoon, after the Greyhound fare and the coffee: three one-dollar bills, a half dollar, a quarter and two dimes: $3.95. So $5.00 less $3.95 means the fare and the coffee together cost $1.05.
- The hotel: "Three dollars... In advance." That should leave 95 cents.
- In the lobby, he worries "what could he get to eat for seventy-five cents?" Twenty cents (the two dimes) are unaccounted for. The coffee was bought before he counted his coins, so it cannot explain the gap. The guide flags the figure and does not invent a reason.
At the conversion factor of about 11.8, the five-dollar bill is about $59 today, the hotel room about $35, and seventy-five cents about $9. The man Fergesson paid off with a hundred dollars on Saturday is down, a day later, to the price of a cheap meal.
Hadley's lucid intervals are always arithmetic. When everything else has gone, he can still add up the coins, and the coins are almost the only facts the chapter gives him that he can trust.
"Not far ahead was the dour outline of a cheap transient-class hotel. He headed toward it."
"'How much?' he asked the clerk leaning against the flyspecked counter. 'A single'" ... "'without bath.'"
"The clerk studied him thoroughly before answering. He was a tall young man with sallow, pimply skin, a shock of thick, greasy black hair tumbling down around his ears, wearing a dirty pale blue shirt and food-stained slacks. 'Looks like something happened to you,' he said languidly."
The clerk. The clerk is one of Dick's sharp minor portraits: "sallow, pimply," with "thick, greasy black hair tumbling down around his ears," "a dirty pale blue shirt and food-stained slacks." He looks to be about Hadley's age, and it is he who looks down on Hadley. "Looks like something happened to you," he says "languidly," and Hadley does not answer. "Three dollars... No luggage?... In advance." A man with no luggage and a battered face pays first. "It was more money than he had expected. But he signed the register and handed over the bills."
"Elaborately, the clerk gave him the key with its heavy square of red plastic, stamped with the name and address of the hotel and the number of the room. With a contemptuous twist of his body the clerk pointed to a flight of wide wooden stairs; he eyed Hadley all the way up, until the lobby was lost behind and Hadley emerged on the second floor."
Signing the register. One detail is easy to miss. Hadley, whom the police are looking for, "signed the register." The text does not say what name he wrote. In a small town where two policemen are watching a parking lot, a battered young man with no luggage signing into a hotel a few streets away is exactly the kind of thing that gets noticed. The chapter lets the risk pass without comment, and the next chapter will show whether it mattered.
"His room was large, drab, and not clean. Immediately, he pulled open the window and let the damp afternoon air billow in." "The day was dark, leaden gray. Only a few people were out; they ducked along in heavy raincoats and umbrellas. The damp chill made Hadley's jaw ache; around one of his broken teeth the gum was slowly swelling and festering."
"He couldn't stand the room."
The second room. The chapter is built on two rooms Hadley wakes into or pays for, and he flees both. The first, in the old couple's house, was ancient and full of things; the second is "large, drab, and not clean," with "gray, stringy curtains" that "fluttered dismally." The first was free and came with a nurse; the second costs three of his last four dollars and comes with nothing. He opens the window of the second room as he forced the window of the first, and the body keeps its own account: the gum around a broken tooth is "slowly swelling and festering," an infection setting in. Then a sentence of five words, a paragraph by itself: "He couldn't stand the room."
The lobby. The lobby is a still life of 1952 small-town America: a "yellow plastic portable radio" playing "Western steel guitar," a clerk "slumped over a pocket book," which the chapter will soon identify as a Mickey Spillane paperback, a "dilapidated wicker chair," a "sagging couch," a cigarette machine, rain on the plate glass. Plastic radios were the new cheap consumer goods of the period, the same world of appliances Hadley sold at Modern TV, now turned into the noise of a flophouse. And Hadley, as so often in Part Three, moves in "an aimless, desperate circle," the circle of Chapter 18's blindfold game, before he sits down.
"He wondered what he was going to do. He wondered where he was going to go, and how. There was nothing left to his plan. There was nothing left to anything."
The plan. What was "his plan"? The chapter never says it, and that is part of the point. In Chapter 18 his plan was to find Beckheim in San Francisco; on Sunday morning it was to get back to Pete; both have collapsed. "There was nothing left to his plan. There was nothing left to anything." The second sentence widens the first from his own scheme to the world, the same move as Chapter 14's "deserted hills and rusty beer cans." It is the low point of the chapter, and Dick follows it at once with the least likely rescuer in the book.
"For a time he eyed the cigarette machine in the corner of the lobby. He got out the change, but then he put it away. All the money he had would have to go for dinner; already his stomach had begun to growl sickishly. But what could he get to eat for seventy-five cents?"
Cigarettes or dinner. The choice is small and complete. He takes out his change for cigarettes and puts it back, because "All the money he had would have to go for dinner." It is the first moment of prudence in two days. The chapter shows him eating nothing all day; the sandwich he asked the old couple for was never served, because he went out the window while they argued over it. A man who had a hundred dollars on Saturday is now choosing between a pack of cigarettes and a meal.
John Preovolos
"While he was sitting and meditating, a man came and sat down on the sagging couch across from him. A bald, middle-aged man with a heavy black mustache, wearing a rumpled brown coat and a gray sweatshirt, cord trousers, and black leather dress shoes."
"The man nodded. 'Afternoon.' 'Afternoon,' Hadley muttered. 'You hurt your jaw, my friend,' the man said solemnly."
A stranger who asks nothing. Preovolos enters as the old couple did, looking at Hadley's injuries, but where they asked "Why were you there? What were you doing?", he makes a statement and stops: "You hurt your jaw, my friend." He calls Hadley "my friend" in his first sentence and never asks how it happened. His clothes are a comic mixture, "a rumpled brown coat and a gray sweatshirt, cord trousers, and black leather dress shoes," a man half dressed for business and half for Sunday at home.
"The man got out a cigarette case, bent and imitation gold. He took a cork-tipped cigarette from the case and then held it out to Hadley." "'Thanks,' Hadley said gratefully, accepting one."
"'Look,' the man said; his voice was faintly accented. He leaned forward and lit Hadley's cigarette from the side of the case: it was a combination case and cigarette lighter. With a broad, toothy smile the man settled back and lit his own. 'Pretty neat, don't you think?'"
The cigarette. A few minutes earlier Hadley put his change back rather than spend it on cigarettes. Now a stranger gives him one, "gratefully" accepted, and lights it with a gadget: a case that is also a lighter, "bent and imitation gold." Preovolos is as proud of it as a boy ("Pretty neat, don't you think?"), and Hadley's answer is the "listless" "Sure" he gave the old couple. The offered cigarette is the only gift in the chapter that comes with no bill attached.
"The man looked around the lobby. His eyes grew large and round; his mouth fell open in an expression of wonderment. 'Pretty terrible-looking hotel,' he said in an awed voice." "Hadley nodded." "The man sagged. He grinned wryly, and shrugged. 'I own it.'"
The joke. Preovolos plays a little comedy for an audience of one. He looks around his own lobby as if seeing it for the first time, with "wonderment," pronounces it "Pretty terrible-looking," waits for Hadley's nod, and then sags and confesses: "I own it." It is the first moment in two chapters that makes Hadley smile, and it works because the owner is the first person to agree with him about anything.
"He held out a large, soft hand; there were two gold rings embedded in the flesh of his fingers. 'You've heard of me? I'm Preovolos. John Preovolos.' He jerked his head. 'I own the cigar store and the used-furniture store over that way.'" "'The restaurant on that side...serves the hotel. Isn't that something?'"
"'Sure,' Hadley said, a little amused by the fleshy Greek."
John Preovolos. A Greek immigrant proprietor of a sort found in many small Californian towns: owner of a cheap hotel, a cigar store, a used-furniture store and the restaurant that serves the hotel. "Bald, middle-aged," with "a heavy black mustache," "a large, soft hand," "two gold rings embedded in the flesh of his fingers," "faintly accented," and called "the fleshy Greek." Dick gives him no background beyond the accent, the name and the businesses. He is a small-town businessman who works on Sunday, sits down with a battered guest, admits that everything he owns is run down, and believes absolutely in the future. He never appears again in the novel.
"'Listen,' Preovolos said tensely, leaning forward, his face close to Hadley. 'This place is run-down, isn't it? Give me your opinion.' 'It is,' Hadley admitted."
"'The rooms, too? They're the same, you would say?' 'I'm afraid so,' Hadley said. 'Maybe worse.'"
"'That's what I thought. As I came in the door I said to myself, 'The rooms are even worse.''"
Fergesson's Modern TV ran on the owner's judgment and pride; Preovolos asks "Give me your opinion" and takes the bad news "with philosophical calm." He even quotes his own thought to prove he already knew. For a man who has just been fired by a boss who would not listen to him, it is a strange and soothing experience to be asked.
"'You look like you come from a good family. Would you say that?' 'Yes,' Hadley agreed. 'I come from a good family. They live in New York. Lots of money.' 'Your father is in business?' 'He was a doctor,' Hadley said."
"'I'm telling you something that I was thinking all this morning. This town is dead. Finished. You know where something's really going on?' 'Where?' Hadley asked. 'Milpitas.'"
"'What's going on in Milpitas?' Hadley asked, grinning in spite of himself."
Milpitas
"'Listen,' he gasped. 'Up in Milpitas a big corporation'" ... "'is buying up ground. Thousands of acres, out in the nothing. A big corporation is out of its mind? That will be the frosty Friday. This corporation'" ... "'is going to set up operations one of these months. Milpitas is going to be big. Milpitas is going to grow.'"
The Greek is right. In 1952 Milpitas was a farm town at the southern end of San Francisco Bay, on the road between Oakland and San José, with fewer than a thousand people. Preovolos's secret is a real one. In February 1953, about six months after the novel's August, the Ford Motor Company announced that it would build a large assembly plant just south of Milpitas, on land bought from the Western Pacific Railroad; the plant began building cars in 1955, employed thousands of workers, and ran until 1983. Milpitas incorporated as a city on 26 January 1954, with 825 residents, largely to stop San José annexing the land around the coming plant, and its population passed six thousand by 1960. A corporation buying "Thousands of acres, out in the nothing," whose name Preovolos cannot give, is exactly how the Ford project would have looked from a small-town café before the announcement. (The actual purchase was about 160 acres, so "thousands" is Preovolos's exaggeration.) Dick's manuscript reached his literary agency in June 1952, eight months before the announcement, so he cannot have known of it. He may have heard local talk of industrial land deals in the South Bay; or the choice of Milpitas may be a joke about the least glamorous town he could think of. Either way the novel's comic dreamer turns out to have read the future better than anyone else in it.
"That will be the frosty Friday." Preovolos's idiom is an old informal phrase meaning roughly "that'll be the day," said of something that will never happen. His point is that big corporations do not lose their minds: if one is buying land in Milpitas, it knows something. His sentence form ("A big corporation is out of its mind? That will be the frosty Friday.") is an immigrant's English, a question turned into a scornful denial. "Up in Milpitas" is also slightly off. Milpitas lies southeast of the Peninsula towns, toward San José, so from Cedar Groves it would be "down" the Bay. The guide leaves the preposition as speech, not geography.
"'And you're going to be in on it?' Hadley asked. 'You're going to move this hotel up there?'"
"Solemnly, his face massive with satisfaction, Preovolos said: 'This hotel is nothing. Already I have bought land for my new hotel. When I open that I'm tearing this one down. I'm not even selling it; I'm burning it up for scrap. I'm giving the boards away. Nothing, I don't want ever to see it again.'"
"A look of rapture appeared on his face, a spiritual trancelike ecstasy. 'My Milpitas hotel,' he whispered, his eyes closing. 'What a place. When I get that built...'"
A secular prophecy. After Beckheim and his Society of the Watchmen of Jesus, Dick gives Hadley a second prophet, and this one preaches real estate. Preovolos speaks of Milpitas with "rapture," "a spiritual trancelike ecstasy," his eyes closing, and the language could describe a believer at one of Beckheim's meetings. The content is the opposite of Beckheim's. Beckheim promised the destruction of the corrupt cities and salvation for the few; Preovolos promises growth, a new hotel, and the burning of the old one "for scrap," not as judgment but as clearance. Both men want the present world torn down. One of them wants to build something in its place. And Hadley, who had no answer to Beckheim but awe, finds himself "grinning in spite of himself" at the Greek.
"'I'm glad to have met you,' he said briskly. 'I'll see you again. Let me know if there's disrespectful service or anything I can do to make your stay more pleasant.'"
"He swept off and disappeared into a back office. The lobby was empty, except for Hadley sitting on his wicker chair, and the desk clerk behind the counter, reading his Mickey Spillane pocket book."
"Disrespectful service." Preovolos's farewell is a hotelier's formula, and it is aimed straight at the clerk, who has been nothing but disrespectful. The owner is courteous and the employee sneers. Then the clerk is fixed in one last detail: he is "reading his Mickey Spillane pocket book." Spillane's Mike Hammer novels were the best-selling paperbacks of the early 1950s, cheap, violent and enormously popular. The clerk's book and Preovolos's dream sit side by side in the lobby, the one a fantasy of punishment and the other a fantasy of growth.
The maps
The effect is real but measured, "A measure," and Hadley's opinion of the man stays condescending. The café is "seedy and run-down... like everything the Greek owned, in all probability," and Milpitas is an "illusionary dreamworld" that "didn't sound very exciting." He does not even know where it is. The joke, for a reader who knows what became of Milpitas, is on Hadley: the only dream in the chapter that will come true is the one he dismisses. But the Greek's optimism has given him something. For the first time since Saturday he thinks about going somewhere.
"Hadley stepped into a Standard gasoline station and said: 'What sort of maps do you have? Let's see the works.'"
"The attendant eyed Hadley with distaste, then indicated a wall rack. 'Help yourself.'"
"For a moment Hadley thumbed through them. He found a map of the Bay Area, a map of San Mateo County, a street map of Cedar Groves. 'Is this all?' he asked."
"'What do you want?' the attendant asked morosely, 'a pirate map?'"
"'I want,' Hadley said, 'some state maps. Got a map of Mexico? Canada?'"
"Not even California," the attendant said, and climbed to his feet as a car pulled up by the gasoline pumps.
The last line. In the 1950s American filling stations gave road maps away free, and Standard Oil of California printed maps of the state and of its regions for its stations. So "Let's see the works" costs nothing, and the free rack in this station holds only the Bay Area, San Mateo County and the town itself: three maps of the place Hadley is trying to leave, each smaller than the last. He asks for Mexico and Canada, the two countries a fugitive American thinks of first, the two borders out. "What do you want... a pirate map?" says the attendant, mocking the fantasy of escape. Then the answer that gives the chapter its title: "Not even California." There is no map out. The attendant does not finish the conversation; he gets up to serve a paying customer, and the chapter ends with Hadley holding maps of the trap.
The line works on several levels. Literally, the rack has run out of state maps. Socially, Hadley has dropped so far that he is not worth the attendant's attention. Symbolically, the world has shrunk to the size of the place where he has failed, and every road on the maps he holds leads back to Cedar Groves. And in the novel's larger pattern, the young man who, Ellen said, was once "going to be an artist" cannot even get out of the county.
A CLOSER LOOK: kindness read as cunning. The chapter's narration is unkind to almost everyone who is kind to Hadley, and a careful reader should separate what the couple do from how they are described. What they do: they stop after hitting a man who was standing in the middle of the street; they take him home; the wife, a trained nurse, cleans his face, salves his lips and palms, and repairs his nose as far as she can; they put him in a bed; they offer him soup, and agree to make the sandwich he asks for; they tell him plainly that they are poor and will have to charge him if he stays. He then leaves by the window without a word or a cent. How they are described: "withered," "beady eyes," "spidery wisps," "German peasants, with large hands and feet," "puffy lips," "tiny eyes," "the eternal cunning of peasants." Their neighbour is "A gigantic figure" with "rolls of red flesh," "a huge hairy paw," and the pronoun "It." The adjectives come from the folk tale of the ogre's house and from wartime caricature, and they are Hadley's, not the facts'.
The same gap opens around the two other strangers who help him. The bus driver lets him ride without a fare, and is described only as stern and weary. Preovolos gives him a cigarette, calls him "my friend" and lifts his spirits, and is "the fleshy Greek" with a "large, soft hand" and an "illusionary dreamworld," a comic immigrant whose dream Hadley patronises. History has the last laugh: the Greek was right about Milpitas.
None of this makes the couple saints. They avoided the police to protect themselves, threatened Hadley with arrest, probably went through his wallet, and sent a man after him. But the chapter belongs to a pattern that runs through the novel's last third. Hadley is helped by people he cannot see clearly (the young men of the Brass Rail, the old couple, the Greek) and he sees them through ethnic and sexual stereotypes that make it easy to run from them. A reader who adopts the narration's adjectives will miss that the only medical care Hadley receives in these two days is given by a "German peasant." The guide does not overread the old man's "brown shirt." It is a working man's shirt, and nothing in the chapter makes it a uniform.
How the chapter is built
The chapter falls into two halves of almost equal length, divided by the four words "He turned that way." The first half is set in San Francisco and is a story of escape: from a room, from two old people, from a giant, from a bus he cannot pay for. Its movement is physical and violent: a forced window, a jump onto concrete, a run, a blow to the giant's head, a sprint after a bus. The second half is set in Cedar Groves and is a story of loss and stillness: the broken car window, the café vigil, the hotel room, the lobby chair, the conversation, the map rack. Hadley barely moves in it. The first half ends on a bus that carries him away; the second ends on a car pulling up at a pump, which does not carry him anywhere.
Each half has a room he flees (the couple's ancient room, the hotel's drab one), a conversation with strangers who want something from him (the couple want a verdict and payment; Preovolos wants an audience), and a vehicle he cannot use (the bus without a dime, the Studebaker under watch). Each also has a moment of mercy he does not notice: the nurse's care, and the driver's free stop, in the first half; Preovolos's cigarette in the second.
Three motifs run across both halves. Rain: "it was raining," "Damp mist, cold and biting," "a slowly descending blanket of acrid water," "Hostile, silent rain," "the rain-swept asphalt," "Rain beat against the plate-glass window." Windows: the narrow window he forces, the "jutting lip of a window ledge" and the "window projection" that fells the giant, the car windows that have been broken, the café's plate glass from which he watches, the hotel window he throws open, and the lobby window beside his chair. Money: the five-dollar bill, the dime he lacks, the Greyhound change, the coins counted one by one, the three dollars "In advance," the change he will not spend on cigarettes, the seventy-five cents for dinner, and a corporation's money buying "Thousands of acres." And the chapter is held together, as the next one will be, by an absence: Pete, never seen, present in one thought ("It had been twelve hours"), one photograph, one sentence to strangers and one inference ("Somebody had noticed Pete").
Reading the diagram. The chain runs down the chapter in order. The first six boxes are the San Francisco half: the room, the couple's verdict and Hadley's "My fault," the nurse's care and the bill, the photograph and the chess question, the window and the giant, and the bus without a dime. The next six are Cedar Groves: the car with its windows broken, the policemen, the three-dollar room, Preovolos and Milpitas, and the maps. The dashed arrow loops from the map rack back to the first box, because the chapter ends as it began, with Hadley in a strange place with nowhere to go: he woke in a room he did not know, and he ends holding maps that lead nowhere but where he already is.
| Two halves | San Francisco (morning) | Cedar Groves (afternoon) |
|---|---|---|
| The room | Ancient, high-ceilinged, full of old things; free, with a nurse | "Large, drab, and not clean"; three dollars "In advance" |
| What he does with it | Forces the window and jumps | Opens the window, then "He couldn't stand the room" |
| The strangers | Two old Germans who want a verdict and payment | A Greek hotelier who wants an audience |
| What they ask | "Why were you there? What were you doing?" | "Give me your opinion" |
| What Hadley says | "Sure... My fault"; "Yes, he's my son" | "I come from a good family"; "He was a doctor" |
| The vehicle | A city bus he cannot pay for | The Studebaker, broken open and watched |
| The pursuer | The giant: "Fang ihn an!" | The police, at their posts |
| The mercy he misses | The nurse's care; a free stop on the bus | A free cigarette and "my friend" |
| The end | "He turned that way" | "Not even California" |
| Old guide (short version) | What the book says | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Lede: "Pete is gone" | Hadley sees the windows down and glass on the ground, and concludes "the windows had been broken and the car opened. Somebody had noticed Pete." He never looks inside | Corrected: an inference, not a fact stated by the narration |
| The couple hit him with their truck | "We hit you with our truck"; the narration later says "put him in their car" | Confirmed; the truck/car slip flagged |
| Preovolos "fleshy and faintly accented" | "his voice was faintly accented"; "the fleshy Greek" | Confirmed |
| His father "was a doctor"; long dead | "He was a doctor"; Chapter 3: a doctor in New York who died "in an auto accident" | Confirmed |
| "My fault": the first time he accepts blame | "'Sure,' Hadley said listlessly. 'My fault.'" | Softened: the guide does not claim a first; it is the most complete and least meant |
| Money: five dollars, then the hotel | A five-dollar bill; $3.95 after the Greyhound; $3 for the room; then "seventy-five cents" | Confirmed; the missing $48 and twenty cents flagged |
| (Not in the old guide) | Ford's Milpitas plant, announced February 1953 | Added: the Greek's dream came true |
| (Not in the old guide) | The German as printed, with its slips | Added and translated in the Flags |
| (Not in the old guide) | The back yard repeats Marsha's Hayes Hole yard (Chapter 11) and Chapter 14's "rusty beer cans" | Added |
Flags for this chapter.
- "es tut uns fruchtbar leid." As printed, fruchtbar means "fertile." The sense requires furchtbar, "terribly": "we are terribly sorry." Almost certainly a transposition in the typing or setting. Quoted as printed; not corrected in the quotation.
- The German, translated. "Bitte" (please); "Selbstmord" (suicide); "Er wollte selbst vielleicht" (perhaps he wanted to himself, the sentence broken off); "nicht wahr?" (isn't it so?); "Getrunken, mein lieber junge Mann" (drunk, my dear young man; standard German would be "junger Mann"); "junge Leute freuen sich" (young people enjoy themselves); "Ich erinne mich ganz" (should be "erinnere": I remember it well); "Verstehen Sie?" (do you understand?); "Eine Frau, und... entschuldigen, bitte... wir haben das Bild deinem Sohn in dem..." (a wife, and... excuse me, please... we have the picture of your son in the...; "deinem Sohn" should be "deines Sohnes," and the verb is missing); "ist deiner?" (is he yours?); "Ich komme!" (I'm coming!); "Fang ihn an!" (meant as "Catch him!", which would be "Fang ihn!"; "anfangen" means "to begin"). The wife uses the informal "du" forms with Hadley; the husband uses the formal "Sie."
- Truck or car. The husband says "We hit you with our truck"; two paragraphs later the narration has them "put him in their car." A small slip.
- "No bones broken." The husband's verdict. In Chapter 17 Hadley thought he had "A broken rib, probably," after the fight with Dave Gold. The two are not checked against each other in the text.
- "It had been twelve hours." Hadley parked at sunset on Saturday, about a quarter to eight under daylight saving time, and it is now midmorning: fourteen hours or more. Hadley's count, not corrected.
- Beside him, or in the back. In Chapter 17 Pete was "Beside him" in the car; here Hadley thinks of "Pete in the back of the Studebaker." Probably moved when the car was parked.
- "Rolled down" and broken. The windows "had been rolled down," yet there is glass on the asphalt and Hadley concludes they "had been broken." See the key box above.
- The old guide's "Pete is gone." Hadley never looks inside the car. The text gives only his inference. Part Four confirms that the baby is safe with Ellen.
- The missing money. $53.22 at 1:15 a.m.; "a crumpled five-dollar bill" by midmorning. About $48 is not accounted for. The couple saw the photograph in his wallet; the Brass Rail had also gone through it. The text accuses nobody and neither does the guide.
- Ninety-five cents or seventy-five. $3.95 minus the $3 room leaves 95 cents, but in the lobby he has "seventy-five cents." The coffee came before the count. Twenty cents unexplained.
- The Greyhound fare. He pays a new fare, although he bought a ticket home at 1:15 a.m. in Chapter 18. Consistent: that ticket was for the 1:50 bus, which he missed, and the Brass Rail crowd judged it "too late." A five less $3.95 leaves $1.05 for the fare and the coffee together.
- "A dime, mister." San Francisco's Municipal Railway raised its fare from ten cents to fifteen in 1952. The month of the change has not been confirmed here, so the ten-cent fare may be slightly out of date for late August 1952. Flagged as possibly anachronistic. (Dick submitted the novel in June 1952.)
- "Mission and the slums... the Tenderloin." The Tenderloin lies north of Market Street and the Mission district south of it; the Greyhound depot of the period stood on Seventh Street between Market and Mission. Loose geography, left as written.
- "Up in Milpitas." Milpitas is southeast of the Peninsula, near the southern end of the Bay. "Up" is speech, not compass.
- "Thousands of acres." Ford's purchase was about 160 acres; the Greek exaggerates.
- Rain in August. Rain is unusual in a San Francisco August (the normal monthly total is well under a tenth of an inch), though summer drizzle from fog is common. The rain is Dick's weather, not the almanac's.
- "first clenched." The book prints "his arm up, first clenched," a misprint for "fist." Quoted around.
- The narration's adjective about the policemen. The book's description of them blending back into the street contains a word on this guide's style list; it is paraphrased rather than quoted.
- How he got to the room. The text never shows the drive from the accident to the couple's house, or how he was carried up the stairs. Hadley "knew" they had picked him up and driven him home; how he knows is not given.
- Prejudice in the narration. "German peasants," "the eternal cunning of peasants," "the fleshy Greek." Period language, left as written; discussed in the A CLOSER LOOK above.
- Text. Source dashes are rendered as "..." in quotations.
Outside facts checked for this chapter.
- Point Reyes Station. A town in west Marin County, north of San Francisco. It began as a stop on the narrow-gauge North Pacific Coast Railroad in the 1870s (first known as Olema Station) and took its present name in the 1880s; the railroad abandoned the line north of the city in 1933. The surrounding country was dairy land.
- Ford at Milpitas. The Ford Motor Company announced in February 1953 that it would build an assembly plant on about 160 acres bought from the Western Pacific Railroad just south of Milpitas, to replace its Richmond plant. The first car came off the line in 1955; the plant employed several thousand people and closed in 1983. Milpitas incorporated on 26 January 1954 with 825 residents, largely to keep San José from annexing the plant area; its 1960 population was 6,572. (Sources: Milpitas city and local history pages; KQED; Western Pacific railroad history.)
- The manuscript date. The Scott Meredith Literary Agency received the manuscript of Voices from the Street in June 1952 (Philip K. Dick bibliography, pkdickbooks.com). The novel was first published by Tor in 2007.
- Mickey Spillane. His first Mike Hammer novel, I, the Jury (1947), sold modestly in hardcover, but the Signet paperback sold in the millions within a few years; by the early 1950s Spillane was the best-selling paperback author in America. "Pocket book" is the period's general word for a paperback, not necessarily the Pocket Books imprint (Spillane's paperbacks were Signet).
- Free road maps. American oil companies gave road maps away at their filling stations from the 1920s to the 1970s; Standard Oil Company of California issued state and regional maps for its stations, many drawn by the H. M. Gousha company. An attendant with no California map in his rack is a joke about a free item that has run out.
- "That will be the frosty Friday." An informal idiom meaning "that'll be the day," said of something unlikely ever to happen.
- Daylight saving time. California voters adopted summer daylight saving time in a 1949 ballot measure (Proposition 12), running from the last Sunday in April to the last Sunday in September, so it was in force in August 1952.
- The Muni fare. San Francisco's Municipal Railway fare rose from ten cents to fifteen cents in 1952 (Market Street Railway history; transit research records). The exact month was not confirmed.
- August rain. San Francisco's normal August rainfall is about 0.06 inch (NOAA climate normals, 1991 to 2020).
- Money. U.S. consumer prices rose about 11.8 times from 1952 to 2024; conversions above use that factor and are rough.
Takeaways from Chapter 19
- Waking again. The chapter opens with Hadley waking in a strange room after a drunk, as he did in the jail of Chapter 1, but worse in every way: a broken nose, broken teeth, untieable laces, five dollars.
- "My fault." He gives the old couple the verdict they need in two listless words. Part Three will end, in Chapter 20, on Fergesson's own "It's my fault."
- Care with a bill. The couple nurse him, threaten him, offer soup and ask for payment. The narration sneers at them; the facts are kinder than the adjectives.
- A child's order. He asks for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and leaves by the window before it arrives.
- The only "my son." "Yes, he's my son," said to strangers about a photograph, is his one open word about Pete in the chapter.
- Escape. A painted-shut window opened "Expertly," a barefoot jump onto concrete, untied shoes, and a giant felled by a window beam.
- Five dollars, no dime. He has fifty times the bus fare and cannot pay it.
- "Somebody had noticed Pete." Hadley infers from a broken window that his son has been found. The text never says what he saw inside, because he never looks.
- The police. Two officers watch the lot, and Hadley understands that he is now the man they are waiting for.
- Three dollars and ninety-five cents. The money runs down coin by coin, from $53.22 to seventy-five cents, with two gaps the text never explains.
- The Greek. John Preovolos owns a terrible hotel, admits it, gives Hadley a cigarette and a dream, and turns out to be right: Ford came to Milpitas.
- "Not even California." The maps on the rack cover only the Bay, the county and the town. There is no map out.
"Let Me In!"
When and where. Sunday afternoon, late August 1952, continuing straight from the end of Chapter 19. Hadley's half of the chapter has no clock times; it begins after he leaves the Standard station and runs through a theft, a bath, a visit to two car lots and a walk to the store. Fergesson's half is fixed: he came to the store "A little after noon that Sunday," spent "fifteen minutes" changing the lock, and then cleaned, swept and polished before going up to the accounts. Since Hadley got off the Greyhound at two o'clock in Chapter 19, sat in a café "over half an hour," took a room and talked with Preovolos before any of this, he cannot reach the store before the late afternoon. The two halves overlap at the moment Hadley's key fails. The weather moves from rain hammering the bathroom window, to a "faint mist" when Hadley goes out, to "cold rain" pouring down as Fergesson works. Places: High Street in Cedar Groves; Hadley's hotel room and the "community bathroom down the hall"; a corner drugstore; two used-car lots across the railroad track; Cedar Street and the front of Modern TV Sales and Service; inside the store, the main display room, the upstairs office, and the basement service department and storeroom.
Who is here.
- Stuart Hadley: bruised, his jaw "damaged," his lips swollen, his cheeks "lined with cuts," a rib injured; his suit torn and his shirt "ragged and stained." He has three dollars' worth of hotel room and a few coins, and by the end of the chapter he is a car thief's apprentice, a would-be safe robber, and a man with his left eye hanging on his cheek.
- The hotel clerk from Chapter 19, who "glared suspiciously" as Hadley crosses the lobby.
- A man and a woman on the second car lot, he kicking tyres, she striding "sullenly after him," who go off down the street "to argue."
- The salesman: "a redheaded man in his shirtsleeves," with "detached cheerfulness," a face "tanned and peeling," a "reddish, hairy arm," and a manner "vacant and benign."
- Jim Fergesson, owner of Modern TV, alone in his shop on a Sunday: "He was getting old."
- A male switchboard operator at the city hall, who answers "Yes sir... What is the address?"
- A crowd of passersby, at first "amused," then "White-faced."
- Policemen and a medical team from the police ambulance; one policeman with a notebook does the talking.
- Present only in thought or in passing: the owner of the stolen maps; the Bank of America vice president who owned the Hudson; Joe Tampini and an unnamed RCA salesman, candidates to replace Hadley; Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Sidney Hillman, Henry Morgenthau and Harry Hopkins; the son Fergesson never had; and Hadley's wife, Ellen, never named, only "his wife."
Content note. This chapter ends with a man throwing himself through plate glass, and the injuries are described closely: shards in his back, bone showing, an eye out of its socket, part of a jaw cut away. Fergesson's thoughts include antisemitic remarks about named public figures; they are quoted where the guide examines them and are the character's, not the book's verdict. There are no slurs in the chapter. Dialogue dashes in the book appear as "..." in quotations.
Maps from a stranger's car
"Hadley left the station and strolled around. At High Street he turned right. A short way ahead a big Buick four-door was parked, pale blue and white, its windows rolled down. In the back on the window ledge lay a heap of maps."
The answer to "Not even California." Chapter 19 ended with a gas station attendant who had nothing to offer but maps of the Bay Area, San Mateo County and Cedar Groves. Chapter 20 opens a few steps away with the solution, and the solution is theft. The first car Hadley sees has maps lying in plain sight on the back window ledge and its windows open. He does not take them. He walks on, "gazing into each parked car," which means he is now choosing. The choice is careful, and the reason for it is the point: he wants maps that come from somewhere else.
"When he came to one that had a Maryland license plate he stopped and tried the door handle. The door opened and he slid quickly inside; it was an old-fashioned Oldsmobile, at least twelve years old. Rummaging in the glove compartment he found a fistful of greasy, creased state maps."
Why Maryland. A car from Maryland has crossed the continent to reach a side street in Cedar Groves, so its glove compartment is a record of the road between. The Buick on High Street is probably local, and its maps will be the same Bay Area maps the attendant offered. Hadley's reasoning is never spelled out, but his walk past the Buick and his stop at the out-of-state plate show it. "At least twelve years old" makes the Oldsmobile a 1940 model or earlier, and the narrator later calls it "a prewar Olds." An old car with a far-off plate is a car that has really travelled. It is also the first time in the novel that Hadley simply helps himself to a stranger's property. He has been fired, beaten and run down, and he has left his own child alone in a car, but until now he has not broken into anybody else's. The theft is small and quick ("he slid quickly inside"), and the novel does not comment on it. It does not need to. The next thing he plans to take is much larger.
"Closing the car door, Hadley hurried back the way he had come, the maps clutched tightly. He mounted the stairs of the hotel two at a time, entered his room, and slammed the door after him. A moment later he had the maps spread out on the bed."
"His heart labored painfully as he studied them. Maps of Colorado, Utah, Texas...states he had never seen, areas a prewar Olds had reached and crossed."
"States he had never seen." The maps are of the interior: Colorado, Utah, Texas. None of them is a place Hadley has a reason to go, and that is their attraction. In Chapter 19 he could not stand the hotel room and fled it for the lobby. Now he runs up the stairs "two at a time" and slams the door behind him, because the room has become a place where the maps can be spread out. The same bed that depressed him is now covered with the West. The sentence "areas a prewar Olds had reached and crossed" carries the logic of what follows. If a twelve-year-old Oldsmobile can cross Utah, a car is all he needs. He is no longer thinking of a bus. Hadley's lucid moments have always come with numbers or plans attached, and the plan forming here is a car.
There is a family echo the novel leaves unremarked. In Chapter 4, Fergesson's father, the oil speculator, left him "a heavy silver ring bought from an Indian in Utah." Utah in this book is where restless fathers went to lose money. Hadley will not get there either.
"His excitement was too much for him. Trembling, he got to his feet and paced around in an eager, nervous circle. In the mirror over the dresser he examined his face."
The mirror
"A line of bluish gray showed around his damaged jaw; he needed a shave. And his hair was soggy and uncombed. There was nothing he could do about the state of his clothing; his suit was torn and his shirt was ragged and stained. His lips were still swollen, his cheeks lined with cuts; but that couldn't be helped. In any case, he could still clean himself up."
Taking stock. This is the first time since Saturday that Hadley looks at himself, and he does it like a salesman preparing for a customer. The inventory sorts the damage into what can be fixed and what cannot. Stubble, hair: fixable. Suit and shirt: "nothing he could do." Lips and cuts: "that couldn't be helped." Then the decision: "he could still clean himself up." It is a businesslike sentence, the kind of check a salesman makes before he goes out on the floor. Everything that follows (razor, soap, bath, comb) is preparation for a sales call, except that this time Hadley will be on the buying side of the counter.
"Getting his money together he hurried downstairs and out onto the sidewalk. At the drugstore on the corner he purchased a cheap safety razor and a ten-cent package of blades. What did that leave him? Nineteen cents... He bought a bar of perfumed soap and left the drugstore."
The last of the money.
- At the end of Chapter 19 Hadley had, by the book's own figures, 95 cents after paying three dollars for the room, although the text then has him wondering what he can eat for "seventy-five cents."
- He buys "a cheap safety razor" (price not given) and "a ten-cent package of blades," and asks: "What did that leave him? Nineteen cents..."
- If he started with 95 cents, the razor cost 66 cents (95 less 10 less 19). If he started with 75 cents, it cost 46 cents. The book does not say, and either price is plausible for a cheap razor in 1952. The twenty-cent puzzle of Chapter 19 simply travels forward.
- Then "a bar of perfumed soap," price not given, out of the nineteen cents. Whatever change is left, it is now a matter of pennies.
In Chapter 19 Hadley asked himself whether he should spend his last coins on cigarettes or on dinner. He spends them on neither. A man with no food and no job buys a razor and scented soap. It looks absurd until the reader sees the reason a few paragraphs later: he is getting himself ready to be taken seriously on a car lot. At the conversion factor of about 11.8, his whole remaining fortune of under a dollar is about $11 at 2024 prices, and he is going out to look at a car worth something over $20,000.
The bath
The only comfort in Part Three. The bath is the one passage in the last chapters where Hadley's body is not in pain. "Long, luxurious," "half dozing," "up to his chin in boiling hot water": the prose slows down and warms up. Outside, "Cold rain hammered on the window and oozed around the sill"; inside, heat. The room repeats the ancient bedroom where he woke at the start of Chapter 19: a ceiling high and "remote," fixtures "archaic and ornate," a "threadbare" towel, a single chair with his clothes on it. Then he was a prisoner of old people's kindness; now the same kind of room is his own, paid for. The "single chair" also repeats the cane-bottom chair beside the old couple's bed, where his clothes lay ready for escape. This time he is not escaping. He is preparing.
"When he had finished bathing, the bathroom was dim with steam. Letting the plug out, Hadley clambered from the tub and cautiously began drying his pain-sensitive body. The heavy, warm air smelled of the soap, a pungent woodsy scent that made him relaxed and sleepy."
"He did not look too bad." The phrase "all things considered" is the language of a man grading himself on a curve, and the verdict is a modest one. The novel lets him have it. The "injured rib" is the one Hadley thought broken in Chapter 17, after the fight with Dave Gold; in Chapter 19 the old man told him "No bones broken," and Hadley's own body has kept disagreeing. The sequence (wipe the mirror, see himself, decide he will pass) is a small recovery of self-respect, and Dick places it immediately before the scene in which Hadley's whole self is wrecked. It is the last time in Part Three that he sees his own face.
"As he passed the desk, the clerk glared suspiciously at him. Hadley grinned starkly back and continued on his way across the lobby and out into the rain. It had let up; only a faint mist drifted here and there across the dismal sidewalks and parked cars. With long strides he walked along the street, toward the railroad track and the rows of buildings beyond."
The grin. In Chapter 19 the same clerk looked him over with contempt and asked whether something had happened to him, and Hadley took it. Now he "grinned starkly back." The adverb matters: the grin is not friendly, it is a bared face. The rain has eased to "a faint mist." For a few paragraphs the world seems to be letting him through.
Metallic animals
Cars as creatures. The image of cars as "metallic animals lasting out the weekend" begins a run of animal and sea comparisons that ends with the Hudson as "a grinning sea monster." The first lot is shut by a chain, which is the chapter's first locked door. Hadley lingers over a Cadillac, the most expensive American make, red and cream: the dream at its largest, and closed for Sunday. The second lot is open: "The chain was down at this lot." The chapter is built on that difference between a chain up and a chain down, a door locked and a door open, and it will end at a door Hadley cannot open.
The couple. The man and woman are a tiny marriage play. He wants a car and goes through the rituals of the knowing buyer (kicking tyres, reading the mileage, running his hands along the chrome); she follows "sullenly," arms folded, and they murmur "heatedly." They leave to "argue" in the street before buying anything. It is the scene Hadley would have played with Ellen if he were a man with a family and a down payment. He has a family, and he has left it. The salesman watches the quarrel "with detached cheerfulness," which is the professional attitude of a man who knows that couples argue on lots and come back, or do not. Hadley, of all people, knows the attitude; he has worn it himself.
"Hadley stepped onto the lot and approached the first car he saw, a pale blue Mercury. The size of the car amazed him; he walked all the way around it, touching the smooth hood, wiping drops of water from the side-view mirror, peering in, awed, at the upholstery and the mass of dials and knobs and levers that made up the dashboard."
"He tried to imagine how much it cost. Lettered in poster paint on the windshield were streaked words:" "DREAM CAR SPECIAL!!"
"DREAM CAR SPECIAL!!" Dick could hardly have found a sign more exact. The words are a used-car dealer's cliché, painted on a windscreen in poster paint that the rain has made "streaked." For Hadley they are also a literal description. The whole of this half of the chapter is a dream: of a car, of the open road, of Canada, and of money that will appear from a safe. The poster paint runs in the rain, which is how the dream ends too.
"The door handle was unlocked. It seemed impossible to him that so many huge, gleaming cars could be crowded together in one lot. With their doors unlocked...and he could see the keys in the lock. The car was ready to go. It was miraculous."
Keys in the locks. Two hours earlier Hadley stole maps from an unlocked car. Now he finds a whole field of unlocked cars with "the keys in the lock," and the word he uses is "miraculous." The reader may think of theft. Hadley apparently does not. He thinks of the cars as gifts waiting to be claimed, and he will later turn down the salesman's invitation to drive one. The keys matter for the rest of the chapter. Every lock on this lot opens. The one lock in the novel that matters to him will not.
The sea monster. The catalogue (Buick, Ford, two more Buicks, Oldsmobile, a green DeSoto) is the flat list of a man walking past things that do not move him. Then the prose changes key. The Hudson is "bulging tanklike," "flashing gunmetal," its sides dripping "as if it had risen from some river," and it is "grinning." Hudson's postwar cars really did look like this: the famous "step-down" body of 1948 to 1954 set the floor below the frame rails, which made the car low and wide, with a long, rounded, slab-sided body. Dick's metaphor turns the car into something mythical and slightly dangerous, a creature from the water. The detail that wins Hadley is the dashboard: "He had never seen so many buttons in his life." He sells radios and televisions with knobs and dials for a living, and still he is "awed." It is the response of a man who loves gadgets, and of a man for whom a car has always been someone else's: Marsha's Studebaker, the old Oldsmobile he has just robbed, the bank man's Hudson.
The pitch
"While he was bent over peering into the Hudson, the redheaded man strolled up and stood a few feet away."
"Hadley backed awkwardly out of the Hudson. 'Sure a fine car,' he said, embarrassed."
"The man nodded in tolerant agreement. 'It is.' He leaned against the fender of a Chrysler convertible, arms folded, shirt moist with mist, his face vacant and benign, unbothered by Hadley's damaged appearance. The couple had gone off down the street to argue; Hadley was the only customer."
"Unbothered." The salesman's first gift to Hadley is that he does not react to the bruises. The clerk glared, the gas station attendant looked "with distaste," the passengers on the city bus stared. The salesman looks at a man with a swollen face and a torn suit and sees a customer. Hadley, embarrassed, opens with a remark that a salesman hopes for: "Sure a fine car." The reply ("It is.") is two words and costs nothing. A good salesman lets a customer sell himself, and this one has started well.
"'How much?' Hadley asked in a strained voice."
"The man rubbed his chin with his thumb, as if making a computation on the spot. Instead of answering he began to walk around the car. 'He kept good care of the tires,' he said."
"'Who's that?' Hadley asked uncertainly."
The story of the previous owner. The question "How much?" is not answered. Instead the salesman tells a story, and every part of it is designed to sell. The owner was a Bank of America vice president, so the car belonged to a respectable, careful man. He used it "once in a while to go out in the country," so the mileage is low. He was given a company Chevrolet with an expense account, so he had no need for this car and sold it for no fault of the car's own. He "kept it around a year or so," so it is nearly new. Nobody can check any of this, and Hadley does not try. The story also carries a sting for him that the salesman cannot know. Hadley has just lost the best job he ever had: the managership of Modern, which Fergesson gave him at the dinner in Chapter 13 and took away with a hundred dollars on Saturday night. The banker had so much that he forgot he owned a Hudson.
The bank and the car, checked. Bank of America began in San Francisco in 1904 as A. P. Giannini's Bank of Italy and took the name Bank of America in 1930. Giannini built it on branches across California, and by 1945 it had passed Chase National to become the largest bank in the world, with around five hundred branches. So a Bank of America vice president "down here" in a small peninsula town is just what a 1952 reader would expect: the bank was everywhere in California, and its branch managers and officers were local men of standing. The car fits too. Hudson's "step-down" cars ran from the 1948 to the 1954 model years, and Hudson began offering General Motors' Hydra-Matic automatic transmission on its 1951 models. A Hudson with "Hydramatic" that its first owner kept "a year or so" before trading it in by August 1952 is a 1951 car, more or less exactly the earliest Hudson that could have had it. Dick's details are right.
"Hadley looked."
Under the hood. The salesman raises the hood and points into the engine compartment, which the narration describes in a phrase this guide does not repeat. He shows the oil filter and says "the fuel pump's perfectly clean." Then a line of mock outrage: "Imagine owning a car like this and parking it away in a garage. It's criminal." The joke works by praising the car and belittling the banker in one stroke. The real owner was too rich to care; the new one will care properly. "Hadley followed him obediently around," the narration says. The man who for years led customers around the display floor of Modern is now being led.
"'Hydramatic, of course,' the man said, dismissing the clutch. 'Safety-seal tubes, radio, heater, all that. A man like him had them put on and never noticed the difference.' He slammed the hull with the palm of his hand. 'Underseal. You planning on using this in town?'"
"'No,' Hadley said hesitantly. 'More for sort of highway travel.'"
"The man accepted this without comment. 'You'll get good pickup on this. It really takes off...like a scalded cat.' Without special intonation he continued: 'Hop in and drive it around. Go ahead; the key's in it.'"
"Without special intonation." The pitch moves through the extras ("Hydramatic, of course," "Safety-seal tubes, radio, heater," "Underseal") with the same small trick of contempt for the banker: "A man like him had them put on and never noticed the difference." Then the qualifying question every salesman asks, "You planning on using this in town?", which tells the seller what the buyer wants to hear. Hadley's answer, "More for sort of highway travel," is a confession in a sentence. He wants to leave. The salesman takes it "without comment" and moves straight to speed: "like a scalded cat." Then the invitation to drive, offered "Without special intonation," as if it meant nothing. It is the oldest move in the trade: get the customer behind the wheel and let the car do the selling.
"Hadley felt weak. He pushed open the door and seated himself behind the wheel, facing the flashing panel of controls. 'No,' he said hoarsely. 'Thanks, anyway. What...does a car like this go for these days?'"
Why he will not drive it. He sits behind the wheel but refuses to drive. The text says only that he "felt weak." Several reasons are possible and the reader can hold them all. He is a man with a concussion and a face full of cuts. He has under a dollar and knows a test drive is the step before signing. And he may not want to feel the car move before it is his, because then he could not leave it. The question he finally asks is the one he asked at first: the price.
"The man concentrated. He stared up at the sky; frowned; finally moved his lips. Hadley strained, but he failed to catch the sum. 'How much?' he asked again."
"'Oh, say four hundred down. Around forty-five a month.' The man did not volunteer the price of the car; he stood waiting."
The price that is never said. The pantomime of calculation (eyes to the sky, a frown, lips moving) is a performance, and the sum is mouthed so that Hadley cannot catch it. Then comes the answer in the form that sells cars: not a price but a down payment and a monthly figure. "The man did not volunteer the price of the car." A customer who thinks in monthly payments is not thinking about the total, and still less about the interest hidden between the two. Hadley never learns the price. He will have to guess it.
Four hundred down, forty-five a month.
- Hadley's guess: "The whole price probably ran eighteen hundred dollars."
- If the price is $1,800, then $400 down leaves $1,400 to pay. At $45 a month that is about 31 months before any interest is counted. With a finance charge, the number of payments grows, or the price is lower than Hadley thinks. The salesman's figures cannot be checked, which is the point of giving them in that form.
- $400 is about 22 percent of $1,800.
- At 2024 prices (factor about 11.8): the car about $21,000; the down payment about $4,700; the monthly payment about $530; and the "four or five hundred dollars" Hadley expects to find in the safe about $4,700 to $5,900.
The safe money would cover the down payment and almost nothing else. Hadley is planning to steal enough to start a debt he has no income to pay, for a car he means to drive out of the state. He does not notice the contradiction, and the chapter does not point it out.
Credit terms in the summer of 1952. The salesman's offer would not have been lawful a few months earlier. During the Korean War the Federal Reserve brought back its consumer credit controls, Regulation W, in September 1950. From October 1950 a car bought on instalments needed at least a one-third down payment and had to be paid off in no more than fifteen months; an amendment of 31 July 1951 stretched the limit to eighteen months but kept the one-third down payment. On those terms an $1,800 car needed $600 down and payments of about $67 a month. Regulation W was suspended on 7 May 1952, and dealers were free again to offer low down payments and long terms. "Four hundred down. Around forty-five a month" is exactly the kind of easy offer that came back that summer. Whether Dick had the regulation in mind cannot be known, but the numbers he gives fit the moment. The salesman's way of quoting only the down payment and the monthly figure was also normal then. American lenders did not have to state a finance charge and an annual percentage rate on consumer credit until the Truth in Lending Act of 1968, whose disclosure rules took effect on 1 July 1969.
"Hadley fooled and plucked at the controls. 'It's sure a nice car,' he said finally. 'Damn fine car.'"
"'It'll get you where you want to go,' the man agreed mildly, and they both laughed at the audacity of his understatement."
The shared laugh. "Fooled and plucked" is as printed (probably "fooled with," or "fiddled"). The exchange that follows is the warmest moment between Hadley and another man in the whole of Part Three. "It'll get you where you want to go" is a joke about understatement, and both men laugh. The line is also true in a way neither of them intends. Where Hadley wants to go is out of his life, and before the afternoon is over he will have gone there by another route.
"Smiling wanly, Hadley climbed out of the car. 'Okay,' he said. 'That gives me an idea of what I want. I'll have to think it over. I'll come back.'"
"Without batting an eye the man said: 'This car won't be here when you get back.'"
"'No?' Hadley said, wondering why not."
"'Oh, no,' the man said. 'Not this car. I have a couple coming back for it sometime this afternoon.' He looked around as if expecting to see them coming. 'This is a hot item.'"
The other buyer. "This car won't be here when you get back" is the classic pressure close, and the "couple coming back for it" is the classic invisible rival. There is a real couple on this lot, the quarrelling pair who went off to argue, and the reader cannot be sure whether the salesman is pointing at them or inventing someone. Either way the purpose is the same: to make Hadley decide now. The glance down the street ("as if expecting to see them coming") is stagecraft.
Seeing the trick and falling for it. This is the most important sentence on the car lot, and one of the sharpest observations in the novel. Hadley recognises every move ("Every word, every inflection") because he has made them himself, "six days a week for years." He knows the invisible couple, the shrug about price, the invitation to drive. Knowing changes nothing: "But he wanted the car. He wanted it terribly." Dick is making a point about the kind of selling Modern practises and Fergesson admires. Its techniques work even on the people who use them, because they do not work on reason. They work on want. In Chapter 2 an old woman told Hadley across Modern's counter that he did not belong there; on this lot he is, for a few minutes, exactly where his trade put him, on the receiving end of it.
"'I'll be back,' he promised fervently."
"The man nodded; withholding his contempt, he waved and turned his back, moved over to the far side of the lot, and stood a long way from Hadley."
"Withholding his contempt." The salesman's courtesy ends the moment the sale does. He keeps his contempt to himself, waves, turns his back and goes "a long way from Hadley." Hadley has said "I'll be back," and both men know what the words usually mean on a car lot. The final placing of the salesman, physically as far away as the lot allows, is the first of the chapter's rejections. It is gentle. The next is not.
Four or five hundred dollars
"Hadley hurried down the sidewalk. Where would he take it first? Nevada, Oregon, maybe all the way to Canada. The world lay open; a car like that could go anywhere. There was no limit."
The world reopens. An hour or two earlier a gas station attendant told him there were no maps beyond California, and Hadley asked for Mexico and Canada and got nothing. Now Canada is back: "maybe all the way to Canada." The sentences have the rhythm of a radio advertisement ("The world lay open," "There was no limit"), and that is fitting. This is a man who has spent years selling the dream of the new machine, and the dream has sold itself back to him. Nevada and Oregon are the two states that border California to the east and north, the first places a car leaving the Bay Area would reach. The fantasy begins practically, with the next state over, and then runs north to a border.
"But he couldn't be sure of getting enough money for the Hudson; he slowed down, his excitement dwindling. Four hundred down... The whole price probably ran eighteen hundred dollars."
"It all depended on how much money there would be."
"How much money there would be." The grammar gives the plan away before the plan is stated. Hadley does not ask how much money he has. He asks how much "there would be," as if money were a quantity waiting somewhere for him. His walk slows as the arithmetic comes in, and then the narration lets the reader into the place he has in mind.
"He tried to remember how Fergesson worked it... At least some of Saturday's receipts were taken home over the weekend, but at the very worst, there would be four or five hundred dollars in the store safe."
The plan is robbery. There is no softer word for it, though the novel never uses a hard one. Hadley means to let himself into Modern, open the safe and take the weekend cash. He thinks about it as a manager would, recalling "how Fergesson worked it," which receipts go home and which stay, and estimating "at the very worst" (meaning the smallest sum) four or five hundred dollars. The phrase is the language of a sales forecast, applied to a theft from the man who taught him to forecast. On Saturday night he unlocked the front door, walked down into the poker game in Modern's basement and said "I want my money"; then he tore at the cash register until Fergesson counted out a hundred dollars, two weeks' wages, and threw them down on the counter. That money was owed. This money is not.
Two smaller things are worth noticing. "Four or five hundred dollars" is almost exactly the down payment, so the theft would buy the beginning of a debt and nothing more. And "Saturday's receipts" means the takings of the day on which Hadley was not there: the day Fergesson waited for his new manager from ten in the morning, set a noon deadline, and watched it pass.
Two sets of keys. In Hadley's wallet lie the two kinds of access he still has. One is the key to Marsha's Studebaker, the car in which he left his son and which now stands in the lot with its windows broken and two policemen watching it. That key is useless, because using it would mean arrest. The other is "brass and minute," the key to Modern, and he still believes it works. On Saturday night it did: he let himself into the store with it and walked down into the poker game. He holds it "clenched in his fist," as he will later clench the same fist against the glass. His body has the symptoms of hope and of fear at once: he is "almost running," his "heart pounded," his breath "whistled in his nose," which is broken. The nearer he gets to the store, "the better he felt." The store has always been home.
"The streets were deserted. He paused a moment to glance around; there was no one watching him. And anyhow, it didn't matter. They were used to seeing him go into the store. Briefly he glanced up at the familiar old-fashioned front, at the display windows and darkened neon sign."
"MODERN TV SALES AND SERVICE"
"They were used to seeing him." Hadley reasons like a burglar for a moment (he checks that "no one" is watching) and then like an employee: the neighbours are used to seeing him go in. The two thoughts sit side by side without his noticing that they contradict each other. A man who is still an employee does not need to look around first. The sign is "darkened," as it is every Sunday, and he looks up at "the familiar old-fashioned front" in the way he might look at a house he grew up in. The capitals of the store's name, set as a line on their own, mirror the capitals of "DREAM CAR SPECIAL!!" an hour earlier. The two signs are the two halves of his life: the job that held him, and the escape he is about to finance from it.
"The combination of the safe was clear in his mind; he had known it for years, since the first time he had watched over Fergesson's shoulder as he was putting the money away."
The combination. Fergesson never gave Hadley the combination. Hadley learned it by watching "over Fergesson's shoulder," the first time he saw the money put away, and has known it "for years." The sentence says a great deal about both men. Fergesson trusted Hadley enough, or noticed him little enough, to open the safe in front of him; and in all those years the combination was never changed. Nothing in the novel suggests that Hadley ever used it. He kept it the way people keep knowledge they have no plan for, until the day a plan arrives. The guide comes back to this in the Takeaways and the In Practice box, because the safe is the one lock in the chapter that Fergesson forgot to change.
The key will not turn
"Through the plate glass of the window the interior of the store was a dim expanse of cloudy shapes. Inertly, the television sets stretched out all the way to the back. The night-light flickered a ghostly blue. Stuart Hadley bent down and skillfully inserted the key in the lock."
"Skillfully." The adverb is a small cruelty. The narration names him in full ("Stuart Hadley") at the moment of entry, as if for a record. The view through the glass is the one Fergesson saw on the first page of the novel, when he opened up on a Thursday morning in June and "the ghostly blue of the night-light rose like marsh gas over a decaying bog." It is the same blue light, seen from outside.
"The key did not turn. It did not go all the way into the lock. He stood for a long moment, dazed and uncomprehending. Then finally, unbelievingly, he understood...and his stupefaction turned to incredulous outrage."
"Fergesson had changed the lock. A rim of clean new wood, freshly exposed, was visible around the lock panel. The lock itself was shiny, metallic, newly installed.
The rim of new wood. The evidence is physical and exact: "clean new wood, freshly exposed," and a lock "shiny, metallic, newly installed." Hadley reads it correctly in one sense (the lock is new, and Fergesson did it) and wrongly in another. He guesses that Fergesson changed it "Saturday night after the poker game, before going home." The second half of the chapter shows that Fergesson came in "A little after noon that Sunday" and did it then, a few hours before Hadley arrived. The mistake is natural, since Hadley has no way to know, but it also tells the reader something about his picture of Fergesson: a man who would act immediately, the same night, coldly. The truth is a man who went home, slept on it, and came back to the shop alone on his day off to do a fifteen-minute job he hated doing.
Why the lock was changed. The novel never states Fergesson's reason, and does not need to. On Saturday night Hadley used this same key to let himself into Modern, walked down into the basement during the poker game, bloody and wild, and demanded his money. In Chapter 17 Ellen also told Fergesson that Hadley had left "His key... still in the door" of their apartment, "standing wide open." A man who has been frightened in his own shop by an employee with a key, and who has just fired that employee, changes the lock. It is ordinary prudence. What turns it into tragedy is that it happened on the one afternoon when Hadley came back with a reason to use the key.
"He couldn't get inside. He was locked out. In a spasm of frustrated wrath he turned and hurled the key violently away from him, into the gutter. It bounced and then lay with the trash and weeds carried along by the dark trickle of water moving toward the sewer."
The key in the gutter. "He couldn't get inside. He was locked out." Two flat sentences, each saying the same thing, as a stunned mind repeats itself. Then the throw. The image of the key lying "with the trash and weeds" in water "moving toward the sewer" is the chapter's first funeral. The key was Hadley's place in the world, the token that he belonged at Modern, and it goes where the rubbish goes. In Chapter 2 an old customer told him "you don't belong here," and Hadley answered "I belong here... I'm not just waiting." Here the store gives the old woman's answer, in brass.
The watcher. Hadley was about to leave. The novel says so plainly: he was "turning his back, starting mindlessly down the street." If he had gone, the chapter would have ended with a thrown key and a lost dream. What stops him is "a flicker of motion," and what he sees is the man himself, upstairs, "stonily," "hard and impassive," "Saying nothing. Doing nothing." Seen from the street, Fergesson's stillness looks like contempt: the owner watching the fired man fail at his door. The reader will soon see the same moment from inside, and learn that the stillness was something else. But Hadley never sees the inside. The fragments "Saying nothing. Doing nothing." are Hadley's reading of Fergesson, and they are what turns despair into rage.
The words also repeat Saturday night. When Hadley cursed him at the register in Chapter 17, Fergesson's face showed for a moment "a tide of dismay and pain, as if he were going to weep. Then his face closed hard and mean, without feeling, an impassive wall." Hadley saw the wall then and sees it again now. He has never once been shown the tide behind it.
"Outraged, in a haze of baffled, mounting fury, Hadley began pounding on the glass. 'Let me in!' he shouted. He ran into the well and pounded on the door. 'Come on...open up! Let me in!'"
"But Fergesson did not stir."
The title. "Let me in!" is the cry of a child locked out of the house, and it is the first time in the novel that Hadley has asked Fergesson for anything so plainly. All his life with Modern he has been half in and half out: trusted with the keys and the floor, mocked for his celery phosphate and his bellyaches, made manager over swordfish and fired over a poker game. Now the request is total. He does not say "I need the money" or "I want my job back." He asks to be let in. The "well" he runs into is the recessed entrance in front of the door, the space between the two display windows. Then one line, a paragraph on its own: "But Fergesson did not stir." Hadley's half of the chapter stops there, and the narrative turns the clock back.
A little after noon
"A little after noon that Sunday, Jim Fergesson had come down alone to Modern TV Sales and Service. As he unlocked the front door and entered, the awful silence hit him full force; he had almost turned around and gone back out."
The clock goes back. The pluperfect ("had come down") is the signal. Hadley's half of the chapter ended at the locked door some time in the afternoon. Fergesson's half starts again "A little after noon," a few hours earlier, and will run forward until it meets the moment already shown from the street. Dick has used this method before in the novel, giving a scene from one side and then the other, but never with such a sharp hinge. The reader knows from the first sentence where this half must end: at the desk upstairs, with a fired man shouting at the glass.
"Alone." Fergesson has come in on a Sunday, in the rain, with no one to see him. This is such a visit. But it is also the day after he fired the best salesman he ever had, and the reader is about to watch him spend an afternoon among that man's leavings. "The awful silence hit him full force; he had almost turned around and gone back out." The store that is home to Hadley frightens its owner when it is empty.
"He hated the way his shoes echoed. He hated the night-light. Bending down, he plugged in the luxurious Walco needle display, and then he straightened up painfully. He was getting old. He turned on a small table-model radio and in a moment had the ball game going shrilly."
Chapter 1, repeated and shrunk. The novel opened with Fergesson letting himself into Modern on a Thursday morning in June. Then too he walked into a dead place ("Here no life existed"), saw "the ghostly blue of the night-light" rise "like marsh gas over a decaying bog," and brought the shop to life by force: he switched on the neon sign and banks of sets, "destroyed" the night-light "with a single jerk of his hand," dragged back the skylight with a pole and "threw the Philco display into whirring excitement." That was a man at the top of his energy, opening for business. Here he plugs in one display, straightens "painfully" and thinks "He was getting old." He does not destroy the night-light this time. He only hates it, and it is still flickering when Hadley looks in from the street. Instead of a row of blaring sets there is "a small table-model radio" with the ball game "going shrilly," the noise a lonely man uses to fill a room. Walco was a brand of replacement phonograph needles, sold from dealers' counter displays, so the "needle display" is a small sales aid, "luxurious" in the way Fergesson thinks of anything a supplier gives him for show.
The lock, from inside. The reader now sees the job Hadley guessed at. The old lock goes "in the trash basket under the counter." That is the second thing in the chapter to end up with rubbish. Hadley's key goes into the gutter "with the trash and weeds"; the lock it fitted goes into the basket. Neither man knows about the other half of the pair. "Satisfied" is the only feeling the paragraph names, and it is a craftsman's feeling, not a victor's. Nothing in it suggests spite, and nothing suggests regret either. Fergesson treats the lock as he would a burned-out tube.
Case: Saturday night or Sunday noon. Hadley's belief and the narrator's fact are a few hours apart, and the difference matters. Fergesson slept on what happened and still decided to shut Hadley out. That makes him harder than Hadley's guess, not softer. But the Sunday version also shows a man who brings a cardboard box with a new lock on his day off and does the work himself rather than calling a locksmith, which is the habit of the "little hard practical men" he is about to praise. The novel lets both readings stand.
A man's imprint
"The office was littered, filthy. Dust lay over everything; there were heaps of cups and glasses, dirty dishes, wadded-up waxed paper; the wastepaper basket had spilled over and was surrounded by trash. The desk was covered with pencil shavings, ashtrays full of cigarette butts; there were trade journals and bills, memos stacked up under the telephone, cards and papers and books and scrawled telephone numbers."
"He swept everything to one side and got out the accounts-receivable drawers."
The office. The catalogue is pure Dick: a list of objects with no verbs, the way a man's eye moves across a mess. It also recalls the counter in Chapter 1, where "years passed and new cups were added; the old were not removed." The store has always been dirty. What has changed is that Fergesson now sees it. He does what a businessman does on a Sunday: "swept everything to one side" and got out the accounts receivable, the record of what customers owe the store. The task is a natural one for the day after losing a manager. It is also, in a small way, the opposite of Hadley's afternoon. Hadley has spent the day trying to find money he does not have. Fergesson spends it counting money owed to him.
"Outside, cold rain poured down; inside the store the air was dank and faintly chill. It never really got light or dry in the store: it was an old building with only a single skylight and the display windows and door at the front to let in the sun. Fergesson's throat ached for a cup of hot black coffee."
The rain. Here the novel says what Hadley's half only implied with its "dark trickle of water moving toward the sewer": it is raining, cold and hard. Hadley is walking the streets in it with a battered face and a hurt side. The detail of the store's light ("It never really got light or dry") belongs with the night-light and the skylight from Chapter 1. Modern is a dark old building that only seems alive when the power is on. On a Sunday, with one radio playing and no customers, it is what it is: an old shop in a wet street. Fergesson wants "hot black coffee," the plainest of comforts; in Chapter 1 the store's coffee came "from the Health Food Store next door," and today he goes without.
"In the corner, under the typewriter table, was Hadley's bottle of celery extract and his bottle of fizz water. Both were dusty and cobwebbed; they had been there since Hadley first showed up with them."
The celery extract. No object in the novel has a longer history. In Chapter 2 Hadley bought fizz water and celery extract at the Health Food Store, "over a dollar's worth," some of it for Fergesson. In Chapter 4 Fergesson told Alice "I won't have anybody running my store who swills celery phosphates." In Chapter 6 it was part of the portrait of Hadley as a hypochondriac with "his celery phosphate." And on Saturday night, firing him, Fergesson said "I'll mail your bottle of celery extract to your house." Now the bottles are here, "dusty and cobwebbed," and the novel adds a fact that changes them: they "had been there since Hadley first showed up with them." So the celery extract was never really in use. It was a prop Hadley set up on his first days and then left, like a flag. Fergesson does not mail it. He throws it away.
The inventory of a man. Fergesson's mind makes a list as a stock clerk would: sales book, tags, rubbers (overshoes), a tie, then the medicine cabinet. Arrid was a well-known deodorant brand, and Anacin a well-known headache tablet; with the nose drops and the after-lunch toothpaste they make a picture of a man worried about his body and how he smells, which fits the anxious hypochondriac of Chapter 6. "In the crapper" is Fergesson's word, not the narrator's. The tone of the list is irritated, and yet it is exact, and only someone who had paid close attention to Hadley over years would know where his toothpaste was and when he used it. The narration is telling the reader that Fergesson noticed Hadley much more than he ever let on.
"And all the endless little projects of Hadley's: little repairs, little heaps of wires and bolts he was working on, continually, eternally. Tinkering, inspecting, improving."
"Tinkering, inspecting, improving." The three participles are a judgment, and a mixed one. "Little" appears three times, and "continually, eternally" is a sigh. But the projects are repairs, real work of the kind his Chapter 4 creed of hard work and no waste approves. The words "inspecting" and "improving" are virtues in his creed. For a moment the list stops being a list of junk and becomes a description of a man who could not stop trying to make things better. It is the closest Fergesson comes to praise before the turn to the salesman.
Throwing him out. "A man's imprint is left all over a small retail store." The sentence turns briefly into the present tense of a general truth, as if Fergesson were thinking of other men he has fired. Then comes the physical comedy of the full basket: he "tried to squash" the bottles in, failed, and in the end carried the basket and the bottles down together. He could have left the bottles in the corner where they have stood for years. Instead he takes them to "the huge trash cartons" in the basement, the same basement where Hadley found him at the poker table the night before. The man is being cleared out of the building at the same moment, as the reader knows, that he is walking toward it with his key.
"The basement was cold and frightening. The service department lay in complete gloom; a single overhead yellow light winked feebly as Fergesson emptied the trash, washed his hands, and started back upstairs. Darkness and decay and silence. The primordial chaos was creeping back into his creation."
"His creation." The basement is described in the language of Genesis turned backward. "Darkness" and "silence" and "primordial chaos" are the state before creation, and the chaos is "creeping back into his creation." Fergesson is the maker of this small world, and in his own mind something like its god. The list that follows (old batteries, wiring, "piles of discarded tubes," crates, "excelsior," the packing straw of the period, "bent nails, bottles of polish, old instruction sheets") is the debris of a working shop. "Nobody had time to clean up. Nobody had time to keep the store really running right, as it should have been." The complaint is aimed at his staff, but it is a confession too. The store has got away from him. "Washed his hands" is a plain detail and also, after throwing Hadley's things out, a gesture with an old meaning.
Abortive creation. The picture of breasts drawn in the dust is a schoolboy's joke, and Fergesson's reaction to it is out of all proportion. He "savagely wiped the outlines off." The narrator gives his reasoning in his own cosmic terms: "The primordial dust had been stirred by abortive creation, not his own." The words "dust" and "creation" call up the making of Adam from the dust of the ground. Someone else has made a figure in Fergesson's dust, a figure of the female body, the body that bears children, and he wipes it out with the remark that "they had never lived or stirred." The paragraph sits a page before Fergesson asks "If he had had a son," and the link is plain to see. A childless man rubs out a drawing of fertility as if it insulted him. He then polishes the sets "vigorously," the hard-working man's answer to everything.
The replacement
"Somewhere in his desk upstairs, lost in the litter of papers and notes and tags, was the name of a TV salesman the RCA people had sent around from time to time. A tall thin dull-faced man who looked as if he had a perpetual cold. Sloppy and slow of speech, mechanical smile and bobbing Adam's apple. Just what RCA could be expected to send."
"A snail, a tortoise, creeping around with a silly grin. A mediocre man with no possibilities. A few tricks, infinite patience, impervious to insult: the perfect modern salesman. The replacement to take the job of Stuart Hadley."
"The perfect modern salesman." The phrase is sarcastic, and the store's name is in it. Modern TV is about to hire the modern salesman, and its owner despises him in advance. The portrait is built from fragments, as Fergesson's thoughts are: the cold, the "bobbing Adam's apple," the "mechanical smile," and then the animals, "A snail, a tortoise." Each detail is the opposite of a quality Fergesson valued in Hadley without ever saying so. Hadley was quick where this man is "slow of speech"; he was proud and easily hurt where this man is "impervious to insult." Fergesson's list of the salesman's virtues ("A few tricks, infinite patience") is a list of what large firms train into men: process, patience, no feeling. "Just what RCA could be expected to send." The manufacturer that supplies the sets will supply the man who sells them, and he will be part of the product. The name of this candidate is "lost in the litter" of the desk. Fergesson cannot even find him.
Selling as spellcraft. This is the most candid account of salesmanship in the novel, and it comes from the owner. Good selling, in Fergesson's mind, means to "wade in and get people," to "spin grandiose tales," to "manipulate the customer in body and mind," to weave "magic spells" around "his prey." The customer is prey. The honest salesman, the one who would "let the customer make up his own mind," is the failure, "never... more than a tag book and a pencil." The irony is close at hand. An hour or so earlier, on the car lot, Hadley stood on the other side of exactly this craft and was spun, manipulated and enchanted by a man in a Bank of America sweater, and he knew it and wanted the car anyway. In Chapter 14, on his first day as manager, Hadley closed a sale for Tampini; the shy salesman needed him. Now Fergesson weighs Tampini and finds him wanting for the same reason.
"Stuart Hadley, somewhere down deep inside him, had something. There had been a possibility there. If Fergesson had got him early enough...if he had been able to train him his own way, really bring him up right, all the way from the bottom... But four or five years wasn't enough. A whole lifetime was needed."
"Had something." Here is the sentence that Hadley, outside in the rain, would have given anything to hear. Fergesson thinks Hadley had "something," "a possibility," and he thinks it in the past tense, as one speaks of the dead. He never once said it to Hadley's face. His regret is not that he fired him but that he did not get him "early enough," to "bring him up right, all the way from the bottom." The language is a father's. "Four or five years" is the length of Hadley's service here, against "for years" a few paragraphs back; the store's owner, who keeps the accounts, gives the precise figure. "A whole lifetime was needed." Fergesson wants not an employee but a life to shape.
Fifteen, then ten. The fantasy runs backward in age, as fantasies of control do. At fifteen Hadley would be "a kid in jeans and white shirt"; at ten, "still just a boy." Each step back gives Fergesson more of him. The verbs are those of an owner of a boy: "Supervised," "Set him on the right path," "Made sure." "Goofy notions" is the word Fergesson uses for everything Hadley has believed in the novel: the Watchmen, Beckheim, the dreams of art and culture, the books in French. The age of ten has its own small echo. In Chapter 15, when Marsha told him her first daughter was born in 1936, Hadley said "Christ... I was only ten years old." The year in which he was ten was the year another life, Marsha's, had already begun to run past him.
Born in 1927
"Hadley was twenty-five years old. Born in 1927. If only he could have got hold of him before Franklin Delano Roosevelt...before the New Deal. All during those crazy years of starry-eyed liberalism, all those years the pinks were running the country. And they still ran it. Sidney Hillman, that Russian Jew. Morgenthau, another Jew. And the worst of all...Harry Hopkins."
The arithmetic. "Twenty-five years old. Born in 1927." In the summer of 1952 a man born in 1927 is twenty-four or twenty-five, so the figures agree with each other. They do not agree with Chapter 15, where Hadley answers Marsha's "born in 1936" with "I was only ten years old," which would place his birth in 1926 (though Marsha's own ages in that scene do not add up either). The guide flagged this in Chapter 15; it is the kind of small slip a fast-writing young novelist makes. Born in 1927, Hadley was six when Roosevelt took office in March 1933 and the New Deal began. So "before the New Deal" means before the age of six. Fergesson's fantasy has moved from fifteen to ten to the cradle.
"The pinks." The paragraph is Fergesson's politics in a single breath, and the narration does not interrupt it. "Pinks" was the common sneer of the period for people thought to be soft on communism, and in 1952, an election year with Roosevelt dead seven years and Truman's Democrats still in power, the line "And they still ran it" was the complaint of the Republican right. The three names are chosen to hurt. Sidney Hillman was the clothing workers' union leader, born in 1887 in Žagarė, then in the Russian Empire and now in Lithuania, who founded the Amalgamated Clothing Workers in 1914, helped to build the CIO and became so close to Roosevelt that "Clear it with Sidney" was a Republican taunt in 1944. Henry Morgenthau Jr. was Roosevelt's Secretary of the Treasury. Both were Jewish, and Fergesson names that first. Harry Hopkins, the architect of the New Deal relief programmes and Roosevelt's closest adviser in the war, was not Jewish; he was born in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1890, the son of a harness maker, and he died in 1946.
"Memory of Harry Hopkins swam up before Fergesson and the big Philco TV set he was polishing. The stooped, angular body. The crooked smile. The sunken cheeks, fever-ridden eyes. The painful gait of the 'half man.' Something like the TV salesman RCA had sent over."
The "half man." Hopkins had most of his stomach removed in 1937 after cancer, and for the rest of his life he was thin, ill and often in hospital, which is the figure Fergesson remembers: "stooped," "sunken cheeks, fever-ridden eyes," a "painful gait." Fergesson's scorn is for the body as much as for the politics. The inverted commas around "half man" mark it as a phrase Fergesson has picked up somewhere, and it is cruel in a man who has just been described straightening up "painfully" because "He was getting old." The vision appears over "the big Philco TV set he was polishing," the image of a face rising on a dark screen, and it slides at once into the RCA salesman. In Fergesson's mind the sickly New Dealer and the patient modern salesman are one type.
"They were coming in that way more and more. Tall, vacant-eyed men, smiling foolishly, good-naturedly, turned out by the Roosevelt mold. The shrewd, mean, small men were gone. The earlier race, the men who had come before and built up the country. The cigar-smoking men. The little hard practical men who had fathered these empty-eyed dreamers."
Two races of men. Fergesson divides the world into two kinds. On one side, "Tall, vacant-eyed men," "turned out by the Roosevelt mold," as if by a factory; on the other, "The shrewd, mean, small men," "The cigar-smoking men," "The little hard practical men." He is one of the second kind. In Chapter 4 he lay on his couch with a cigar and a beer, and the novel has given him a "plump, muscular body." "Mean" here means tight with money, not cruel, and Fergesson uses it as praise. The irony is in the last clause. The hard small men "fathered these empty-eyed dreamers." The dreamers are their sons. Fergesson cannot see that this describes his own family turned upside down. His father, the "tall, dignified old man" of Chapter 4, was a lawyer and oil speculator who "lost everything he had," died in Fergesson's house after eight years of care, and "never got tired of telling" him "that business was unworthy of a son of his." Fergesson's own father was the tall dreamer; Fergesson is the small hard son. And Hadley, in Chapter 2, watched a stranger pass in the street and imagined himself "tall and dark and dignified." The young man Fergesson would like to have raised wants to grow into the type Fergesson most despises, which is also the type of Fergesson's father.
A CLOSER LOOK: whose prejudice is this? The antisemitism in this paragraph belongs to Fergesson and is shown as part of him. It is not endorsed by the narration. Three things in the text make this clear. First, the free indirect style marks it as his: "that Russian Jew," "another Jew," "the worst of all" are the rhythm of a man talking to himself while he polishes a set, and they come in the same voice as "goofy notions" and "the crapper." Second, the facts are wrong in a telling way. Fergesson puts Hopkins, who was not Jewish, at the head of the list, so the real charge is not religion but a type: the clever, sickly, idealistic government man. The ethnic sneer is the nearest weapon to hand. Third, the passage is followed at once by "If he had had a son," which turns the politics back into grief. Dick lets the reader see that Fergesson's hatred of the New Deal is mixed up with his anger at the young, at his father, and at his own childlessness. None of this excuses the slur. In 1952 talk of this kind was common among small businessmen of Fergesson's age and politics, and Dick, writing in the McCarthy years, records it without flinching. Readers should notice that the man who thinks it is the same man who, ten minutes later, cannot bear to watch another man humiliated in front of strangers.
If he had had a son
"If he had had a son, would he have come out this way? Fergesson polished furiously. No, his son wouldn't have been like this. His son would have turned out different. If he had had a son he would have come out right."
The hidden centre. This short paragraph explains the whole of Fergesson's afternoon. The question comes first ("would he have come out this way?") and the answer is a denial repeated three times: "No," "wouldn't have been like this," "would have come out right." A man who needs to say it three times does not believe it. "Polished furiously" is the body doing what the mind refuses to. The novel has prepared this all through Part Three. At the dinner in Chapter 13 Fergesson told Hadley "I think you've calmed down now that you have a son... it seems to me you're beginning to grow up." In Chapter 14 Alice said "bitterly" to Hadley, "Jim and I would give anything in the world to have a son. A little boy like Pete." And in Chapter 4 Fergesson, driving Ellen home, told her that their having no children was "My fault... According to the doctors," and called his staff "my little flock." Hadley was the nearest thing to a son he had. Fergesson made him manager in the hope that he had grown up and fired him when he proved he had not. Now, cleaning out his things, he imagines a son who would have turned out right, and a few minutes later the son he did have is at the door.
Watching from the office
"Finished with polishing, Fergesson tossed the greasy rag under the counter, turned off the ball game, and made his way upstairs to the office. He pulled the cover from the adding machine and began running a tape on the accounts receivable. As he was sitting down at the desk to check the tape, there came a faint, echoing click, metallic and sharp in the silence of the store."
The click. The two halves of the chapter meet on a sound. In Hadley's half the key "did not go all the way into the lock"; in Fergesson's half that failure is "a faint, echoing click, metallic and sharp." Fergesson has just "turned off the ball game," so the store is silent at the precise moment the key goes in. The adding machine and its tape are his own instrument of order, and the tape will keep slipping out of his hand as the scene goes on. It is the paper record of what is owed to Modern, and he never finishes checking it.
"Somebody was at the door. Fergesson glanced up, his pencil poised over the tape. A form loomed up in the doorway, dark and opaque. It took him a moment to recognize it; at first he thought it was some blundering customer, trying to get in, wanting a radio fixed, tubes checked. Then he realized, with a thrill of pain, that it was Stuart Hadley."
"A thrill of pain." Fergesson's first feeling, seeing Hadley, is pain, not anger and not fear. The narration says so plainly and the street could not see it. Before he knows who it is, the shape is just a customer "wanting a radio fixed, tubes checked," and the form in the doorway is "dark and opaque," a phrase that returns a few lines later as "the opaque shape." To Fergesson, Hadley has always been opaque. The reader has spent most of the novel inside Hadley's head; Fergesson has never been there once.
"For a moment he rose to his feet and stood watching Hadley try the lock futilely, saw him flush with rage and hurl the key off into the gutter. He saw Hadley start away from the door, then turn abruptly and move back to press his hand and face against the window."
The overlap. This is the hinge of the chapter, and most of the details match the first half. Fergesson saw the key thrown "into the gutter." He saw Hadley "start away from the door," which is the moment when Hadley was "turning his back, starting mindlessly down the street." Then Hadley came back and pressed "his hand and face against the window," as the first half had him jam his hand against it. One detail does not match. Here Fergesson "rose to his feet" while Hadley was still trying the lock. In Hadley's half, Hadley saw him "Sitting in the upstairs office" and only "Presently" saw him get "to his feet." Either Fergesson sat down again or the two accounts are a little out of step. The guide reads it as the second: two people remembering one moment in a slightly different order.
Either way, the cruelty is in the timing. Some "flicker of motion" upstairs stopped Hadley as he was leaving, and the most likely cause is Fergesson moving at his desk, startled. If Fergesson had kept still, Hadley might have walked away. What looked to Hadley like the stony stare of an owner was a man who did not know what to do.
"The sound of Hadley's voice came, muffled and dull, blurred by the thick shatterproof glass. 'Let me in!'"
"A ghostly sound. Fergesson listened, heard the words, then pushed the adding-machine tape up on his desk...it had begun to slither off. He tried to ignore Hadley; he tried to pretend that nobody was out in the street shouting and pounding. The leaden thumps of Hadley's fist against the glass echoed through the store; more ominous thunder to disturb his work and make his routine impossible."
Pretending. "Thick shatterproof glass" is the most ironic adjective in the chapter; within a page it will be in pieces on the floor. Fergesson's response to the cry is to tidy his tape and to "pretend that nobody was out in the street." The words "ghostly," "leaden," "ominous thunder" belong to a horror story, and Fergesson experiences the scene as one. What he wants is his "routine." The man outside is a disturbance to the accounts receivable. This is the side of Fergesson the chapter will not let off: faced with a man in torment, he tries to go on working.
"The pounding ceased. Hadley stood glaring stupidly into the store, inert and helpless. The sight made Fergesson nervous; didn't the damn fool understand he couldn't get in? He tried to go on with his work, but it was hopeless. Outside the locked door the opaque shape remained, cutting off the sight of the gray sidewalk and the parked cars."
"'Let me in!' Hadley shouted."
"Fergesson winced; the tape slid from his hand and he sat immobile, head bent down, waiting for the next blast. He realized it was coming; he prepared himself and stiffened his body."
"Didn't the damn fool understand?" Fergesson's question tells the reader what he thinks the situation is. To him, the lock has settled the matter: Hadley cannot get in, so he should go. He does not imagine that Hadley might be asking for something other than physical entry, or that a word from the door would change anything. "Head bent down," "stiffened his body," "waiting for the next blast" is the posture of a man under shellfire, and it is also, oddly, the posture of a man being shouted at by his own child. He takes it rather than answer it.
What Fergesson never knew. "He had not known there was such hostility in Hadley." The reader has known for a long time. In Chapter 13, on the night he was made manager, Hadley's fear was "fear of himself," that "he might suddenly, blindly, burst out and destroy the safety of his microcosmos. In his archaic fury he might smash, demolish, pull down the only world in which he could exist." In Chapter 14 he told Alice the world "ought to be wiped out... an ocean of water before, a lake of fire this time." Chapter 20 is that prophecy carried out against the store itself, the "microcosmos," with Hadley's own body as the hammer. Fergesson, who saw only the hypochondriac with his celery phosphate and the salesman with his tags, is "amazed." The two men have worked side by side for years without one of them knowing the other.
"Booming reverberations rolled through the store; Hadley had thrown his entire weight against the glass. Shocked, Fergesson glanced involuntarily up. The expression on Hadley's face was dark and ugly, a baffled, animal frenzy that clouded his eyes and made his cheeks puffy and unhealthy. He was pressed tight against the door, staring blindly in, seeking some living thing to fasten his attention on."
"He was not going away."
"Some living thing." Hadley is "staring blindly in, seeking some living thing to fasten his attention on." Inside the store the only living thing is Fergesson. Everything else is the "dead things" of Chapter 1, the sets, the displays, the dust. The phrase makes Hadley into an animal hunting by sight, and it makes Fergesson the prey of his own selling metaphor ("Tampini wove no magic spells around his prey"). "He was not going away," on its own line, has the weight of a sentence passed.
"Fear touched Fergesson, and shame. Not for himself but for Hadley. Behind the man, a handful of people had collected, passersby who had been attracted by the noise. They darted quick, amused looks... Fergesson turned away, humiliated, wondering if he could endure what was going to happen. Wondering if there could be any sense or meaning to a world in which such things were permitted."
Shame for another. The best thing in Fergesson is in this paragraph. His shame is "Not for himself but for Hadley." He sees the "quick, amused looks" of the passersby, the same looks Hadley has been getting all day (the clerk's glare, the passengers on the bus), and he feels them on Hadley's behalf. He is "humiliated" by proxy, which is a form of love. And then, for the only time in the novel, the practical man asks the question that Hadley and the Watchmen have been asking all along: whether "there could be any sense or meaning to a world in which such things were permitted." "Permitted" implies someone permitting. Fergesson, the small god of his own creation, is suddenly asking about a larger one.
"'Let me in!' Hadley screamed."
The snow globe. This is the strangest and best image in the chapter. With a man screaming at his door, Fergesson "concentrated on the glass paperweight," a snow globe with "a tiny house, a tree, a gravel path," and white flakes that swirl "when it was revolved." It is a world under glass, closed, perfect and small, just as Modern has been for both men. The house in the globe cannot be entered. The snow on its roof only moves when someone outside shakes it. Fergesson looks into his own sealed world rather than at the man outside his. And the outside world is about to shake it: a few lines later the glass of Modern will break.
The first two sentences are worth reading slowly. "There was no point in saying no. It did not need to be said; it was evident." Fergesson believes that silence is an answer, and that the answer is "evident." This is the central failure of the chapter. He never says no, so he also never says anything else: not "go home," not "I'll call Ellen," not "come back tomorrow." On Saturday night, in Chapter 17, he did speak ("Get out of here and go home"), and Hadley cursed him. Today he says nothing at all. To Hadley, who reads his silence through the glass, it says what Hadley most fears.
"Silence."
"Fergesson peered up warily. Hadley had disappeared. Had he gone away? Had he given up? Did he finally understand that he could never get back in, that he had forfeited his right to admittance, by his own acts, with his own hands?"
"Forfeited his right to admittance." The sentence is formal, almost legal ("forfeited," "right," "admittance"), and it is Fergesson's real verdict on Hadley. It also has the sound of Genesis. A man who has lost the right to enter the garden "by his own acts, with his own hands" is Adam after the Fall, and the novel has just called the store Fergesson's "creation" and the basement its "primordial chaos." In the story of Eden the gate is barred and guarded. Here it is a Yale lock and a man at a desk. "With his own hands" points both ways. Hadley's own hands lost him the job; in a moment his own hands, and then his head, will break the door. And it was Fergesson's hands that fitted the lock.
"As Fergesson began breathing again, Hadley reappeared. He had something in his hands. A brick."
"Fergesson found himself on his feet. He snatched up the telephone and dialed. 'Send a cop,' he said to the answering switchboard operator at the city hall."
"'Yes sir,' the male operator said quietly. 'What is the address?'"
Calling the police in 1952. There was no single emergency number in the United States in 1952. The first 911 call was not made until 16 February 1968, in Haleyville, Alabama. Before that, a citizen called the local police number or, as Fergesson does, the city hall switchboard, and an operator passed the call on. So Fergesson needs a moment, "snatched up the telephone and dialed," and then the matter passes through a man at a switchboard who asks for the address. It is a slow chain, and the delay is part of the plot: "he wondered where the police were, and why they hadn't come." By the time they come, it is too late.
"Send a cop." Three words, and the first time in the scene Fergesson speaks. He has said nothing to Hadley; he speaks to the city hall. "Found himself on his feet" means the body acted before the mind decided. Calling the police on a man he had wanted to raise as a son is a hard thing, and the chapter does not hide it. But given a brick, it is also the reasonable thing.
Going down. After all his sitting, Fergesson goes down the stairs toward Hadley. The text does not say why. It may be to protect the stock, or to speak, or simply because a man goes toward a noise in his own shop. He "heard it instead of seeing it": once again the scene is first a sound. "Succeeded" is an odd word for a hole made with a brick, and it is Hadley's word, the language of effort and achievement. The "basketball" gives the scale. Through it comes Hadley's face, now "streaked with thin bloody trails," the first of the wounds.
"As Fergesson watched, Hadley reached through the hole and groped around for the inside door handle. It made no difference; the lock was thrown and the key was in Fergesson's pocket. Hadley continued to explore the inside of the door, plucking and examining the jagged shards of glass blocking his way. Then, abruptly, he put his shoulder to the hole and shoved."
The key in his pocket. "It made no difference; the lock was thrown and the key was in Fergesson's pocket." This is the second key of the chapter. Hadley's old key is in the gutter on its way to the sewer; the new key is in the owner's pocket, a foot or two away through a hole in the glass. The new lock works from the inside as well as the outside; Fergesson tested it "both from outside and from inside." So even with his arm through the door, Hadley cannot open it. The only way in is the key Fergesson holds and does not use.
The crowd. There are now three kinds of watchers: Fergesson inside, the reader, and "a good-sized crowd" in the street. "Nobody stirred; nobody made any attempt to approach." The crowd that was "amused" a few minutes earlier is now "White-faced," "fascinated and terrified." Dick does not judge them, but the scene is a picture of a city watching a man destroy himself and doing nothing, which is also what Fergesson is doing. The "diagonal slot, two feet long and a foot wide" is just big enough for a man's head and shoulders, and the precise measurement makes the next paragraph inevitable.
"'Let me in!' he pleaded. His voice came through clearly, a raw and agonized sound, not particularly human. But Fergesson made no move to open the remains of the door. Listening tensely, rigidly, he wondered where the police were, and why they hadn't come."
The fourth cry. "Let me in!" has come four times now in Fergesson's half: through the "thick shatterproof glass," "shouted," "screamed" and now "pleaded." With the glass gone, the voice "came through clearly," and what comes through is "not particularly human." The verbs move from anger to begging, the reverse of the order one might expect. And Fergesson, with the key in his pocket, "made no move to open the remains of the door." He thinks of the police. Nothing in the text says he thinks of opening up. Here the chapter makes its hardest judgment, without a word of comment.
Head first
"He knew." Fergesson knows "even before the man began to move." It is the one moment in the chapter when he understands Hadley perfectly, and it comes too late to use. The charge is described in the language of a football player or a bull: "poised on the balls of his feet," "head down, shoulder forward," "lumbered." The glass rains "on Fergesson" and on "the TV sets, the counter," the stock and furniture of the store, so the attack falls on the man and his creation together. Hadley has run into hard things before in these chapters. In Chapter 18 he ran blindly into a pole and broke his teeth; in Chapter 19 he woke to be told that a truck had hit him. This is the third collision in twenty-four hours, and the only one he chooses.
Content note. The next paragraph describes Hadley's injuries in graphic detail. The guide quotes it in full because the detail is the point, but readers may wish to skip to "The ambulance."
"Without a central intelligence." The language strips Hadley of personhood step by step. He becomes "a grotesque, bleeding thing," then "a mindless conglomeration of reflexes and muscles, without a central intelligence," then something that will "ooze." The phrase "central intelligence" is unusual in a novel of 1952 and it is exact: the body goes on trying to get in after the mind has gone. That is the whole of Hadley's history with Modern in one image. Whatever happens to him, some part of him keeps pushing toward the store. The detail of the wounds (the "broken fingers," the cheekbones showing white, the left eye "by a thread," the "lower jaw... sheared away") is far more violent than anything else in the novel, and it is meant to be. The quiet realism of the whole long novel ends in this.
"As the flapping, struggling thing plunged head forward into the store, the police ambulance wailed dismally up to the curb. Police appeared; the crowd pulled aside for them, and they quickly approached the doorway."
Head forward. Hadley does get in. "The flapping, struggling thing plunged head forward into the store." The cry "Let me in!" is answered in the most terrible way: he lets himself in, through the glass, head first, and the police arrive at that very moment. The timing is cruel in the way the whole chapter is cruel. A few minutes earlier, the police would have taken him away from the door; a few minutes later, and the novel might have ended with his death.
"Fergesson made his way forward and opened the door. He managed to get it all the way aside before he was sick, terribly sick, off in a corner by the end of the counter, where the ghostly blue of the night-light flickered forlornly."
He opens the door. Only now, with Hadley lying inside, does Fergesson open the door, which with the lock thrown means using the key in his pocket, to let the police and the medics in. The door Hadley begged him to open he opens for others, once there is nothing left to refuse. Then "he was sick, terribly sick," in the corner under "the ghostly blue of the night-light," which he "hated" when he came in. The light that greeted him on the first page of the novel ("rose like marsh gas over a decaying bog") now "flickered forlornly" over him. In Chapter 1 he destroyed it "with a single jerk of his hand." Here it watches him vomit.
"The medical team shoved inside the store and clustered around Hadley. After a prolonged interval they got him onto the stretcher and back across the sidewalk to the ambulance. A moment later the siren growled back into existence and the ambulance nosed its way out into traffic."
Most of him, anyhow
"'You put in the call?' a policeman was saying to Fergesson. 'You're the owner of this store?'"
"'Yes,' Fergesson managed. He sank down on the window ledge, among the cardboard displays and dust rags, beside the staple gun. 'How hurt is he? Will he live?'"
On the window ledge. Fergesson sits down "among the cardboard displays and dust rags, beside the staple gun," in the window where the store shows itself to the street. These are the tools of window dressing, the work Hadley did best: in Chapter 14, on his first day as manager, he built a Zenith window. The owner now sits in that window, on view, while a policeman takes notes. His first questions are the right ones, and they are about Hadley: "How hurt is he? Will he live?"
"'He'll be all right,' the policeman said. 'They'll patch him up. Most of him, anyhow.' He had his notebook and pencil out; another policeman was clearing away the crowd of frightened, curious people. 'You know the individual?'"
"'Yes,' Fergesson said. 'I know him. I know the individual.'"
"I know the individual." The policeman's answer is the bleakest joke in the novel. "He'll be all right... They'll patch him up. Most of him, anyhow." It is the talk of a man who sees such things every week, and it promises survival while admitting loss: an eye, a jaw. Then the official phrase, "You know the individual?" Fergesson answers three times, and on the third he takes the policeman's word for himself: "I know him. I know the individual." The repetition is a man in shock echoing what he has heard. It is also the chapter's last irony. A few minutes ago "He had not known there was such hostility in Hadley." He has just learned that he did not know the individual at all.
"'You want to prefer criminal charges? Or you want to let it go?' The policeman turned a page in his notebook. 'Maybe you ought to let it go.'"
"'I'll let it go,' Fergesson said. 'I don't want to prefer any charges.'"
"Maybe you ought to let it go." The policeman steers him, gently. To prefer "criminal charges" is the formal phrase for making a criminal complaint, and Hadley has broken a door, damaged stock and tried to break into a closed shop, perhaps with theft in mind, though nobody but the reader knows that. The policeman, looking at a man with his eye on his cheek, suggests mercy, and Fergesson takes it at once. In Chapter 19 the German couple were "afraid to call the police" and threatened Hadley with arrest for being drunk; here the police themselves let him off. It is the second time in a day that strangers decide not to make a case of Stuart Hadley. Nobody in the novel ever learns about the robbery plan. If Fergesson had opened the door, he would have let in a man who meant to empty his safe.
"'You're insured?' the policeman asked, indicating the ruins of the glass door. One of the policemen was clumsily trying to close the frame."
"'Yes,' Fergesson said. 'I've been insured twenty years.'"
Twenty years. Fergesson's answer dates his business. It is a small boast of prudence at the worst moment of his working life. The policeman "clumsily trying to close the frame" of a door with no glass in it is the chapter's last image of a lock: a man trying to shut a door that is no longer there.
"Through the torn, gaping hole of the door filtered sounds, the whirr of cars and the hushed voices of people. Uneven sounds, carried by the night wind, the mixed voices, human and mechanical, from the street."
"The night wind." The afternoon has become night, at least in the prose. The clocks of the chapter do not allow it: Fergesson came in a little after noon, and Hadley, whose day began after a two o'clock bus, cannot have reached the store before late afternoon; in late August night does not fall until about eight. Either the scene has run on for hours, which the text does not suggest, or the phrase is Dick reaching for an ending. It is a fine sentence anyway. "The mixed voices, human and mechanical" is the whole novel in five words: people and machines, the Watchmen and the TV sets, a man and the store that was his world. Now the store has a hole in it, and the street's noise comes in.
"'I'll call his wife,' Fergesson said, getting unsteadily to his feet."
"'We can call her,' the policeman said."
"'It's my fault,' Fergesson answered, going to the phone and taking hold of it. 'So I'll call her.'"
"It's my fault." These are the last words of Part Three. The police offer to make the call, and Fergesson refuses, and gives his reason: "It's my fault." Then "So I'll call her," the logic of a man who believes that blame brings duty with it.
The words close a chain that runs through the whole novel. In Chapter 4, driving Ellen home, Fergesson answered her question about children with "My fault... According to the doctors." In Chapter 12, with Marsha, Hadley felt "cheated again, and it was her fault," and Marsha herself said "It's my fault." In Chapter 14 Hadley said the coming fire was "our own fault," and Alice said "I feel it's my fault." In Chapter 17 Ellen told Fergesson on the telephone, "It isn't his fault; it's your fault and everybody else's." In Chapter 18 voices in the dark said of Hadley, "His own fault." And in Chapter 19 the old German shouted "It was your fault!" and Hadley answered, listlessly, "Sure... My fault." Hadley accepted blame he did not mean in order to be left alone. Fergesson accepts blame he means, and it binds him. He goes to the telephone to call Ellen, the woman who blamed him a day earlier, and tell her what has happened to her husband. Whether he is right to blame himself is the question the guide takes up below.
The end of Part Three. Part Three is titled "Evening," and it began with a dinner at which Fergesson handed Hadley the management of Modern. It ends with Hadley carried out of Modern on a stretcher and Fergesson at the phone. The novel has one part left. The reader leaves Part Three not knowing whether Hadley will live with one eye, what Ellen will say, or what will become of Modern with a hole in its door. The one thing settled is that the store, Hadley's home and Fergesson's creation, has been broken open by the man who most wanted to be inside it.
A CLOSER LOOK: Fergesson's politics in the novel. It would be easy to read the Hillman paragraph as the novel's verdict on its businessman, the moment when the solid owner is revealed as a crank. The text is more careful than that. Fergesson's politics have been present since Chapter 4, where he lay on his couch reciting a creed of hard work and no luxury, and they are the politics of a particular man: a self-made small retailer, son of a failed professional, who came up through the Depression and built a business without help. He blames the New Deal for the young men he cannot understand. But the chapter places the paragraph between two things that complicate it. Before it comes the list of Hadley's possessions, which shows how closely Fergesson watched him; after it comes "If he had had a son," which shows what the politics are covering. Dick, who lived in left-leaning Berkeley circles at the time (FBI agents called on him and his wife Kleo there in the early 1950s), gives his conservative character the ugliest lines in the chapter and also its most humane feelings. Readers who want a simple hero or villain will not find one here.
A CLOSER LOOK: is it Fergesson's fault? "It's my fault," Fergesson says, and the chapter invites the reader to judge. A fair account separates three things.
- The firing and the lock. These were reasonable. Hadley failed to come to work on a Saturday, early in his time as manager, appeared drunk and bleeding at a private gathering on Saturday night, cursed his employer in front of his friends and forced the cash register. Fergesson paid him in full and fired him. Changing the lock the next day was what any owner would do, and the reader knows what Fergesson does not: Hadley came back to rob the safe.
- The silence. This is where the chapter places its weight. For several long minutes Fergesson sits upstairs and says nothing to a man he has known for years, a man he has just been wishing he had raised as a son. He "tried to pretend that nobody was out in the street." He thinks "There was no point in saying no." He never goes to the door to speak, even through the glass, until the brick is thrown. He calls the police rather than Ellen. A word might have changed nothing, but the chapter makes clear he never tried.
- The larger fault. Ellen told him in Chapter 17, "It isn't his fault; it's your fault and everybody else's." She seems to have meant that Hadley was the product of a world (the store, the job, the town) that gave him nothing to live for, and that Fergesson was part of it. The chapter's Hillman paragraph, ironically, makes the same kind of argument from the other side: that Hadley was spoiled by the world he grew up in, and that someone should have got to him first. Both readings make Hadley's ruin a social fact as well as a personal one.
The guide's reading is that Fergesson is right to call it his fault, but not for the reason he would give. He did nothing wrong as a businessman. His fault is simpler and harder: he did not speak. And Hadley's own share is large. He planned a theft, threw a brick and threw himself. The chapter shows that blame can be real on both sides of a door.
How the chapter is built
The chapter falls into two halves, told from two sides of the same glass. The first half follows Hadley from the gas station to the locked door: a theft of maps, a razor, a bath, two car lots, a sales pitch, a plan, a walk and a key that will not turn. It ends on "But Fergesson did not stir." The second half goes back to "A little after noon" and follows Fergesson from the moment he unlocks the old door to the moment he picks up the telephone: a new lock, an office, Hadley's things, a basement, a dusty drawing, a daydream, and then the face at the window. The two halves meet at a single sound, the "faint, echoing click" of a key that "did not go all the way into the lock," and from that point the reader sees what Hadley could not.
The joint is precise. The first half tells the reader what Hadley sees (a man "Saying nothing. Doing nothing."); the second tells what that man felt ("a thrill of pain," "Fear... and shame... for Hadley," "no point in saying no"). This is the novel's oldest method, the alternating point of view between employee and employer, pressed into a single scene. Until now the two men's points of view have run in separate scenes. Here they meet across a sheet of glass, and neither knows the other's.
Three groups of objects carry the chapter. Doors, locks and keys: the unlocked Oldsmobile, the unlocked Mercury with "the keys in the lock," "the key's in it," the store key in the wallet with Marsha's car keys, the new lock, the key in the gutter, the old lock in the trash basket, the key in Fergesson's pocket, the snow globe that cannot be entered, and the door the policeman tries to close. Dreams: the maps of "states he had never seen," "DREAM CAR SPECIAL!!", the sea monster, "The world lay open," Fergesson's dream of a boy raised right, and the "empty-eyed dreamers." Rubbish: the key with "the trash and weeds" going "toward the sewer," the old lock in the basket, the celery extract and fizz water carried to "the huge trash cartons," the basement's crates and bent nails, and the drawing wiped out of the dust. At the end of the chapter, the man who has been half thrown out with the rubbish all afternoon comes back in through the glass.
Reading the diagram. The chain runs through the chapter in reading order. The first seven boxes are Hadley's half: the maps from the Oldsmobile, the last coins spent on a razor, the dream car, the salesman's terms, the plan to open the safe, the new lock, and the cry at the glass. The last five are Fergesson's half: the Yale lock fitted at noon, the celery extract thrown away, the son he never had, the brick and the telephone, and the end. The dashed arrow runs back from the noon lock to the failed key, because the chapter's second half rewinds to explain its first: the lock Fergesson fitted "A little after noon" is the lock that stops Hadley at the door.
The earlier, shorter version of this guide carried a smaller diagram of the same chapter, which is kept here because it shows the outline at a glance.
| Two sides of the glass | Hadley, outside | Fergesson, inside |
|---|---|---|
| Why he is there | To open the safe and take "four or five hundred dollars" | To change the lock and do the accounts receivable |
| What he believes about the lock | Changed "Saturday night after the poker game" | Changed himself, "A little after noon," in "fifteen minutes" |
| What he sees | A man "Saying nothing. Doing nothing," watching "stonily" | "A form... dark and opaque," then "a thrill of pain" |
| What he feels | "Incredulous outrage," then "baffled, mounting fury" | "Amazed, and frightened"; "Fear... and shame... for Hadley" |
| What he hears | His own voice, "Let me in!" | "Muffled and dull," then "not particularly human" |
| His key | Thrown "into the gutter" | "In Fergesson's pocket" |
| His dream | A Hudson and "The world lay open" | "If he had had a son he would have come out right" |
| What he says | "Let me in!" (four times in the second half alone) | Nothing to Hadley; "Send a cop" to the city hall |
| How it ends | "Head forward into the store," on a stretcher | Sick under the night-light; "It's my fault" |
| Old guide (short version) | What the book says | Note |
|---|---|---|
| "Fergesson fitted a new lock at noon" | "A little after noon that Sunday"; "fifteen minutes" | Confirmed |
| Take box: "changed the lock the morning after the firing" | Changed a little after noon on Sunday | Corrected: afternoon, not morning |
| "Watching 'stonily'" | "He watched Hadley stonily" | Confirmed; Fergesson's half adds "a thrill of pain" |
| Hydra-Matic fits a 1951 Hudson | "Hydramatic" in the pitch; Hudson used GM's Hydra-Matic from its 1951 models | Confirmed; the car's model year is never given |
| "The old man takes the blame" | "It's my fault... So I'll call her" | Confirmed; "old man" is the guide's phrase, not Dick's |
| Hadley knows every word is "straight out of the book" | As printed | Confirmed |
| (Not in the old guide) | Hadley's plan is a theft, and nobody in the novel learns of it | Added |
| (Not in the old guide) | The two accounts of Fergesson rising differ slightly | Added and flagged |
| (Not in the old guide) | "Carried by the night wind" in the afternoon | Added and flagged |
| (Not in the old guide) | Regulation W suspended in May 1952; no 911 until 1968 | Added as context |
IN PRACTICE. The leaver who still knows the combination. Strip away the glass and the blood and the chapter is a textbook case of what banks and large firms call leaver risk: the danger posed by a person who has left, especially one who left angry, and who still holds some of the organisation's access. Fergesson's controls show what a small business got right and wrong in 1952, and the same list applies to any enterprise today.
- Revoke physical and logical access quickly. Fergesson changed the lock within a day. NIST's control catalogue for federal systems (SP 800-53, control PS-4, "Personnel Termination") asks organisations to disable a departing person's system access within a set time, revoke their credentials, hold an exit interview, recover security-related property such as keys, badges and tokens, and keep access to the information on systems the person used. A key that still works the morning after a firing is the brass equivalent of an active login.
- Rotate the shared secrets. The lock was changed, but the safe's combination was not. Hadley had known it "for years," learned "over Fergesson's shoulder," and it was the real target. In a bank the equivalents are vault codes, shared administrator passwords, service-account credentials and API keys: secrets that more than one person knows, which are not tied to anyone's badge and so are not revoked when a badge is. A good leaver process lists every shared secret the person could have known and rotates it.
- Use dual control on cash. A safe that one person can open, with a combination that has spread by observation, is a single point of failure. Banks require two people to open a vault or approve large payments so that no single insider, current or former, can act alone.
- Recover keys at exit. Fergesson never asked for Hadley's key back. He fired him across a cash register in a rage. A calm exit, even a short one, recovers property and lowers the chance of a scene later.
- Do not leave the leaver in silence. This is the chapter's human lesson. The most dangerous moment came not from a missing control but from a missing conversation. HR and security teams in banks are trained to handle exits with dignity: a clear message about pay and references, a point of contact, and in hard cases a check on welfare. Fergesson's silence behind the glass looked, from outside, like contempt, and it turned despair into violence. The control that would have helped most was a sentence.
- Watch the sales pitch too. The used-car salesman's "This car won't be here when you get back... This is a hot item" is a false-urgency script. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission's 2022 staff report on dark patterns treats false claims of scarcity or urgency as deceptive.
Flags for this chapter.
- When the lock was changed. Hadley thinks "Saturday night after the poker game"; the narration says "A little after noon that Sunday." Not an error but a deliberate gap between a character's belief and the fact.
- Sitting or standing. Hadley sees Fergesson "Sitting in the upstairs office" who "Presently... got to his feet"; Fergesson's half has him rise "For a moment" while Hadley is still trying the lock. A small mismatch between the two accounts.
- "The night wind." The closing paragraph hears sounds "carried by the night wind," though the scene takes place on a Sunday afternoon in late August. Left as written.
- Twenty-five, born 1927. Agrees with itself for the summer of 1952, but not with Chapter 15, where "I was only ten years old" in 1936 implies 1926.
- "Thick shatterproof glass." The glass shatters. Irony, not error.
- Ninety-five cents or seventy-five. Carried over from Chapter 19; the coin count in the mirror scene depends on which figure is used (see the money box above).
- "Hadley fooled and plucked at the controls." As printed; "fooled" here means "fooled about," fiddled. Not corrected.
- The quarrelling couple. The pair on the second lot have no names and no direct speech; they go "off down the street to argue." Whether they are the "couple coming back for it" the salesman claims cannot be told, and the claim itself cannot be checked.
- "For years" and "four or five years." The narration says "Hadley had worked for him for years"; a few paragraphs later Fergesson counts "four or five years." Consistent, but vaguer than the store's own books would be.
- Prejudice in Fergesson's thoughts. "That Russian Jew," "another Jew." Quoted once, in the section above, and discussed in the A CLOSER LOOK. Hopkins, listed with them, was not Jewish.
- Text. Source dashes are rendered as "..." in quotations.
Outside facts checked for this chapter.
- Bank of America. Founded by A. P. Giannini in San Francisco in 1904 as the Bank of Italy, renamed Bank of America in 1930, and by 1945 the largest commercial bank in the world, with about 500 branches in California (Office of the Comptroller of the Currency history).
- The Hudson step-down. Hudson's "step-down" design, in which the floor sat below the frame rails, ran from the 1948 to the 1954 models. The Hornet was introduced for 1951, and Hudson offered GM's Hydra-Matic automatic transmission from 1951 (Hemmings; Ate Up With Motor).
- Regulation W. Reinstated by the Federal Reserve on 18 September 1950 with a one-third down payment and a 21-month maximum for cars; Amendment No. 1 (effective 16 October 1950) cut the car maximum to 15 months; Amendment No. 4 (effective 31 July 1951), following the Defense Production Act Amendments of 1951, allowed at least 18 months; suspended 7 May 1952 (FRASER, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis).
- Truth in Lending. The Truth in Lending Act was signed on 29 May 1968; its finance-charge and APR disclosure rules (Regulation Z) took effect on 1 July 1969.
- Walco. A brand of replacement phonograph needles, sold to dealers on counter display cards and cases in the period.
- The first 911 call. Made on 16 February 1968 in Haleyville, Alabama (Smithsonian National Museum of American History).
- Sidney Hillman. Born 1887 in Žagarė (then in the Russian Empire, now Lithuania); founded the Amalgamated Clothing Workers in 1914; a founder of the CIO; the target of the Republican taunt "Clear it with Sidney" in 1944.
- Dick and the FBI. FBI agents George Scruggs and George Smith visited Dick and Kleo Apostolides Dick in Berkeley in the early 1950s; Dick later said they were asked to report on students and refused (Dick's own account; his later FOIA correspondence).
- Henry Morgenthau Jr. Roosevelt's Secretary of the Treasury, 1934 to 1945; Jewish.
- Harry Hopkins. Born in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1890; not Jewish; had most of his stomach removed after cancer in 1937 and was frail for the rest of his life; died in 1946.
- The New Deal. Roosevelt took office on 4 March 1933. A child born in 1927 was six.
- Leaver controls. NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5, control PS-4 (Personnel Termination).
- Dark patterns. Federal Trade Commission staff report, "Bringing Dark Patterns to Light," September 2022.
- Money. U.S. consumer prices rose about 11.8 times from 1952 to 2024; conversions are rough.
Takeaways from Chapter 20
- The maps. Hadley answers "Not even California" by stealing maps of "states he had never seen" from a car with Maryland plates. The first theft of the day is a theft of a dream.
- Clean for nothing. He spends almost his last coins on a razor, blades and soap, and makes himself presentable for a car lot.
- The pitch from the other side. A redheaded salesman runs Hadley's own routine on him, "straight out of the book," and Hadley sees every move and still wants the car "terribly."
- Easy terms. "Four hundred down. Around forty-five a month" is the kind of offer that came back after credit controls ended in May 1952, quoted without a price or an interest rate.
- The plan is theft. To make the down payment he means to open Modern's safe, whose combination he learned over Fergesson's shoulder years ago.
- The key will not turn. The new lock has "A rim of clean new wood." Hadley guesses wrong about when it was fitted, throws the key in the gutter, and is about to leave when he sees Fergesson upstairs.
- "Let me in!" The title cry is printed six times, twice in Hadley's half and four times in Fergesson's, where it moves from a muffled cry to a shout, a scream and a plea. It begins as the cry of a man who wants money and ends as the cry of a man who wants something no lock controls.
- The rewind. The chapter goes back to noon and shows Fergesson alone in a dead store, fitting the lock, clearing out Hadley's relics and throwing the celery extract away.
- "Had something." Fergesson thinks what he never said to Hadley: that he had promise, and that a lifetime would have been needed to bring him up right.
- Fergesson's politics. A bitter daydream about Roosevelt, Hillman, Morgenthau and Hopkins, in which prejudice and grief for a son he never had are tangled together.
- The snow globe. With a man screaming at his door, Fergesson looks into a sealed glass world, and decides that "There was no point in saying no."
- The brick and the head. The police are called by a city hall switchboard; Hadley breaks the glass, then breaks himself on it, and gets in head first.
- "Most of him, anyhow." No charges. Twenty years insured. A "night wind" in the afternoon.
- "It's my fault." Part Three ends with Fergesson taking the blame and the duty: he will call Ellen himself.
Mister and Mrs. Mole
When and where. The chapter covers about five or six weeks, from the day Hadley leaves hospital to a weekday afternoon some time in the following month. The first scene is fixed by two facts: "Five weeks in the prison ward of the county hospital" and "The heavy late-September sun." Chapter 20 took place on a Sunday late in August 1952, without a date. If that Sunday was 24 August, five weeks later is 28 September, which fits; if it was 31 August, the last Sunday of the month, five weeks later is 5 October (see Flags). The move is "the day after tomorrow"; in between, the Hadleys sleep at Ellen's parents' house. Then comes "the next month" of rest and work, with "Warm autumn sunlight," "the smell of autumn grass drying," and heating that "could wait; it was still some time before winter." That places the visit from Olsen and Tampini in about late October or November 1952. Places: the streets of the poor part of Cedar Groves, "over the railroad tracks, past factories and dingy stores"; the outside of the old mansion, its gate, porch and side path; the basement flat (living room, kitchen, dinette, two bedrooms, bathroom, shower stall, laundry, a room of wet earth, a closet, a pantry); the doorstep and the garden of geraniums and candy tuft; the "dilapidated garage"; and offstage, the paint stores, a wholesale house and Ellen's downtown business office.
Who is here.
- Stuart Hadley: about twenty-five, out of hospital after five weeks; his left eye gone ("the empty socket where his left eye had been"), his jaw "bandaged, misshapen," his rib not yet mended, "Frail and uncertain" on his feet. By the end of the chapter he is sunburned, in torn trousers and tennis shoes, mending a stove.
- Ellen Hadley: his wife, who has found and rented the flat, sold off what she could, kept what she could not bear to part with, and gone back to work as "a typist and stenographer." On the first day she wears "an old pair of faded jeans, a paint-splashed canvas shirt" and a bandanna.
- Pete Hadley: about three months old now, who "pinched his hand" on a cupboard hinge and wails until "his face swelled and blackened."
- Dave Gold: driving his Hillman Minx (apparently new) "cautiously, conscious of his responsibility." In Chapter 17 Hadley called him an antisemitic name and fought him in the street.
- Laura Gold: Dave's wife, solicitous with Hadley ("Does your rib hurt?") and mocking with Dave ("The schlump!").
- Olsen: Modern's repairman, foul-mouthed, nervous, "hunched over, head turned like an enormous crab," who calls Hadley "Stumblebum."
- Joe Tampini: the young salesman, now "on the floor" and newly married, in an Arrow shirt.
- Present only in talk: Mrs. Nevin, the landlady on the top floor; the "trashy young people from Los Angeles" on the second floor, an ad writer and a woman who "has men friends over when he's away"; the quiet people on the ground floor; Jim Fergesson, who "almost crapped in his pants" and is "sort of quiet" now; Jack White, fired; "some half-assed goon from Meyberg's," hired; Virginia, Tampini's wife; and Olsen's "buddy" who "lost an eye in the war and got a glass one."
- Seen only from the doorstep: a cat among the parked cars and some children pushing a bike, who fall silent at his face.
Content note. This chapter is about a man living with serious facial injury: a lost eye, a damaged jaw, a face that silences children. Olsen's talk is full of profanity and crude remarks, quoted as printed where they matter. There are no slurs in the chapter. The man who drives Hadley home is the man Hadley abused with an antisemitic slur in Chapter 17; the slur is not repeated here. Dialogue dashes in the book appear as "..." in quotations.
Part Four: Night
The novel's four parts are named for the times of a single day: "Part One: Morning," "Part Two: Afternoon," "Part Three: Evening," and now "Part Four: Night." The day is a life. Morning was early June, Ellen heavily pregnant and Hadley restless at Modern; afternoon was July, the baby, the magazine and Marsha; evening was August, the promotion and the weekend in which everything fell apart. Night ought to be the end, and in a sense it is: Hadley's ambitions are dead before the first page of it.
A night in sunshine. The odd thing about "Night" is that it is the brightest part of the book. The first scene happens under "The heavy late-September sun." Hadley sits on the doorstep in "Warm autumn sunlight." In Chapter 22 the family drives through "hot sunlight" in "late July." There is hardly a scene in the dark except the late kitchen hour in Chapter 22, "almost midnight," when Ellen gives him Fergesson's message. So the title is not about the weather. It belongs to the scheme of the day, and to what has happened to the man: the fire has gone out, the work of the day is over, and what is left is quiet. Night is also the time of sleep, and the last part of the book keeps returning to Ellen's picture, in Chapter 1, of her husband asleep and "Perfectly content." The reader can take "Night" as a death or as a rest. The novel does not decide for us, and Ellen, at the end of Chapter 22, cannot decide either.
The Golds' English car
"In the front seat of the Hillman Minx, Dave Gold sat gripping the wheel and solemnly scrutinizing the street ahead. He drove cautiously, conscious of his responsibility. He avoided holes and ruts; the diminutive English car glided through traffic, over the railroad tracks, past factories and dingy stores, past towering wooden houses drab with age and decay."
The careful driver. The chapter starts with a man doing something properly. Dave Gold "sat gripping the wheel," "solemnly scrutinizing," driving "cautiously, conscious of his responsibility." He has a damaged passenger, and he avoids "holes and ruts." The route tells us where the Hadleys now live before we see the house: "over the railroad tracks, past factories and dingy stores, past towering wooden houses drab with age and decay." In American towns of the period, the far side of the railroad tracks was the poor side, and the phrase the wrong side of the tracks was already old. Dick does not use the phrase, but he puts the tracks in the first sentence. The Hadleys used to live in a modern flat full of new appliances. Now they are across the line.
The Hillman Minx. The "diminutive English car" is a real one. The Minx was the small family car of the British Rootes Group, made under that name from the early 1930s to 1970. A new car in 1952 would have been a Mark V, introduced in 1951; the Mark V convertible was listed in the United States at about $1,890, or roughly $22,000 in 2024 money (a rough conversion). Austin and Hillman were the first ordinary British family cars to sell in real numbers in America after the war, to buyers who wanted something cheaper and more economical than a Detroit sedan, and reviewers were lukewarm. A small foreign car was an unusual choice in 1952 California, and a choice that said something. In Part One and Part Two the Golds drove an old Cadillac, "a rusting heap of iron," a rich man's car bought used and run into the ground. Now Dave Gold, the left-wing journalist of the novel, has bought a car of his own choosing, apparently new since it comes with "all the extras" and an instruction book, and it is a modest import rather than a big Detroit sedan. According to Laura he went "out of his mind" over the extras.
"'Does your rib hurt?' Laura asked anxiously, turning around in her seat to face Stuart Hadley."
"'It's fine,' Hadley answered."
"Does your rib hurt?" Laura asks the first question of Part Four, and it carries more than she says. The rib Hadley thought was broken ("A broken rib, probably") was hurt in Chapter 17, in the fight outside the Society hall with the man now driving the car. Neither Gold mentions the fight, the slur or the blood. Laura asks about the rib as if it were an accident. Hadley's two words, "It's fine," are the first of many short, flat answers he gives in this part of the book. He used to talk a great deal. Now he answers the question and stops.
"Beside him, Ellen squeezed his hand. 'We're almost there. I hope you're not too disappointed... it isn't anything like the place we had. It's a little...' She gestured nervously. 'I mean, it's all run-down, darling. But it can be fixed up; it could be really lovely.'"
Now she is afraid he will not like it. She holds his hand, and her speech breaks twice, first on "disappointed..." and then on "It's a little...," and she gestures "nervously" where the word should be. "It isn't anything like the place we had" is the closest the chapter comes to describing the old flat, the one with the new refrigerator and the television, which the reader saw in Part One. "But it can be fixed up; it could be really lovely" is the chapter's programme in one sentence. Everything that follows is fixing up.
"Laura Gold still peered intently at Stuart Hadley. 'How does your jaw feel?' she demanded."
"'Fine,' he answered, grinning slightly. 'It'll be all right.'"
The jaw. Laura "still peered intently" and asks about the jaw. Chapter 20 ended with part of it cut away by the glass; the hospital has rebuilt it, and here it is "bandaged, misshapen." Hadley answers "grinning slightly," and the grin matters. In the last pages of the novel he grins again, at the words "natural law." The man whose face was his living now grins with a broken jaw at a woman asking about it.
"Satisfied, Laura sank back into her seat and turned her attention on the street. 'It's hot,' she said. 'Dave, turn on the cooling system. I'm baking.'"
"'I don't know how to work it,' Dave answered. 'Look in the dashboard compartment; that book is there somewhere.'"
"'What'd you buy it for if you can't work it?' Laura demanded. Sniggering, she turned to face Stuart and Ellen. 'He got all the extras. He went out of his mind. The schlump!'"
The schlump and the extras. The little comedy in the front seat is a relief after the glass and the blood, and Dick plays it for laughs. Laura is "baking" and wants the "cooling system" on; Dave, who bought it, does not know how to work it and sends her to "that book" in the dashboard compartment. "Schlump" is Yiddish-derived American slang for a dull, slovenly or hapless person, and Laura uses it with affection. "He got all the extras. He went out of his mind" makes the earnest Dave a consumer like everyone else: the man who argued politics in the Hadleys' living room in Part One has fallen for the dealer's options sheet. The novel has spent twenty chapters on salesmen pushing extras on customers. It ends Part Three with Hadley on a used-car lot hearing his own pitch used on him. Part Four begins with a satisfied customer who cannot work what he bought.
What "cooling system"? It is not clear what Dick had in mind. Factory air conditioning in cars was almost unknown in 1952. Packard offered an optional system for the 1940 model year and dropped it after 1941; Chrysler's Airtemp came back as an option on the 1953 Imperial. A British economy car of 1952 would not have had refrigerated air. It might have had a fresh-air ventilator or a heater-blower unit, and a dealer could sell aftermarket coolers. The guide leaves the phrase as Dick wrote it: what matters is that Dave bought it and cannot use it.
"'I have to have a car,' Dave said doggedly. 'I have to drive around.'"
"'He won't let me drive it,' Laura said. 'It's too good for me to drive. It's his car, not mine.' She winked coarsely at Ellen. 'The lion asserts himself.' She winked at Hadley. 'Some lion.'"
"Some lion." "I have to have a car... I have to drive around" is Dave's whole defence, said "doggedly." Laura's mockery has an edge: "It's too good for me to drive. It's his car, not mine." Then the line about the lion, with two coarse winks, one to each Hadley. "The lion asserts himself" is a joke about a small, gentle man who has found one thing he will not share. "Some lion." It is also a joke the reader may not find quite funny. The last time we saw Dave Gold assert himself, he "charged bull-like" at Hadley in the street and put him on the ground. Laura's winks treat that as forgotten, and Hadley lets it be.
His blind side
"He didn't see the house at first. It was on the left side of the street, his blind side. Ellen watched anxiously, holding on tight to Pete, as Hadley climbed painfully from the car and onto the sidewalk. The heavy late-September sun glared down on him and he stood blinking and adjusting. Then he reached out to take Pete, and Ellen followed after him."
"His blind side." This is the first time the novel shows the lost eye at work. Hadley does not see the house "at first" because it is "on the left side of the street." The left eye was the one that hung on his cheek at the end of Chapter 20. Half of the world is now dark to him, and the chapter keeps the reader aware of it: he "stood blinking and adjusting" in the sun; later "The vacant darkness of one side of his brain... that was the worst of all." Ellen "watched anxiously, holding on tight to Pete," as he climbs out "painfully." Then the small, exact gesture: "he reached out to take Pete." The first thing the broken man does on arrival is take his son. Five weeks earlier he left that son locked in a parked car downtown overnight. Nothing is said about that either.
"'What do you think of it?' she asked quickly, eyes bright and searching."
"While Hadley was studying the ramshackle building, the Hillman Minx coughed into activity and hurried off past him. Dave and Laura waved frantic good-byes; the little car rapidly disappeared into traffic and was gone. Stuart and Ellen stood by themselves on the sidewalk."
"'Why did they go?' Hadley asked, with mild curiosity."
"'They'll be back later on.' Ellen took his arm lightly. 'Want to go in? Ready?'"
"'Sure,' Hadley said. He forgot the Golds and started stiffly toward the house."
The Golds drive off. Ellen asks "quickly" what he thinks, "eyes bright and searching," before he has had time to look. The Minx "coughed into activity and hurried off," with "frantic good-byes," and the Golds are gone. Hadley's question, "Why did they go?," comes "with mild curiosity," and the adverb is the new Hadley. A few months ago he would have taken their going as a slight. "He forgot the Golds and started stiffly toward the house." Forgetting is going to be one of his skills in this part of the book. At the end of the chapter he forgets Fergesson and the store in the same way.
The mansion
A house that has come down in the world. The paragraph is a portrait of decline, and a portrait of the man arriving at it. The house "had once been a respectable, imposing mansion"; "when this portion of town was new the house had dominated the block." Its turrets date it to "the turn of the century," its "brightest period." Now its shingles cover it "like rough brown hair," "stained and broken." The simile makes the house an animal, or a man who has let himself go. The details that follow are all damage: "rusty iron fence," "vast dirty palm tree," "Tattered curtains," roofing "a dull, corroded red," "cracked gray concrete," "wilted geraniums," "chipped, sagging boards," "a heap of moldy newspapers." It is a house like Hadley: it was once handsome, it has been battered, and it is still standing. The word "corroded" will come back in the last sentence of the chapter, for the stove.
Two trees. The palm "squatted in one corner, by what had once been a garage." It is an ornamental tree, planted when ornament was the point, and Dick does not like it: it is "vast" and "dirty," it cuts off "noises from the street," and Hadley wonders by the end of the chapter "if there was any way one man could saw down a full-grown palm tree." In Chapter 22 the Hadleys buy a lot in the country with "nothing but weeds and one old oak tree." The novel moves its family from a planted, showy tree that blocks out the world to a native tree standing in an empty field. The fields around Woodvalley are full of oaks; cows lie "dozing under clusters of ancient oak trees."
"'A coat of paint,' Ellen said hopefully, 'would certainly fix it up.' She guided her husband up the three cement steps to the heavy gate and stood waiting while he dutifully fumbled with the catch. 'I guess it's sort of old.'"
"'Which is our part?' He held the gate aside for her and closed it after. Frail and uncertain, he started toward the porch; Ellen stopped him and led him gently around the side of the house."
"A coat of paint." Ellen's hope is the hope of every small renovation, and it is wrong. A coat of paint will not fix shingles like rough brown hair. Hadley, in the next month, does not start with paint either: "Before he painted the apartment, he scoured the walls with a steel brush." The real work is underneath. The physical description of Hadley is careful. He "dutifully fumbled with the catch." He is "Frail and uncertain." He heads for the front porch out of habit, the front door of a respectable house, and Ellen "stopped him and led him gently around the side of the house." The front door is not theirs any more.
The house as a ladder. Ellen's long breathless sentence, all gossip from the landlady, sets out the building floor by floor, and the floors are a social order.
- Top floor: the owner. Mrs. Nevin "has her floor stuffed full of furniture," the possessions of an old woman who owns the house and keeps everything.
- Second floor: the city people. "Trashy young people from Los Angeles"; "he's an ad writer and the woman has men friends over when he's away." The advertising man is a cousin of the salesman Hadley used to be, and the woman's affairs echo his own summer with Marsha. Mrs. Nevin disapproves, and Ellen repeats it without comment.
- Ground floor: the quiet people. Very quiet, "although once in a long while they have a party," and once Mrs. Nevin "had to go down and ask them please to pipe down." The sentence runs on and on, which is how Ellen talks when she is nervous.
- The basement: the Hadleys. Under everyone, with their own low door at the side.
The house has its own order of rank, and the Hadleys are at the bottom of it.
"'And us?' Hadley asked."
"'We're on the bottom. In the basement.' Ellen stooped and turned the handle of a low door. 'It's locked.' She got out her key and unlocked it. 'Anyhow, this is us. We go in here, like Mister and Mrs. Mole. Do you mind?'"
Underground
"He didn't mind." The answer is given in narration, without a word from Hadley, and it is the truth. The paragraph is all pipes and darkness: "a dark, moist interior," "huge tunnels of metal covered with spiderwebs and soot," water and gas pipes on the wall, a room "long, gloomy, low-ceilinged, silent." Ellen pulls back a curtain "and sunlight streamed in," the first of the chapter's many moves from dark to light. "There was no furniture." The palm grows beyond the one wall with windows. Hadley hands Pete back to his wife and goes on alone to look.
"Beyond the long, low living room was a tiny cramped kitchen. A massive icebox was jammed into one corner; a sink and corrupted black gas stove filled the balance of the room. 'No cupboards?' Hadley asked, amused."
"'They're in the next room,' Ellen said, coming after him."
Icebox and stove. The kitchen has two appliances, and both will matter. "A massive icebox" is the kind that keeps food cold with a block of ice delivered by the iceman. By 1952 most American homes had mechanical refrigerators, and the Hadleys had one, bought on credit; now they are back with the older technology. The "corrupted black gas stove" is the stove Hadley will be mending at the end of the chapter, "the corroded stove." "Corrupted" is a strange word for a stove. Dick uses it as a near-synonym for rotted or decayed, and it brings with it a moral sense. The young man who sold new appliances has come down to an icebox and a rotten stove. Hadley is "amused" by the lack of cupboards. A man who is amused by a bad kitchen is not the man who could not bear an unpaid bill.
"They were totally isolated." The flat is "a series of tiny cells, a labyrinth of passages," and the word "cells" is not innocent for a man just out of a prison ward. The last room is "still unclaimed from the original cellar; its floor was heaped, wet dirt": the burrow has not been finished. The walls are "stained and yellowed"; there is "the smell of dampness and mold"; a mouse "scampered" in the walls. Then the silence: "beyond that there was no sound." The palm cuts off the street; "The ceiling above them was thick, impenetrable." The paragraph ends on a short, plain sentence, "They were totally isolated." For the old Hadley, who needed crowds, a store, a meeting hall and a lover, isolation would have been a sentence of its own. For this Hadley it is shelter. It is also the setting for the kind of marriage the novel has been moving toward since Chapter 1: the two of them and the baby, alone together, out of the world's way.
"'I guess,' Ellen said wistfully, 'it's a sort of dungeon.'"
"'It's fine,' Hadley said. 'And let's not talk about dungeons.'"
"Ellen flushed guiltily. 'I'm sorry. I mean, you don't think of it that way, do you? This isn't really so barren; we can fix it all up.'"
"And let's not talk about dungeons." Ellen says it "wistfully," and then hears what she has said. Hadley has just spent five weeks under guard in a hospital ward and faced a judge; his answer, "It's fine," is followed by the nearest thing to a rebuke he gives her in the whole of Part Four. She "flushed guiltily" and backs away from the word: "you don't think of it that way, do you? This isn't really so barren; we can fix it all up." The exchange is brief and gentle, and it is the first sign that the two of them will have to learn new tact. There are words that are now dangerous: dungeons, prisons, faces, the store.
The mirror in the shoebox
"'I think we can,' Hadley said. He roamed about, his hands in his pockets, examining each room. In a closet he came abruptly upon himself; from the fragments of a broken mirror stacked in a shoebox his reflection gleamed up, shattered and twisted. It was a shock; he closed the door and stalked out of the room, into the pantry."
"He came abruptly upon himself." This is the shock of the chapter, and Dick writes it in a single sentence. Hadley "roamed about, his hands in his pockets," and in a closet, in "the fragments of a broken mirror stacked in a shoebox," his reflection "gleamed up, shattered and twisted." The broken glass is the glass he broke. He went through Modern's door "head first" and now finds his face in pieces of a mirror, as if the glass had kept a picture of what it did. Mirrors have run through the novel: in Chapter 20 he wiped the steam off the hotel mirror after shaving, looked at his cut face and decided he would pass. There is no deciding here. "It was a shock; he closed the door and stalked out of the room." The verb "stalked" has some anger in it, the last flash of the old Hadley. Then the anger goes out of him.
"'I know one thing,' he said wryly to Ellen. 'I'm not going to be the nice-looking young man behind the counter again.
The nice-looking young man. The next line is said "wryly," and it is the chapter's verdict on Parts One to Three: "I'm not going to be the nice-looking young man behind the counter again. In Chapter 2 the old woman with the radio told him it was "pretty and blond, but it's a bad face," and asked for "The man who waits on me," who was "darker and shorter." Alice Fergesson told her husband "He's a good-looking young man... You ought to go along with him." His sister Sally called him "a nice-looking boy." The face was his stock in trade at the counter of Modern TV, and now it is gone. The phrase "behind the counter" names the job as well as the face: he is not going back to selling. Chapter 22 will make the second meaning explicit.
"'Is it?' Ellen said, not understanding. 'That's good; I'm glad.'"
"Hadley indicated the empty socket where his left eye had been. 'I mean this.' He touched his bandaged, misshapen jaw. 'And the rest.'"
"Not understanding." Ellen hears the sentence as a change of heart, the end of selling, and says "That's good; I'm glad." Hadley has to point. "Hadley indicated the empty socket where his left eye had been." It is the first time the novel names the injury plainly in Part Four: an empty socket, no glass eye yet, and a "bandaged, misshapen jaw." "And the rest" leaves the other injuries unlisted: the ribs, the cuts down his back, the scars. The misunderstanding is kind on both sides. Ellen thought he meant the job; he meant his face. Both meanings are true.
"Let's get busy"
"Ellen busied herself at the sink. 'This all has to be fixed up; my God, it's filthy.' She tore down some newspapers tacked to the wall. 'All this will have to be scoured; the whole place.'"
"'Let's get busy,' Hadley said."
"'No!' Ellen turned quickly, her face anxious, pleading. 'You can't do anything; you're supposed to rest for another two months, at least. Your rib...' She put her hands on his shoulders and gazed up earnestly into his face. 'Please.'"
Who does the work. Ellen turns away from his face to the sink, the natural move of someone who does not know what to say, and talks about dirt instead: "my God, it's filthy," "All this will have to be scoured; the whole place." She "tore down some newspapers tacked to the wall," the previous tenants' makeshift wallpaper. Hadley's "Let's get busy" is the first sign of the man he is becoming: a man who answers trouble with work. Ellen's "No!" is quick, "anxious, pleading," and medically sensible. He is "supposed to rest for another two months, at least." Her speech breaks on "Your rib..." and she puts her hands on his shoulders and says "Please." In the first chapters of the book it was Ellen who waited and Hadley who drifted. Here she gives the orders, and for a month he obeys them.
"Hadley walked over to the door and bent down to fix it open. He kicked a square of broken cement against it and stood for a time in the open doorway, his back to his wife. Pete, sitting in the corner of the room, began to wail; his face swelled and blackened and he waved his arms furiously."
The doorway and the baby's face. Hadley does not argue. He "walked over to the door and bent down to fix it open" with "a square of broken cement," and then stands "in the open doorway, his back to his wife." It is a silent answer. He is letting light and air into the burrow, and he is turning away from her for a moment because her pleading is hard to hear. Five weeks earlier he was locked out of Modern and went through its glass; here he props a door open with a piece of broken cement. Then Pete cries, and the description of his crying is startling: "his face swelled and blackened and he waved his arms furiously." The baby's face swells and darkens like a bruise. Pete's red rage is an image of his father's damaged face, and of his father's old rage, on a baby's scale.
"'What's the matter?' Hadley asked, turning toward him."
A pinch and a hinge. "What's the matter?" is the father's first question in the new home, asked as he turns toward his son. The answer is small and domestic: "He pinched his hand," on "A cupboard hinge, I suppose." When they first came down the steps Hadley asked, amused, "No cupboards?"; here is the hardware of one, lying loose on the floor for a baby to find. Ellen is ready for work: "an old pair of faded jeans, a paint-splashed canvas shirt." In 1952 jeans on a woman were still work clothes rather than fashion, and Ellen's outfit says she has come to scrub, not to visit. She "kicked off her shoes" and gathers "the items that had been brought over earlier in the week," which tells us the move has been under way for days.
"'Here we go,' she announced. She carried the zinc bucket to the kitchen and sprinkled soap dust into it; as hot water roared after the soap, she tore cotton rags from a discarded sheet and began tying her hair up with a bandanna. 'You sit down,' she instructed Hadley, 'or go outside. I'm going to do the walls first.'"
"She lathered the heavy scrub brush and searched for something to stand on. 'I can't quite reach the ceiling,' she said plaintively. 'Can...you think of anything?'"
The zinc bucket. Dick lists Ellen's tools like a craftsman's: the "zinc bucket," "soap dust," hot water that "roared," "cotton rags from a discarded sheet," a "bandanna," "the heavy scrub brush." She does "the walls first." Her order, "You sit down... or go outside," is affectionate and firm. Then the request: she cannot reach the ceiling, and asks "plaintively" whether he can "think of anything." It is a small thing, but she has handed him the first job of the new life, and it is a practical problem about reaching.
"From the dilapidated garage Hadley found her a wooden crate to stand on. Ellen climbed gratefully onto it and began scouring the ceiling; dirty water dribbled down her bare arms into her rolled-up sleeves and dripped into her face. She grinned happily down at him, eyes wide and hopeful."
"'Am I doing any good?' she asked."
"'You're doing fine,' Hadley told her. 'But I think it's about time to knock off and have a beer.'"
"Am I doing any good?" Hadley finds "a wooden crate" in the garage, and Ellen climbs on it. The image is unglamorous and happy: "dirty water dribbled down her bare arms into her rolled-up sleeves and dripped into her face." She "grinned happily down at him, eyes wide and hopeful." Her question has two senses, as so much of her talk in this chapter does. She means the ceiling, and she means the marriage, the move, her whole effort to rescue what is left. His answer, "You're doing fine," is the right one for both. Then the joke, "about time to knock off and have a beer," which turns a scene of hardship into an ordinary day of moving house.
"'We're going to have to get ice,' Ellen reminded him. 'For the icebox... And I think it should be cleaned out first.' She wrinkled her nose. 'It doesn't smell so good.'"
Ice. They need ice for the icebox, and the icebox "doesn't smell so good." It is a small line with a long tail. In Chapter 22 Hadley will work at an ice rink, "tending and operating the freezing equipment," then buy and dismantle an old refrigerator, and on the last day of the novel, standing in a country town, ask "Did you see any sign of an ice plant?" The man who sold refrigerators on credit starts his new life needing ice delivered, and ends it wondering whether a town could use someone to make it.
On the doorstep
"Cautiously, Hadley seated himself on the doorstep, his knees apart, hands clasped together. Warm autumn sunlight beat down on his face; he squinted and turned his head away. A faint breeze stirred the palm tree, a metallic rustle, heavy and ponderous, like a very old bird shifting fitfully in its sleep."
Sitting in the sun. The doorstep scene is the centre of the chapter. Hadley sits "Cautiously," "his knees apart, hands clasped together," a posture of rest and of patience. The sun "beat down on his face; he squinted and turned his head away." The palm makes "a metallic rustle, heavy and ponderous, like a very old bird shifting fitfully in its sleep." The old bird is the house's tree, and it is also the old, sleepy part of the world Hadley has come to live in. Dick's similes in this chapter keep giving dead things life: shingles like hair, a tree like a bird, Olsen like a crab.
Pain in the background. The sun works on the body first: "his body relaxed, and some of the dull ache drained out of his joints." Dick is exact about chronic pain. "Every part of him hurt to some degree"; it has "become a background, a distant presence that had gradually waned below the level of consciousness." Then the worst thing, which is not pain at all: "The vacant darkness of one side of his brain." He experiences the lost eye as a dark half of his mind, which is close to how a person newly blind in one eye can feel it, since the brain loses half its view. "Artfully, he focused on a cat" is a small exercise, practising with the eye he has. He reassures himself in three short sentences: he can see "well enough," he can "make his way around," "his rib would eventually heal." The sentences are the speech of a patient who has been told what to expect and is repeating it.
The eye that does not grow back. This is one of the strangest and most tender paragraphs in the novel. Hadley lets himself imagine that "If he sat long enough in the sun perhaps even his eye would return, grow back in place, very tiny at first, then larger and larger until it was full sized." It is a child's idea, the logic of a plant that grows in the sun, and he knows it. "The more he thought about it the more he doubted"; "regretfully, he allowed it to leave." The paragraph shows a man giving up a fantasy calmly. The old Hadley lived on fantasies: the Watchmen, Marsha's magazine, Beckheim as a father, the store as his kingdom, a used Hudson of which he thought "The world lay open." Here he lets one go, and the letting go is the change in him. Then the conclusion, stated flatly: "What had happened to him had left a permanent mark; whether for better or worse, he was not the same Stuart Hadley." The phrase "for better or worse" is the language of the wedding service, and it fits. He is about to begin a second marriage to the same woman.
"Not Stuart Hadley at all." The next paragraph pushes further. "In fact, in many ways, he was not Stuart Hadley at all." Through the whole novel Hadley has asked who he was. He looked for himself in Beckheim, in Marsha, in his sister, in the managership. "Once, he had wondered who or what Stuart Hadley was. Now it did not matter." The name has become "an echo," something printed "across the papers in his wallet," "something to answer to; he could tolerate it to that extent." Readers can take this two ways, and the novel keeps both open. It can be a release from a self that brought him nothing but pain: the end of the questioning, the beginning of peace. Or it can be a loss: the self that wanted and strove has been broken off, and what remains answers to the name the way a tenant answers to a room number. Ellen, at the end of Chapter 22, will take the second view. Hadley, in the sun, takes the first.
A CLOSER LOOK: cure or damage? Readers of the novel divide over this paragraph and its sequel in Chapter 22. On one reading, Dick has written a conversion story without religion: the restless, divided, self-hating young man of Part One is broken and remade, and what emerges is calm, practical and kind. On another, Dick has written something darker: a portrait of a man whose head injury and humiliation have taken away the part of him that hoped, so that his "peace" is a kind of numbness. The text supports both. On the side of cure are the work he does well, the patience, the absence of drink, the care of Pete, the end of the violence. On the side of damage are the injuries themselves ("The vacant darkness of one side of his brain"), the flatness of his answers, the line "He could stand anything now," and the fact that the only person who sees him close up, his wife, thinks something has died. The guide's view is that Dick meant the double reading and built it into the structure: Part Four shows the cure from inside Hadley and the damage from outside him.
"Sleepily, he got out his cigarettes and matches. He lit up and cautiously stretched out his legs. Some children passed beyond the iron fence, pushing a bike. They glanced at him; their voices ceased as they made out the destroyed portions of his face. He said nothing; and presently they went on, but not as loudly as before."
The children. This is the first time a stranger looks at the new face, and the narration lets us see it from outside. "Some children passed beyond the iron fence, pushing a bike." "Their voices ceased as they made out the destroyed portions of his face." "Destroyed" is the strongest word Dick has used for the injury, and he gives it to what the children see. Hadley "said nothing"; the children go on, "but not as loudly as before." There is no cruelty in the moment, only the ordinary hush of children who see something frightening. The iron fence stands between them, and it is the kind of fence that surrounds a house, a park or a prison yard.
"It was going to be that way. He was marked, and marked where it showed. No old lady would ever come again, carrying her radio, wanting to have it fixed. There would be no kidding with the dark-haired girl at Woolworth's soda fountain. But he felt no resentment at the realization; the warm sun made him relaxed and at peace."
"Marked where it showed." The paragraph names what the face has cost him, in two pictures from his old life. "No old lady would ever come again, carrying her radio, wanting to have it fixed." In Chapter 2 an old woman brought her radio into Modern and told Hadley "you don't belong here," that his face was "a bad face," and that the man who waited on her was "darker and shorter" and had "a good face." The novel's opening insult now comes true in a new way. "There would be no kidding with the dark-haired girl at Woolworth's soda fountain." Woolworth's was the best-known chain of dime stores, and many branches had lunch counters; in Chapter 7 Hadley told his sister that her first thought would be that he was "playing around with some waitress over at the dime store," and in Chapter 13 he described the girls from the business college across the street from Modern, "the ones you see in Woolworth at lunchtime." The dark-haired girl appears for the first time here, in the moment of losing her: the small flirtations that a good-looking young salesman takes for granted. Then the turn: "But he felt no resentment at the realization." The sun has made him "relaxed and at peace." The word "resentment" points back to the whole novel. Resentment was Hadley's fuel; in Chapter 22 the narration will say he was "without rancor." The two words bracket the end of the book.
What was kept
"'Can I have a cigarette?' Ellen gasped, stepping off the box and pushing her hair back out of her eyes. She came over to him and crouched down; dirty water clung to her face and arms. As he handed her his cigarette she leaned forward and kissed him on the back of the neck."
"'I'll be able to help you soon,' he said. 'By the time we move in.'"
"'We'll be moving in the day after tomorrow,' Ellen contradicted practically. 'I'm just getting it clean enough to live in; you can fix it all up later on.'"
A kiss on the back of the neck. Ellen comes down from her box, "gasped," "dirty water clung to her face and arms," and asks for a cigarette. He hands her his own. She kisses him "on the back of the neck," the one place on him that is not hurt or marked. It is the first kiss of Part Four, given from behind, where she does not have to look at his face. The novel has many kisses in it, and the placing of this one is tactful. Hadley's promise, "I'll be able to help you soon... By the time we move in," is contradicted at once: they are moving in "the day after tomorrow." Ellen is "practically" in charge of the calendar. "You can fix it all up later on" hands him the future work. She has set the terms of the next month in one sentence: she cleans now, he builds later.
"'How much stuff do you want brought over from your family's place?'"
"'Just our beds. And our clothes. Dishes... personal things.' She straightened up. 'You don't mind staying there a couple of days, do you?'"
"'No,' he answered. He could stand anything now."
"'We could stay with the Golds.'"
"He could stand anything now." The practical talk of a household moving: beds, clothes, "Dishes... personal things," brought from "your family's place," where they will stay until moving day. Ellen's parents are a presence through the novel without ever appearing on stage. In Chapter 22 Alice Fergesson finds out where Ellen works "from my mother." The narrator's sentence after Hadley's "No" is the one that matters: "He could stand anything now." It can be read as strength. It can be read as a man who has been hurt so badly that nothing small can hurt him any more. Ellen's "We could stay with the Golds" offers the other refuge, the friends he fought. "It doesn't matter" is his answer to that too.
"'It doesn't matter. You kept the living-room furniture? That was paid for.'"
"'Yes,' Ellen said. 'The living-room furniture and the beds, and that big lamp, and the rugs, and the silver. All the small stuff; it's stored. Everything but the refrigerator and the stove and the television set. I let them take those back... It wasn't worth paying them off.'"
"'You mean we didn't have a choice.'"
What the credit took back. Hadley asks the question a man asks after losing his income: "You kept the living-room furniture? That was paid for." The distinction between what was paid for and what was not is the distinction the chapter turns on. Ellen's list of what was kept is a list of the household's real property: "the living-room furniture and the beds, and that big lamp, and the rugs, and the silver. All the small stuff; it's stored." Then the list of what went: "the refrigerator and the stove and the television set." These are the three big appliances of the postwar home, the things that Modern TV and stores like it sold on time payments, and, as the repossession shows, things the Hadleys had bought on credit. "I let them take those back... It wasn't worth paying them off." Ellen presents it as a decision. Hadley corrects her gently: "You mean we didn't have a choice." Without his wages the payments could not be met, and the dealers or finance companies took the goods back. The man who spent four years selling televisions on easy terms has had his own television repossessed.
Why "It wasn't worth paying them off." Ellen's phrase is accurate about the economics, not only a brave face. Consumer durables in the 1950s were usually sold on instalment contracts in which the seller or a finance company kept title, or a security interest, until the last payment. If the buyer stopped paying, the goods could be repossessed and resold. The arithmetic of a default is simple. A new refrigerator or television loses value fast in its first years, while the amount owed falls slowly at first because the early payments include most of the finance charge. Early in a contract the balance can be larger than the resale value of the goods. A buyer in that position who lets the goods go may walk away from a debt worth more than the thing itself (depending on the contract and state law, a seller could also pursue the buyer for any shortfall; the novel does not say whether that happened). The guide has not found a figure for 1952 repossession rates and does not offer one.
Three points carry over to a modern bank or consumer lender.
- Collateral value against balance. Loans on cars, appliances and devices are secured on assets that fall in value. A lender that tracks the gap between what is owed and what the asset would fetch (the loan-to-value ratio, and negative equity when the balance is higher) knows which accounts are likely to be handed back rather than paid, as Ellen did.
- Income shocks. The Hadleys did not default because they were careless with money in September. They defaulted because the earner was in hospital and then in a prison ward, and lost his job. Many consumer defaults look like this: illness, job loss, a family crisis. Good credit models separate a shock from a habit.
- How the customer is treated. In the United Kingdom the Financial Conduct Authority's consumer credit rules require firms to treat customers in default or arrears difficulties with forbearance and due consideration, which can mean payment holidays, reduced payments or a sale on agreed terms before repossession. A lender that had talked to Ellen might have saved the stove, the account and the customer. Nobody in the novel talks to her; the goods are simply taken.
"'Did... you want them?'"
"'No,' Hadley said. 'We can use the icebox.' Five weeks in the prison ward of the county hospital had taught him to go without a lot of things."
Hadley's "No" is complete, and his reason is the one sentence in the chapter that says where he has been: "Five weeks in the prison ward of the county hospital had taught him to go without a lot of things." The phrase "prison ward" tells the reader that he was held in custody while he was treated. Chapter 20 ended with Fergesson declining to press charges, but the novel does not say what else the police or the court held against him (the baby left alone overnight in a parked car is the obvious candidate) or why he was kept in custody. In Chapter 22 Hadley remembers "the interviews with the judge, the activity of the lawyers, the legal arrangements" only as a blur. Here, he has learned something practical from it: how to want less.
"Ellen moved back to her bucket and rags. 'We still have the electric toaster and the electric coffeemaker and the Waring blender. All the kitchen gadgets...' Her voice trailed off forlornly. 'I couldn't give them up...and anyhow, we could have got only a few dollars apiece.'"
"'Fine,' Hadley said genially."
"'I guess we could use the money, though.'"
"'We'll be all right,' Hadley said. He blew a cloud of smoke out into the yard, among the geraniums and candy tuft; he wondered idly if there was any way one man could saw down a full-grown palm tree."
The gadgets she kept. Ellen has kept "the electric toaster and the electric coffeemaker and the Waring blender. All the kitchen gadgets," and her voice "trailed off forlornly" as she confesses it. "I couldn't give them up...and anyhow, we could have got only a few dollars apiece." The Waring blender has a history in the novel. In Chapter 8, on the night of the worst quarrel of their marriage, Hadley's sister Sally offered Ellen the small blender she and Bob no longer needed, and Ellen wept with rage: "Her and her damn Waring blender. She's going to give us the old one, the little one." If this is the same blender, as it seems to be, the castoff Ellen despised in July has become in September one of the few things she cannot bear to part with. Hadley's "Fine," said "genially," lets her keep them. Ellen's "I guess we could use the money, though" is followed by his "We'll be all right." He looks out at "the geraniums and candy tuft" and wonders "idly if there was any way one man could saw down a full-grown palm tree." Candytuft is a low garden flower (the genus Iberis), white or pink; the geraniums were "wilted" when they arrived. His first idle thought in the new home is about doing a big physical job alone. It is the first stirring of the man who will lay floors and pipes and plan to build a house.
The next month
What he had was all he was ever going to have. The chapter now changes speed. The first half covered one afternoon in close detail; the second covers "the next month" in summary, the way a man remembers a long convalescence. The sentences are short and plain: "His body was mending slowly; gradually his strength came back. He had been very sick." Then the hard admission: "not all of it came back." Hadley waits for the rest of his strength and then stops waiting. "He knew there was no more on the way; what he had was all he was ever going to have, the rest of his life." It is the same lesson as the eye that would not grow back, learned again by the whole body. The old Hadley lived in the future tense, always about to become someone. This sentence closes the future and leaves him with the present.
"Before he painted the apartment, he scoured the walls with a steel brush. He chipped the old paint off the woodwork and made arrangements to restore the stain. The wood, under its cheap white enamel paint, was a lovely old walnut; slowly, reluctantly, the original grain and color emerged. He labored patiently at it... The job was a long one."
Walnut under white enamel. This is the chapter's central image, and Dick does not need to explain it. "Before he painted the apartment, he scoured the walls with a steel brush." He "chipped the old paint off the woodwork," and under "its cheap white enamel paint" the wood "was a lovely old walnut." The grain comes up "slowly, reluctantly," and "The job was a long one." White enamel over walnut is a cheap modern finish laid over good old material, the way the shining cabinets of Modern TV covered the same old tubes and wires, the way Hadley's good looks covered a frightened young man. The basement of the decayed mansion turns out to have been built of better stuff than anything in the Hadleys' old flat. Dick lets the reader draw the parallel with Hadley himself, and leaves open whether what is coming up through the scraped surface is the real man or only a wall.
The role reversal. In two sentences the household turns over. "Ellen hurried back and forth to her job"; she "was working as a typist and stenographer at a downtown business office." "Hadley took care of Pete and the apartment." In 1952 this was an unusual arrangement and one that many men of Hadley's age would have found shameful. The narration does not treat it as shame. It gives Hadley something he has never had: "For the first time in his life he had the long empty mornings in which to think and become familiar with himself." The sounds of those mornings are the sounds of a residential street on a weekday, when the men are at work: "distant radios booming out soap operas," "the squeak of brakes as milk and bread trucks raced along the streets." Daytime radio serials were still a large part of American broadcasting in 1952, and home delivery of milk and bread was normal. Hadley is hearing the world of housewives, from inside it. The phrase "become familiar with himself" answers the earlier "he had only a remote, detached relationship to Stuart Hadley." He is getting to know a stranger.
Saturday in the paint stores. Dick's list of paint is the language of a hardware counter: "high-gloss, enamel, flat-coat, oil- and water-based, the new rubber-based, brush and roller paints, spray guns, turpentine, sandpaper." "The new rubber-based" was accurate for its moment. Glidden's Spred Satin, launched in 1948, was the first widely sold house paint made with a synthetic rubber (styrene-butadiene) latex, and rubber-based wall paints that cleaned up with water were spreading fast in the early 1950s. The paint roller was also a recent arrival in ordinary homes. The paragraph has a second sense. Hadley spent four years as a salesman and knows how a shop wants you to buy. Now he is the customer, and "When he purchased he chose calmly, solemnly." What he carries home is "a cardboard box of simple colors, basic materials to build with." The man who sold "luxurious" cabinets on credit now buys plain things for cash, and the narration calls them "basic materials to build with," a phrase that will come back when he plans to build a house.
"The real substance beneath." This is the most openly symbolic paragraph in the chapter, and the one most often quoted. "Carefully, step by step, he built his way up." The work is "slow and painful"; he stands "all day on a stool, sanding and cleaning and caulking," and the key words follow: "scraping down to the real substance beneath, the genuine material that had been covered over, buried beneath stale, artificial layers." The sentence is about the walls, and it is obviously about Hadley too: the "stale, artificial layers" are the sales talk, the borrowed ideas, the posing, the drink. "Plain, unassuming tints began to emerge as he built up from the solid subsurfaces." The verbs go down and then up: scrape down, build up. "He worked over each square foot at a time, his attention completely on what his hands were doing, putting everything of himself into the work." For the first time in the novel Hadley's attention is completely on something outside himself. A reader who knows the craft tradition will hear in this the old idea that patient work with the hands is a kind of healing. A reader who agrees with Ellen's verdict in Chapter 22 might notice that "everything of himself" has gone into a wall.
New light, new wiring. He orders "plain overhead fluorescent tubing from a wholesale house." Fluorescent lamps for ordinary use were introduced by General Electric and Westinghouse in 1938 and spread through offices, factories and kitchens after the war; buying from a wholesale house is the habit of a man who knows the trade. He spends a whole day "assembling the units, wiring up the starters," and he rips out "the old decayed wiring," replacing it with "solid aluminum BX cable." BX is the old trade name for armoured cable, insulated wires carried inside a flexible spiral metal sheath. A man who repaired radios and televisions would know how to do this. The point is that the skills of the store are being turned to his own home. In a basement that was dark from the first page (furnace pipes "covered with spiderwebs and soot," "The vacant darkness"), he puts in bright, even, modern light. Then evening: "At night the apartment smelled of paint, and gas from the kitchen stove." "The smell of autumn grass drying in fields and gardens" comes through the open windows. Ellen sits "on the bed, mending moth holes in a spread," and Hadley repairs "the plunger mechanism of the toilet." It is the most domestic picture of the two of them in the novel, both of them mending.
"He wanted to put in better heating. But that could wait; it was still some time before winter. He proceeded cautiously, step by step; he learned all over again, from the ground up. He felt his way along as a weak man should, as a man recovering from a terrible illness had to. He understood how sick he had been; he took his time about coming back."
"As a weak man should." "He wanted to put in better heating. But that could wait." This is the first time the Hadley of this novel has wanted something and put it off without pain. The sentence also prepares Chapter 22, where Hadley works with Olsen laying "radiant heat" pipes in a new house. Then the paragraph names the method: "He proceeded cautiously, step by step; he learned all over again, from the ground up. He felt his way along as a weak man should, as a man recovering from a terrible illness had to." The phrase "as a weak man should" is unexpected. The Hadley of Part One wanted to be strong, a leader, a great man; Beckheim was his idea of a giant. Here the narration says calmly that he is a weak man and that there is a right way for a weak man to live: slowly, with care, without pretending. "He understood how sick he had been; he took his time about coming back." Whether "sick" means only the injuries is left open. The whole novel can be read as the story of a sickness that ended in the glass.
"In an old pair of torn, stained trousers, and tennis shoes, sweatshirt, his neck sunburned, arms perspiring, he squatted in the garden, pounding out frames for new concrete steps. It was something he knew nothing about; he failed, and for a while he put the job aside. He could not expect to do it all at once... He returned to the apartment and restudied the plumbing situation."
The steps that failed. Dick gives his recovering man a failure, and it is important that he does. In "torn, stained trousers, and tennis shoes, sweatshirt, his neck sunburned, arms perspiring," the former salesman in a cheap suit now looks like a labourer. He squats "in the garden, pounding out frames for new concrete steps," and "It was something he knew nothing about; he failed." Formwork for concrete is a skilled job; getting forms square and strong enough to hold wet concrete is harder than it looks. The old Hadley, failing, would have blamed someone, drunk, or fled. This one "put the job aside." "He could not expect to do it all at once..." He goes back inside and "restudied the plumbing situation." It is a small paragraph about how to fail without breaking.
Visitors from Modern
"One afternoon, while he was laboring over the flue of the stove, Olsen and Joe Tampini dropped by."
"'It's looking pretty good,' Tampini observed shyly, moving around the apartment. The sight of the store truck parked outside gave Hadley a strange feeling; he ignored it and poured beers for the two men."
The store truck. The visit is timed to a single detail: "One afternoon, while he was laboring over the flue of the stove." The stove, which on the first day was a "corrupted black gas stove," is still the problem he is working on. Olsen and Joe Tampini, Modern's serviceman and its newest salesman, have "dropped by" in the middle of a delivery round. Tampini, as shy as ever, says "It's looking pretty good." "The sight of the store truck parked outside gave Hadley a strange feeling." For four years that truck was part of his daily world; in Chapter 2 Tampini was "out in the truck for the final deliveries of the day." Hadley "ignored it," the first of several times in the scene when he declines to let the store back into his mind, and does the host's job: he "poured beers for the two men."
"'Shit-lousy neighborhood,' Olsen muttered, accepting his beer. 'Thanks.' He threw himself down self-consciously on the couch and crouched forward, bent over and nervous. 'Long time no see,' he said finally. 'How's it going?'"
"'Fine,' Hadley said."
"'You sure got banged up,' Olsen observed, studying him briefly. 'I was the one had to put up another door.'"
"Hadley nodded without answering."
"I was the one had to put up another door." Olsen, "the spiderlike repairman" of Chapter 1 and "the huge bent-over serviceman" who came up from the basement to help at the counter in Chapter 2, is as rough as ever: "Shit-lousy neighborhood." He sits "self-consciously on the couch" and "crouched forward, bent over and nervous," a big man ill at ease in a sick friend's home. "Long time no see" and "How's it going?" are the words of a man who does not know what to say. Hadley's "Fine" closes the subject. Then Olsen comes out with the only thing he has to say about the event: "You sure got banged up... I was the one had to put up another door." The sentence is comic, practical and kind all at once. It is the workman's view of the night Hadley went through the glass: a door to replace. It also tells the reader, for the first time, that what Hadley broke was a glass door. "Hadley nodded without answering." He does not apologise, explain or joke.
"'You gave old man Fergesson the scare of his life,' Olsen continued, rubbing beer foam from his hairy upper lip. 'He almost crapped in his pants... He's never been the same since. You really jolted him.'"
"Tampini agreed. 'He's sort of quiet. He doesn't yell at everybody all the time now.'"
Fergesson changed. "You gave old man Fergesson the scare of his life," Olsen says, wiping "beer foam from his hairy upper lip." His report is coarse ("He almost crapped in his pants") and then serious: "He's never been the same since. You really jolted him." Tampini confirms it in his mild way: "He's sort of quiet. He doesn't yell at everybody all the time now." The reader of Chapter 20 knows more than either man. Fergesson watched the whole thing from his office, refused to press charges, and said "It's my fault." The novel has given him a change too, though it shows it only from outside, through his employees. Chapter 22 will add his offer, and Hadley's refusal of it.
"'Glad to hear it,' Hadley said vaguely. He did not mind hearing about the store, but it was difficult for him to concentrate on it. 'How's business?'"
"'Shitty,' Olsen answered heartily. 'Fergesson fired Jack White; he's got somebody else in, some half-assed goon from Meyberg's.'"
"'I'm on the floor,' Tampini said. 'I sold a Zenith combination today; that's what we're out delivering.'"
The store goes on. Hadley's "Glad to hear it" is said "vaguely." "He did not mind hearing about the store, but it was difficult for him to concentrate on it." His "How's business?" is a courtesy. Olsen's answer is the old store news. "Shitty," he says "heartily," which is how a man of his kind says things are normal. "Fergesson fired Jack White; he's got somebody else in, some half-assed goon from Meyberg's." Jack White was the veteran salesman with the silk tie, the one who answered Marsha's calls in Chapter 9 and was at the Fergessons' Christmas dinner with his wife and children. The novel does not say why he was fired. Meyberg's is a real name: the Leo J. Meyberg Company was a San Francisco wholesaler of radio and electrical goods and, by the mid-1950s at least, an RCA distributor; Fergesson asked in Chapter 13 whether "That Leo J. Meyberg shipment" had come in. The new man is a distributor's salesman crossing to retail. In Chapter 20 Fergesson, planning a replacement, remembered "the name of a TV salesman the RCA people had sent around from time to time," a "Tall thin dull-faced man." If Meyberg's was handling RCA in 1952, the goon from Meyberg's may be that man, though Dick does not say so. And Tampini has moved up: "I'm on the floor," he says, and "I sold a Zenith combination today." The delivery boy has become a salesman, the job Hadley did. A Zenith "combination" was a console combining, typically, a radio and record player, often with television as well, one of the most expensive items a store like Modern sold.
"'Fine,' Hadley said, smiling. 'How's your girl?'"
"'We're married,' Tampini managed to answer, overcome with shyness. Under his Arrow shirt his chest swelled with pride. 'Say, drop over sometime and have dinner with us; Virginia's a swell cook.'"
"'I will,' Hadley promised."
Tampini married. "How's your girl?" is the right question; Hadley remembers that Tampini had one. "We're married," Tampini says, "overcome with shyness," and "Under his Arrow shirt his chest swelled with pride." Arrow was the best-known American brand of men's shirts and collars, the brand of the Arrow Collar Man advertisements; it is the shirt of a young man who has started to dress for the sales floor. In Chapter 13 Hadley, asked whether Tampini still went with the same girl, said "The same one... The cute redhead." Now she has a name, Virginia, and she is "a swell cook." The invitation to dinner is the first offer of ordinary friendship Hadley receives in his new life, and "I will" is meant. Tampini's marriage, with a pregnancy or without, is the beginning of the life Hadley and Ellen began five years before. The novel makes nothing of the parallel, but it is there.
"The two men lingered. 'Good to see you again, Stumblebum,' Olsen said abruptly. 'The joint isn't the same.' He didn't look directly at Hadley. 'Sorry you're gone, but I'm glad you told that fat-assed Fergesson off. Do it again for me sometime.'"
"Hadley said nothing."
"'I always thought you didn't belong in a crummy joint like Modern,' Olsen continued. 'If I had anything but crap in my pants I'd tell him to go shove it and get the hell out of there. But I guess I won't. I guess I'm too chicken-shit.'"
"Stumblebum." Olsen uses Fergesson's old nickname for Hadley, "Stumblebum," which Fergesson used in Chapter 4 ("There's something wrong with Stumblebum"); it has become the store's name for him, rough and almost affectionate. "The joint isn't the same." Then Olsen, who did not see what happened, gives his version of it: "I'm glad you told that fat-assed Fergesson off. Do it again for me sometime." Hadley did not tell Fergesson off. He begged to be let in and then threw himself through glass. In a few weeks the store's version has made it a rebellion. "Hadley said nothing." Olsen goes on: "I always thought you didn't belong in a crummy joint like Modern," which echoes, from the opposite side, the old woman's "you don't belong here" in Chapter 2. "If I had anything but crap in my pants I'd tell him to go shove it and get the hell out of there. But I guess I won't. I guess I'm too chicken-shit." It is a rare moment of self-knowledge from a man the novel has mostly shown as a grumbler. He admires what he thinks Hadley did, and he knows he will not do it. Hadley's answer, "I never thought of it that way," is honest: he did not think of it at all.
"'I never thought of it that way,' Hadley said."
"'Well,' Olsen said, belching, 'maybe it wasn't worth it.' He gestured toward Hadley's face. 'You look pretty damn awful with that missing peeper; why don't you get a glass one? I know a guy, a buddy of mine, he lost an eye in the war and got a glass one. Anyhow, I'm glad you did it. You look all right, considering. You seem to be doing all right.'"
"Thoughtfully, Hadley answered: 'I feel okay. A little tired.'"
The glass eye. "Well," Olsen says, "belching," "maybe it wasn't worth it." "You look pretty damn awful with that missing peeper; why don't you get a glass one?" Coming from Olsen this is not cruelty but a practical suggestion between men: "I know a guy, a buddy of mine, he lost an eye in the war and got a glass one." Many veterans of the Second World War and Korea wore artificial eyes. By 1952 most new artificial eyes in the United States were in fact made of acrylic plastic rather than glass: the wartime cut-off of German glass eyes led United States military dental and medical staff to develop acrylic eyes in the early 1940s, and they became standard. People went on calling them "glass eyes" anyway. Then Olsen sums up, clumsily and warmly: "Anyhow, I'm glad you did it. You look all right, considering. You seem to be doing all right." Hadley's reply is "Thoughtfully" given: "I feel okay. A little tired." The novel never says whether Hadley got an artificial eye.
"The two men got to their feet. 'We have to go,' Joe Tampini said earnestly. 'We'll drop by again sometime.'"
"'Can I come over for a feed?' Olsen asked bluntly. 'I can stand some broad-cooked food for a change. Those goddamn hash houses are ruining my gut.'"
"'Sure,' Hadley said, grinning. 'Anytime. I'll give you a call on the phone.' As they wandered out the door, he said: 'You think Fergesson will care if you visit us?'"
"'Fuck him,' Olsen bellowed as he strolled down the concrete walk, hunched over, head turned like an enormous crab."
"Broad-cooked food." "We'll drop by again sometime," says Tampini, "earnestly." Olsen asks "bluntly" whether he can "come over for a feed": "I can stand some broad-cooked food for a change. Those goddamn hash houses are ruining my gut." A hash house was cheap slang for a low-priced diner. The line suggests that Olsen is living alone and eating out; at the Fergessons' Christmas dinner, in Alice's memory, there was "Olsen and his wife." The novel does not explain the change (see Flags). Hadley's "Sure... Anytime" comes with a grin; he is pleased to be asked. Then the question that shows he still thinks about his old employer: "You think Fergesson will care if you visit us?" "Fuck him," Olsen bellows, walking down the concrete path "hunched over, head turned like an enormous crab." Spider in Chapter 1, crab here: Olsen is always a big, bent, many-legged creature, comic and a little alarming.
"'I think he's sorry,' Tampini said, blushing. 'I mean, I think he feels it was his fault. He knows...' He broke off, confused. 'It's none of my business. I think he feels responsible.'"
"Hadley nodded."
"'He's having trouble finding people to run both stores,' Tampini said hurriedly. 'I think...'"
"'Come on!' Olsen squalled from the truck. 'Get your ass out of the sling... we have to deliver this pile of shit and get back to the store.'"
"I think he feels responsible." Tampini, "blushing," says what Olsen will not: "I think he's sorry... I think he feels it was his fault. He knows..." He breaks off "confused" and retreats to "It's none of my business. I think he feels responsible." What Fergesson "knows" is never finished, and the gap is worth leaving open. He may know that he pushed Hadley too hard, that he fired him on the worst night of his life, or that he watched him at the glass and did nothing. "Hadley nodded." Then Tampini, "hurriedly": "He's having trouble finding people to run both stores," and "I think..." This is the first hint of the offer that Chapter 22 will bring. Fergesson bought O'Neill's in August and has now lost the man he meant to manage Modern. Olsen interrupts with his last vulgarity, "Get your ass out of the sling," and the truck goes "to deliver this pile of shit and get back to the store." Hadley never hears what Tampini thought.
"The truck drove noisily off, and Hadley reentered the apartment to resume his work. For a little while he thought about Fergesson and the store. Then the images faded; he was glad to get rid of them. They ceased dancing around him, and he turned his attention back to the corroded stove."
Back to the stove. The last paragraph of the chapter is about letting go. "For a little while he thought about Fergesson and the store. Then the images faded; he was glad to get rid of them. They ceased dancing around him." The store has become images that dance around him, like the visions he had in the dark in Chapter 18. He lets them fade, and "he turned his attention back to the corroded stove." The chapter has come back to the stove: "corrupted" on the first day, a smell of gas at night, a flue he is labouring over, now "corroded." It is the household's oldest and most dangerous fixture, and he is still working on it. In Chapter 22 Hadley will describe his own life with "You put your hand on the stove and you get burned." A man who sold new appliances on credit ends Chapter 21 trying to make an old one safe with his own hands.
How the chapter is built
The chapter has three movements. The first is a single afternoon told closely and slowly: the drive in the Golds' car, the arrival at the house on his blind side, the tour of the basement, the mirror in the shoebox, the cleaning, the doorstep in the sun, and the talk about what was kept and what was taken back. It ends with an idle wish to saw down a palm tree. The second movement is a month of work told in summary, in long, quiet paragraphs with almost no dialogue: steel brush, walnut, paint, fluorescent light, BX cable, the toilet's plunger, the concrete steps that fail. The third movement is a single scene again, the visit of Olsen and Tampini, told almost entirely in their talk. It ends with Hadley turning back to the stove.
The method mirrors the subject. The first movement is all looking: at the car, the house, the rooms, the mirror, the face that silences children. The second is all doing, and the sentences become plain and practical, the language of the job. The third brings the old world back in, the store, the boss, the gossip of the floor, and shows the new Hadley declining to be pulled back into it. The narration stays close to Hadley throughout and, unlike the alternating chapters of Parts One to Three, never moves into Fergesson's head.
Several threads run through the chapter, and most of them reach on into Chapter 22.
The chapter's threads.
- The stove. "Corrupted black gas stove" on arrival; "gas from the kitchen stove" at night; "the flue of the stove" when the visitors come; "the corroded stove" at the end. The stove at the old flat was repossessed. In Chapter 22 Hadley says "You put your hand on the stove and you get burned."
- Ice and cold. The huge old icebox; "We're going to have to get ice"; "We can use the icebox." In Chapter 22 Hadley works the freezing plant at an ice rink, dismantles a Westinghouse refrigerator, and looks for "an ice plant."
- Glass and mirrors. The shattered mirror in the shoebox; the empty socket; Olsen's "another door" and "a glass one" for the eye. In Chapter 22 Ellen sees the "indestructible glass wall of the world."
- Dark and light. A part called "Night," set in "heavy late-September sun"; a basement, a "dungeon," "The vacant darkness of one side of his brain"; then fluorescent tubes and the doorstep in the sun.
- Surface and substance. Brown shingles "like rough brown hair" on a once grand house; white enamel over walnut; "stale, artificial layers" over "the real substance beneath"; the good-looking face now gone.
- Trees. The vast dirty palm he wants to cut down; in Chapter 22 the lot with "one old oak tree."
- Names and identity. "Mister and Mrs. Mole"; "not Stuart Hadley at all"; "Stumblebum."
Reading the diagram. The chain runs through the chapter in reading order. The first six boxes are the arrival afternoon: the car, the house, the basement, the mirror, and the line that ends his old life. The next three are the doorstep and the reckoning with what was lost. The last three are the month of work and the visit. The dashed arrow runs from the visit back to the mirror: what Olsen and Tampini bring is the old world, the store and the face Hadley used to have, and Hadley's answer is the same one he gave in the shoebox scene. He looks, says little, and turns back to his work.
The earlier, shorter version of this guide carried no diagram for this chapter. It did carry a before-and-after table, kept and expanded here.
| Before (June to August) | Part Four (September and October) | |
|---|---|---|
| Face | His asset: "the nice-looking young man behind the counter"; an old customer called it "pretty and blond" | One eye gone; jaw "bandaged, misshapen"; children fall silent; "marked where it showed" |
| Home | "The place we had": their own apartment with refrigerator, stove and television | A basement under a rooming house; an icebox; a corroded gas stove; "like Mister and Mrs. Mole" |
| Possessions | Appliances on credit; living-room furniture paid for | Fridge, stove and TV taken back; furniture, lamp, rugs, silver and kitchen gadgets kept |
| Who earns | Hadley, salesman and then manager-designate at Modern | Ellen, "a typist and stenographer at a downtown business office" |
| Who keeps house | Ellen, at home with a new baby | Hadley "took care of Pete and the apartment" |
| Work | Selling cabinets on easy terms | Scraping walls, painting, wiring, plumbing, failing at concrete |
| Buying | Wanting things: the Hudson, the managership | "He chose calmly, solemnly": "basic materials to build with" |
| His name | A question he kept asking | "Something to answer to" |
| Mood | Resentment, grand longing, fear | Sun, patience, "no resentment," "He could stand anything now" |
| Fergesson | Boss, father figure, enemy | A report from two employees: "quiet," "sorry," "responsible" |
| Old guide (short version) | What the book says | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Opens in late-September sunshine | "The heavy late-September sun" | Confirmed |
| Jaw rebuilt; table: jaw sheared and rebuilt | "His bandaged, misshapen jaw" | Corrected: the book never says sheared or rebuilt |
| The new Hillman Minx | "The Hillman Minx"; Dave "got all the extras" and has the instruction book | Softened: probably new, never said |
| The fight outside the Society hall | Chapter 17: the fight near the Society of the Watchmen of Jesus hall | Confirmed |
| Three storeys with turrets | "Ornate turrets"; "three stories high" | Confirmed |
| Must rest two more months | "Another two months, at least" | Confirmed; he is working within the month (see Flags) |
| Olsen had to put up the new door | "I was the one had to put up another door" | Confirmed |
| Dick never says how Pete was found | Chapter 19: the Studebaker's windows broken open, "Somebody had noticed Pete" | Softened: we know the car was opened, not who found him or what followed |
| Five weeks from the last Sunday in August runs into October, not late-September | No date is given for the Sunday of Chapter 20 | Softened: 24 August plus five weeks is 28 September, which fits; only 31 August pushes it into October |
| Marsha never mentioned again | No mention in Chapters 21 and 22 | Confirmed |
A CLOSER LOOK: what the novel leaves out. Part Four is short, and much of what a reader might want to know is not in it. Three silences matter. The first is the law: Hadley spent five weeks under guard, there were lawyers, a judge and "legal arrangements," and none of it is told. The second is Pete: the baby was left in a car overnight and found by a stranger, and nobody in Part Four mentions it, not Ellen, not the Golds, not Hadley. The third and largest is Marsha Frazier, who was raped and beaten in Chapter 16 and disappears from the book. The guide's earlier version suggested that her disappearance lets the ending read as healing without reckoning, and that remains a fair criticism. Two defences can be made. One is that the silences are Hadley's: Part Four is told from very close to a man who has let "the images" fade, and the gaps in the story are the gaps in his mind ("blurred and uncertain," Chapter 22 calls them). The other is formal: Dick ends his long realist novel with a deliberately narrow focus, a basement and a family, and the narrowing is the point.
A CLOSER LOOK: is the work therapy or retreat? The month of work is easy to read as a moral fable: false surfaces stripped, honest materials laid bare, a weak man learning "from the ground up." Dick gives the reader enough to accept that reading, and the prose of these paragraphs is among the calmest in his early fiction. But the chapter also hedges it. The wall is still a wall; "putting everything of himself into the work" can mean that nothing of him is left for anything else; and the visitors bring a world he can no longer "concentrate on." In Chapter 22 Ellen will put the case against in her own words. The fair reading is that the chapter shows a real recovery of a limited kind, and asks the reader to decide what it cost.
Flags for this chapter.
- The date. "Five weeks in the prison ward" and "late-September sun" fit if the Sunday of Chapter 20 was 24 August 1952 (five weeks on is 28 September). If it was 31 August, five weeks on is 5 October. The novel gives no date for that Sunday; Chapter 13 sets Part Three in August.
- County hospital or police hospital. Here "the prison ward of the county hospital"; in Chapter 22 "the police hospital." Possibly the same place described two ways; possibly a slip.
- Rest for two months. Ellen says "another two months, at least," but within "the next month" he is sanding, wiring and pounding concrete forms. The narration says he started painting "As his rib mended."
- Olsen's wife. Alice remembers "Olsen and his wife" at last Christmas's dinner (Part Three); here Olsen's gut is being ruined by "hash houses" and he wants "broad-cooked food." The novel does not say whether he has separated, been widowed or is simply eating out.
- "Told that fat-assed Fergesson off." Olsen's version of the night at the glass is wrong. The error is his, not Dick's: the store's gossip has turned a collapse into a rebellion.
- The cooling system. No ordinary British economy car of 1952 had refrigerated air conditioning. Dick may have meant a ventilating or heater-blower unit; see the box above.
- A part called "Night." Set almost wholly in daylight and sun. Deliberate, on the guide's reading.
- Dave Gold. The man Hadley abused with a slur and fought in Chapter 17 drives him home; nobody mentions the fight.
Outside facts checked for this chapter.
- Hillman Minx. A small family car of the British Rootes Group; the Mark V was introduced in 1951 and sold in the United States among the first British family cars to be imported in numbers (period road tests and Rootes histories).
- Car air conditioning. Packard offered factory air conditioning for the 1940 model year and dropped it after 1941; Chrysler's Airtemp system was offered on the 1953 Imperial.
- Glidden Spred Satin. Introduced in 1948 as the first widely sold synthetic latex (styrene-butadiene) house paint; Sherwin-Williams' Kem-Tone (1941) was an earlier water-thinned casein-resin paint. Hence Dick's "the new rubber-based."
- Waring blender. The Waring Miracle Mixer, invented by Frederick Osius and financed by the bandleader Fred Waring, was shown at the National Restaurant Show in Chicago in 1937 at $29.75 and later renamed the Blendor.
- Fluorescent lamps. Introduced commercially by General Electric and Westinghouse in 1938.
- Artificial eyes. During the Second World War, when German glass eyes could no longer be imported, United States military dental and medical staff developed acrylic artificial eyes, which became the standard material.
- Leo J. Meyberg Company. A San Francisco distributor of radio and electrical goods (trade name MYCO), named in a 1955 RCA publication as an RCA distributor in San Francisco.
- Woolworth. The F. W. Woolworth Company was the best-known American five-and-dime chain; many of its stores had lunch counters and soda fountains.
- Candytuft. The garden genus Iberis, low-growing with white, pink or purple flowers.
- The Wind in the Willows. Kenneth Grahame's novel (1908) has the underground "Mole End" and the chapter "Dulce Domum." The guide does not claim Dick had it in mind.
- Consumer credit rules. The UK Financial Conduct Authority's consumer credit sourcebook requires firms to treat customers in default or arrears difficulties with forbearance and due consideration (used in the IN PRACTICE box).
Takeaways from Chapter 21
- Night, in sun. Part Four is called "Night," and it opens in "heavy late-September sun." The ambitions are dead; the man is sitting in the light.
- The driver. Dave Gold, whom Hadley abused and fought in Chapter 17, drives him home from the prison ward in a small English car, and nobody mentions the fight.
- The blind side. The house is on "his blind side." The new life literally begins where he cannot see.
- Four floors. Mrs. Nevin at the top, the young people from Los Angeles in the middle, a quiet couple on the ground floor, and the Hadleys "In the basement... like Mister and Mrs. Mole."
- The mirror. In a closet he finds a shoebox of broken mirror and sees himself "shattered and twisted." He says, "wryly," that he will not be "the nice-looking young man behind the counter again."
- Ellen leads. She scrubs the walls and ceiling, gives the orders, keeps him resting, and earns the money.
- The lost eye. On the doorstep he lets a child's fantasy go "regretfully." He is "not Stuart Hadley at all," and the name is now "something to answer to."
- Marked. Children fall silent at his face. No old lady will bring her radio; no girl at Woolworth's will flirt. He feels "no resentment."
- Repossessed. The refrigerator, stove and television go back; the paid-for furniture stays. "You mean we didn't have a choice." Sally's castoff blender, once hated, is kept.
- Walnut. He scrapes cheap white paint off woodwork and finds "a lovely old walnut," and works "scraping down to the real substance beneath."
- Step by step. Step by step, from the ground up, "as a weak man should." He fails at concrete steps and puts the job aside without despair.
- The visitors. Olsen and Tampini report a quieter Fergesson, Jack White fired, a man from Meyberg's hired, Tampini married and selling. Olsen thinks Hadley told Fergesson off; he didn't.
- "I think he feels responsible." Tampini's broken sentence and his hint about "both stores" prepare the offer in Chapter 22.
- The stove. The images of the store fade, "he was glad to get rid of them," and he goes back to work on the corroded stove.
A Whole Bunch of Things
When and where. The chapter runs from about late October or November 1952 to late July 1953, nine months or so, and gives only seasonal markers. The opening night comes after the visit of Olsen and Tampini at the end of Chapter 21 ("Tampini said something when they were over"), on a warm night: "the windows were wide open to the heavy night air." The pipe-factory job lasts "a few months," until "a little after Christmas." The city parks job follows; "In the early spring" he moves to the ice rink. "During May" he installs the radiant heating, and the dinner with Olsen falls "that evening." The drive is "late July", which on the novel's own count makes it 1953, a little over a year after the dated morning of Chapter 1 (Thursday, 5 June 1952). Places: the basement kitchen and living room of the flat in Cedar Groves; offstage, the pipe factory, the city parks, the ice rink; then the road north into the country, over "a long range of hills," to Woodvalley Station ("The nearest big town is Petaluma"): its gravel road, a bungalow with a goat, the realtor's office beside the drugstore, an empty lot, and the parked car.
Who is here.
- Stuart Hadley: about twenty-five, one-eyed, with a "ruined eroded face," now a manual worker in "sailcloth pants and a sweatshirt," with fingers "strong and hard." He has given up selling and found the work of his hands.
- Ellen Hadley: his wife, still working in the downtown office and supporting the family while he finds his way. She brings the message, drives the car, and in the last scene sees what has become of him.
- Pete Hadley: born in late June 1952, so about thirteen months old by the drive; in "his red and white summer suit," he is "staggering back toward the fence" where the goat is tied.
- Olsen: Modern's repairman, who supervises the heating, eats lamb stew, curses, praises Hadley's idea, and declines to join it: "I'm a bum." Seen standing, he is "a huge hunched-over man, his jaw blue and stubbled, his hair a tangled, weedy mass."
- The realtor: "the scrawny dried-up old realtor" of Woodvalley Station, with glasses, a fountain pen and an "old-fashioned oak desk," who tries to sell them a cabin on the Russian River.
- Present only in talk: Alice Fergesson, who came to Ellen's office and stayed "a couple of hours"; Jim Fergesson, who would take Hadley back and is going to sell O'Neill's; Joe Tampini, who "said something" and later helped patch up their old Chevrolet; Ellen's mother, who told Alice where Ellen works; and Hadley's mother, "back east," who will supply the money.
- Seen only from the road: "A vast old woman sitting in a rocker on the front porch," and a goat that "glared belligerently at them until they were gone."
Content note. There is no violence in this chapter, but it is the end of a book about a man maimed in a fall through a glass door, and the last scene turns on his damaged face. Olsen swears freely and is quoted as printed where it matters. One line uses an old word for bundles of firewood that is now best known as a slur; it is quoted once below in its original sense, with a gloss. Dialogue dashes in the book appear as "..." in quotations.
The message
The chapter begins on the floor.
"The message itself came through Alice. As Hadley and his wife were laying squares of asphalt tile in the kitchen, Ellen said: 'I have something to tell you. I don't know what you're going to say; maybe I shouldn't even mention it.'"
Asphalt tile. The material is a quiet echo of the first page of the novel. On the morning of Chapter 1 the sunlight in the old apartment spread "over the icy asphalt tile of the floor," and Hadley lay asleep beside Ellen, with the working day ahead of him. Here the same humble floor covering is being laid by his own hands, on his knees, with a glue pot. In Chapter 6 Fergesson, standing in their kitchen, told them to rip out the linoleum and "Put in tile; it won't rot away," and said of Hadley that "He could fix up this whole apartment if he didn't have his damn head in the clouds." The prophecy has come true in a different apartment, after the head has come down out of the clouds the hard way.
Note too that Ellen opens with a hedge. She does not know what he will say, and "maybe I shouldn't even mention it." After the summer of Chapters 13 to 20, she has learned to approach him carefully.
"Hadley laid down the glue pot and seated himself at the kitchen table. It was late, almost midnight; the windows were wide open to the heavy night air. Up and down the street there was only darkness and immobility. A few tubby insects bumbled and fluttered around the overhead light."
The insects round the light. The scene is set with Dick's usual small exact touches: midnight, open windows, a dark and motionless street, and "A few tubby insects" bumbling round the overhead bulb. There is nothing threatening in it. The night of Part Four, which is titled "Night," is warm, still and ordinary. Compare the nights of Part Three, which were full of drinking, driving and violence.
"'I think I know what it is,' Hadley said. 'Tampini said something when they were over.'"
He has already guessed. In Chapter 21 Tampini let slip that Fergesson "feels responsible" and dropped a hint about "both stores." Hadley put the pieces together without being told. He is slower now, and calmer, but not stupid.
"Continuing with the tile laying, Ellen said: 'Alice Fergesson came down to the office today; she found out where I work from my mother. She stayed a couple of hours.' She glanced up anxiously at her husband. 'Do you mind if I talk about it?'"
"'I don't mind.'"
From my mother. Alice found Ellen's office through Ellen's mother. It is a small detail, but it tells us that the two families are still connected: Alice knows Ellen's parents, or at least how to reach them, and the Fergessons have been making an effort. Ellen's mother appears nowhere else in Part Four except as the household the Hadleys stayed with before the move (Chapter 21). Alice "stayed a couple of hours," which for a message that "didn't really say much" is a long visit. The novel does not say what else they talked about.
Ellen's question, "Do you mind if I talk about it?", is another sign of how she handles him now. She asks permission to raise the subject of the store.
"'She wanted to know how we were getting along. She asked about Pete. And about you, of course. Do you remember her coming to visit you at the hospital?'"
"'Vaguely,' Hadley said. The whole period at the police hospital, the interviews with the judge, the activity of the lawyers, the legal arrangements, were blurred and uncertain in his mind. 'How is she?'"
Blurred and uncertain. This is the only summary the novel gives of what happened between the glass door and the basement: "The whole period at the police hospital, the interviews with the judge, the activity of the lawyers, the legal arrangements." We never learn what the charge was, whether he was tried, fined, bound over or simply released. The legal process is told as Hadley remembers it, which is barely at all. In Chapter 21 the place was "the prison ward of the county hospital"; here it is "the police hospital" (see Flags). Either way, the novel deliberately keeps the law offstage.
"'She's fine. She...' Ellen hesitated. 'Well, she says that Fergesson says if you want, you can come back to work.'"
"'I know,' Hadley said after a pause. 'I figured that out.'"
"'She didn't know how you'd feel... Neither did I, because I never thought about it. I just... considered it a closed book. You know what I mean?'"
"'Yes,' Hadley agreed. 'I know what you mean.'"
A closed book. Ellen's phrase for the store is "a closed book," and she admits she "never thought about it." She has been living in the present of the basement, the typing job and the baby, and the offer takes her "completely by surprise." Hadley's answer, "I know what you mean," is gentle and noncommittal. He lets her finish before he says anything that matters.
"'It took me completely by surprise... I told her I'd tell you.' Ellen grabbed some tiles and worked feverishly, intently. 'So that's what she said. She didn't really say much... That's what she came by for, of course. There weren't any details... I guess it would be the same as it was.'"
Ellen works "feverishly, intently" while she talks. The tiles give her something to do with her hands and somewhere to look other than his face. Her guess about the terms, "I guess it would be the same as it was," is the frightening part: the same job, the same counter, the same boss.
"'I knew it was going to be brought up,' Hadley said. 'Is she waiting for an answer?'"
"'I'm supposed to call her.'"
Then the answer, with no pause at all.
"'Tell her to thank Fergesson and tell him I'm not coming back.'"
"Ellen let out her breath with a rush. 'Thank God.'"
"Tell her to thank Fergesson and tell him I'm not coming back." The sentence is courteous, complete and final. It thanks the man who knocked him down, so to speak, and it closes the door on him. Ellen's "Thank God" is the most open statement of her own wishes she has made in Part Four. She did not want him back at Modern, and she was afraid to say so in case he did.
A refusal without anger. Compare this with Hadley's earlier dealings with Fergesson. In Part One he resented the boss and fantasised about leaving. In Part Three he took the managership and then wrecked it. In Chapter 20 he went through the glass door of the store. Now he says no in one sentence and sends his thanks. There is no wish to hurt Fergesson, no wish to please him, and no wish to be his son. The relationship that drove the whole novel has simply stopped mattering. This is the first of several signs in the chapter that something in Hadley has been switched off.
"'It means you have to keep on working awhile. Until I line up something.'"
"'You shouldn't be working yet anyhow!' Ellen protested."
"'I'm well enough,' Hadley said firmly. 'I can begin looking for something.'"
"Presently Ellen said in a tiny voice: 'What sort of thing, darling? What are you going to do?' Wanly, she said: 'I've been wondering... I know you want to do something new, I guess. Different.'"
Who earns. "It means you have to keep on working awhile." The arrangement of Chapter 21 continues: Ellen earns, Hadley recovers. Ellen protests that he "shouldn't be working yet anyhow!" but he answers "firmly" that he is "well enough." Her "tiny voice" asking what he will do is fear for the future, and also fear of him. She knows he wants "something new" and "Different," and the last time he wanted something new it was the Watchmen of Jesus and a night in a cell.
Almost decided. "I've almost decided...but I want to take my time." And: "I don't want to rush into anything." The man who could not wait for anything in Parts One to Three, who quit, plunged and lashed out, now speaks the language of patience. He gets down beside his wife and goes on laying tile. The scene ends where it began, on the floor.
Tool room and parks
The same long paragraph in the book (line 255 above) now changes gear. Without a break, the narration moves from a single night to months of summary.
Not particularly impressive. The job he takes is described by its lack of prestige: "not particularly impressive." He sits "on a bench in an elongated storage room, handing out tools to workmen from midnight to nine in the morning." The man who once dreamed of art, causes and greatness works the night shift in a tool crib. But the details that follow are not sad. "The job paid well; he joined the union and rode back and forth on the bus, a lunch pail under his arm." The lunch pail, the bus, the union card, the sailcloth trousers and sweatshirt are the uniform of the industrial working class of the 1950s, and Dick lists them without irony.
The class drop is real. In Part One Hadley was a salesman in a suit and tie behind the counter of a television shop, and in Part Three a manager-designate with a new car in view. A night-shift tool crib in a pipe factory is a long way down that ladder, and he accepts it without comment. The narration does not record a single complaint.
The tool crib. Note what the job actually is: handing out tools. This is the seed of the plan Hadley describes later in the chapter. "I sat in that pipe factory handing out tools to workmen all day long," he says. The job gives him the idea of tools as something lent, logged and returned, and the habit of thinking about which tool a man needs for which job.
After "a few months, a little after Christmas," he moves on, "after careful deliberation," to a job with the city, "operating the equipment that maintained the seven or eight miniature city parks." "Careful deliberation" is a phrase nobody would have used of the Hadley of Part Three.
The discipline of tool maintenance. The sentence "The discipline of tool maintenance was taught him" is passive. Hadley does not seize this lesson; it is given to him, as discipline is given to an apprentice. The particulars are plain and almost moral: "to keep tools clean and oiled, and to put them away where they belonged." In Chapter 6 Ellen told Fergesson that Hadley had wanted to be an artist but "didn't have the discipline" and "didn't understand it meant work and learning a lot of techniques." Now he has the discipline, in a small form. What he has learned is the opposite of what he wanted: care for the instrument, not expression of the self.
Ellen's diagnosis in Chapter 6. The whole year in this chapter answers Ellen's analysis of her husband in Chapter 6, given to Fergesson over a bowl of strawberries. "What he wanted to do was express himself through his hands some way. Because that was what he had been taught to do." And: "He was yearning, and he didn't know what for." In Chapter 22 the hands find their work, but the yearning, the part Ellen called "a religious thing," is gone. The question the ending leaves is whether the yearning was cured or simply cut out.
Ice rink and the Westinghouse
"In the early spring he quit his job with the city and went to work for a local ice rink, tending and operating the freezing equipment, keeping it in repair and keeping it functioning." The three jobs climb in mechanical complexity: handing out tools, operating mowers and grinders, keeping a refrigeration plant running.
Ice. Cold runs through Part Four. In Chapter 21 the basement had "A massive icebox" because the refrigerator had been repossessed, and Ellen said "We're going to have to get ice." Now Hadley keeps an ice rink frozen, takes a refrigerator apart, and at Woodvalley Station asks whether there is "an ice plant." On the first page of the novel the floor was "icy asphalt tile." The novel that began with a man frozen in bed ends with a man who knows how to make cold.
"Working with machinery interested him. For the apartment he bought an old Westinghouse belt-driven refrigerator and began tinkering with it. For a little while he toyed with the idea of taking a course in refrigeration; but he decided against it, partly on the grounds that he could learn more by actual work, and partly because there seemed to be no such course."
No such course. He thinks of "taking a course in refrigeration," and decides against it "partly on the grounds that he could learn more by actual work, and partly because there seemed to be no such course." The word "seemed" matters. It is Hadley's impression, and probably an inaccurate one: refrigeration and air-conditioning training was widely advertised in the period (see Outside facts). The comedy is gentle. The former college man, who once tried to learn everything from talk and books, cannot find a course and does not mind.
"As he had expected, refrigeration repair was not something he could learn from a book, or by thinking about it. Or even, he discovered, by talking about it. For days he sat with the contents of the refrigerator spread out around him, examining and studying it, putting it together and taking it apart. He learned a lot about refrigerators."
Not from a book. This is the lesson of the year, put plainly: refrigeration repair "was not something he could learn from a book, or by thinking about it. Or even, he discovered, by talking about it." The last clause is aimed at Hadley's whole past. He was a salesman, a man of talk; he spent the summer of Part Two arguing with Marsha, Beckheim, Dave Gold and Fergesson. Now he sits "For days" with the parts "spread out around him, examining and studying it, putting it together and taking it apart." The scene recalls the shoebox of broken mirror in Chapter 21, where he sat among fragments of his own face. Here the fragments are a machine, and he can put them back together.
The belt-driven fridge. An old "Westinghouse belt-driven refrigerator" was already obsolete in 1953. Early domestic refrigerators drove the compressor from a separate electric motor by a belt; by the 1930s most makers had moved to sealed units in which motor and compressor sat together in a hermetic housing. A belt-driven machine is one a man can take apart with ordinary tools, which is precisely why Hadley buys it. He chooses an old, open, mendable machine over a new, sealed one, as in Chapter 21 he chose plain materials over credit purchases.
Radiant heat with Olsen
"The job he had quit, the job with the city, remained in his mind. During May, while he thought about it, he tore up the floor of the apartment and installed radiant heating. The hot-water pump and pipes were put together with his own hands... and those of Olsen. Olsen came by and supervised."
The job that remained. "The job he had quit, the job with the city, remained in his mind." This is a hint of the plan to come: the city job, with its outdoors, its mowers, sprayers and hedge clippers, is the one he liked. While he thinks about it, he does what Fergesson did in his own house in Chapter 13. At the dinner of Part Three, Fergesson showed his guests the tile floor and said, "I put in radiant heating," and "I laid the pipes and then the tile over it. Works pretty good." Hadley now does the same, "with his own hands." He has taken over his old boss's pride in making his own house comfortable, without any of the boss's money.
The timing is odd. In Chapter 21 the better heating "could wait; it was still some time before winter," and it waited through the whole winter. He installs it in May, as summer comes.
"'For a guy with only one peeper,' Olsen commented, 'You're doing okay.' Morosely, he added: 'But you'd sure be up shit creek if you lost the other.'"
Only one peeper. Olsen's praise is typical of him: a compliment and an insult in one breath. "For a guy with only one peeper... You're doing okay." Then, "Morosely": "But you'd sure be up shit creek if you lost the other." It is the only direct reference to the lost eye in the whole of Chapter 22 until the last scene. Olsen can say it because he is Olsen, and because in Chapter 21 he spoke of a buddy who "lost an eye in the war and got a glass one." The crude joke is a kind of acceptance. Nobody else in the book would dare it.
"The two of them replaced the floor and inspected the thermostat of the pump. The pump wheezed and clattered as it ejected hot water into the rings of pipe under the floor. After a fashion, it worked."
After a fashion. The pump "wheezed and clattered." "After a fashion, it worked." The phrase sums up the whole of Part Four. Nothing Hadley builds is good; it works after a fashion. In Chapter 21 he failed at concrete steps and set them aside. Here the heating works, with noise. Dick never lets the work become heroic.
Stew and O'Neill's
"'You'll probably burn down the whole joint,' Olsen said that evening at dinner as he sat across from Ellen and Stuart, self-consciously spooning up lamb stew and biscuits. 'These old firetraps go like kindling once some jackass gets them started.'"
"Hadley and his wife smiled at each other; Ellen reached out and touched her husband's hand."
Kindling. Olsen's joke, "You'll probably burn down the whole joint," and "These old firetraps go like kindling once some jackass gets them started," is said "self-consciously" over "lamb stew and biscuits." He is a guest at their table, and he does not know what to do with his hands. The Hadleys smile at each other and Ellen touches her husband's hand. It is one of the few moments of plain marital tenderness in the novel, and it happens in front of a man spitting food. The old mansion as a firetrap is a fair point, though: a wooden turn-of-the-century house divided into flats, with a home-made hot-water system in the basement.
"'You think,' Olsen demanded, 'maybe you ever want to go back to Modern? Fergesson sure as hell would like to have you back.' He added: 'The old fart's going to sell O'Neill's place. He can't run both of them; he's too damn old and broken-down.'"
Too damn old and broken-down. The news is that Fergesson "sure as hell would like to have you back" and that "The old fart's going to sell O'Neill's place. He can't run both of them; he's too damn old and broken-down." By the dinner of Chapter 13 Fergesson had bought O'Neill's store, and the second store was the reason he could hand the management of Modern to Hadley. Within a year he is selling it. In Chapter 4 the narration introduced him as "Jim Fergesson, forty-two, sound of health." Olsen's verdict, "too damn old and broken-down," is the measure of what the summer did to him too. The glass door broke more than one man.
"'I'm sorry to hear that,' Hadley said, suddenly perturbed."
"Suddenly perturbed." This is the only flash of the old feeling in the chapter. O'Neill's was the expansion that made his own promotion possible, the start of the future he wrecked, and the news that it will be sold touches something. Then the feeling passes.
"'Well?' Olsen shouted, spitting food across the table. 'Then why don't you come back?'"
"'I don't want to come back,' Hadley said slowly. 'No, I'm not coming back. It's too bad about O'Neill's place...' For a time he sat frowning intently down at his plate. He said nothing; his face was wrinkled and solemn."
The second refusal. Olsen shouts the offer across the table, "spitting food," and Hadley says it twice: "I don't want to come back," and "No, I'm not coming back." Then he frowns at his plate, "his face was wrinkled and solemn." The solemn face recurs at the end of the chapter, where Ellen sees "an expression of great seriousness" that "was not going away." The seriousness begins here, over the stew.
"'What do you think you'll do?' Olsen asked, slopping down coffee and wiping his chin. 'You're not going to stay with that ice rink, are you?'"
"'No,' Hadley agreed."
"'And you're not coming back to Modern? You really mean it?'"
"'I've been thinking,' Hadley said. 'That job I had with the park... I liked working like that, outdoors.'"
"'What are you going to be,' Olsen raged, 'a goddamn horse?'"
A goddamn horse? Hadley says he liked working "outdoors," and Olsen explodes: "What are you going to be... a goddamn horse?" It is the funniest line in the chapter and also a real objection. Olsen is a skilled man who cannot imagine wanting work that is outside, physical and unskilled. To him a man who goes from TV salesman to park labourer is going backwards, into the stable. The joke also anticipates the goat at Woodvalley Station: by the end of the chapter Hadley really is thinking about a life among animals and fields.
The pitch
After dinner the three of them sit in the living room. Pete is asleep, and "in the unused room the hot-water pump labored fitfully." The noise of the home-made heating sits under the whole conversation.
He lists painting, flooring, plumbing and wiring, and ends with a question that could be the opening of an advertisement: "Who has a man come in and sand the floors these days?" Then the catch: "You sand your own floors...if you can get hold of a sander." The pitch is built like the salesman's pitches he gave for years, but it begins with a need, not with a product.
"'People always did that stuff,' Olsen disagreed. 'Guys always jigsawed little birdhouses out of plywood on their workbench in the garage.'"
"'I don't mean that,' Hadley said, 'that Popular Mechanics stuff. Hobbies on Saturday afternoon, knickknacks around the house. I mean the basic services of construction and maintenance...like pouring concrete. Two years ago nobody would have poured his own concrete...now everybody does.'"
Not hobbies. Olsen objects that people "always did that stuff," jigsawing "little birdhouses out of plywood." Hadley draws the line precisely: not "that Popular Mechanics stuff," not "Hobbies on Saturday afternoon, knickknacks around the house," but "the basic services of construction and maintenance...like pouring concrete." The distinction is a good one, and real. Hadley sees the second part, which is where the money is.
It is a salesman's exaggeration, and Hadley himself has just failed at pouring concrete steps (Chapter 21). But the direction is right (see Outside facts).
"'If they can get hold of the mixer,' Ellen said quickly."
Ellen's interruption, "quickly," is the first time in the novel she has added to one of her husband's ideas instead of worrying about it. She sees the catch before he states it: the mixer.
Fifty dollars and two thousand. The economics of the plan rest on one ratio: "To do a fifty-dollar job you need two thousand dollars' worth of power-driven tools." On those numbers a man would have to do forty jobs to pay back the kit, ignoring maintenance and storage. No household does forty concrete jobs. Hence the gap. As a rough guide to scale, the United States consumer price index rose by a factor of a little under twelve between 1953 and 2025, so the figures are something like six hundred dollars of work against twenty-four thousand dollars of equipment in recent money. The ratio, not the sum, is the point.
Hadley's hands are "clasped tightly together" as he talks. He is excited and holding it in. The list grows wilder as he goes, from cars and roofing asphalt to "they could build their houses and everything inside them. Practically weave their own clothes." Some of the old Hadley is still here: the dreamer who wanted a great cause has found a small one, and for a moment he talks about it as if it could remake the world.
"'The women could do that part,' Ellen said. 'And make bowls to eat out of. All you need is a revolving wheel and lots of clay.'"
"'Okay,' Hadley said. 'So you want to make a bowl out of clay. You need a potter's wheel... where are you going to get it?'"
"'I don't know,' Ellen said; 'I never tried.'"
The potter's wheel. Ellen jokes that "The women could do that part," weaving and making bowls: "All you need is a revolving wheel and lots of clay." Hadley takes the joke seriously and turns it into the core of the argument. "You need a potter's wheel... where are you going to get it?" Ellen admits "I never tried." The small exchange is the whole business plan in miniature: the need, the tool, and nowhere to get it. It also brings back the Hadley who wanted to be an artist. A potter's wheel is a craftsman's tool, and he imagines lending it to others, not using it himself.
"'There isn't any place,' Hadley informed her. 'Contractors own all the stuff; their own crews use them. Try to rent a mixer, a floor sander, heavy-duty paint sprayers, and they laugh at you. They have to laugh... if they loaned you the stuff they'd go out of business. There's no end to what a man can do for himself if he has the tools.'"
They laugh at you. The gap in the market is ownership: "Contractors own all the stuff; their own crews use them." Try to rent a mixer, a floor sander, a heavy paint sprayer, "and they laugh at you." Hadley's analysis of why is sharp: "They have to laugh... if they loaned you the stuff they'd go out of business." The contractor's equipment is his moat. If customers could do the job themselves, they would not need the contractor. Then the creed: "There's no end to what a man can do for himself if he has the tools." For a man who could not, all through the novel, do anything for himself, the sentence is close to a confession.
"'I suppose you're going to fix your own goddamn TV set,' Olsen said bitterly."
"'If I ever get one again,' Hadley said mildly, 'which is doubtful, I'll build it. All you need for that is a two-dollar soldering iron and a pair of pliers.'"
The soldering iron. Olsen, the television serviceman, sees his own trade threatened and says "bitterly" that Hadley will fix his own TV next. Hadley answers "mildly" that if he ever gets one again, "which is doubtful," he will build it, with "a two-dollar soldering iron and a pair of pliers." Two things are in the line. One is a real change: the man who sold television sets for a living does not expect to own one, and does not seem to mind. The other is a boast. Building a working television receiver in 1953 needed more than a soldering iron and pliers, as Olsen, who spends his days with test equipment, would know. Hadley's new confidence in tools has a touch of the old grandiosity in it.
"Olsen lapsed into gloomy silence. 'Then what happens to me?'"
"Then what happens to me?" Olsen's question is half a joke and half fear. He sees, before Hadley does, that a world where everyone fixes their own things is a world without repairmen.
Experience as a résumé. Hadley lists his qualifications like an applicant: the pipe factory, where he handed out tools "all day long" (he worked nights, but the slip is natural in talk); the city job, where he "drove power lawn mowers and compost grinders" and "operated electric hedge clippers and sprayers"; the ice rink, "a whole building full of pumps and coils and pulleys to take care of." Every job of the past nine months turns out to have been training. The narration earlier presented them as a drift from job to job. Hadley now presents them as a plan. Both may be true: he may have known what he was doing all along, as he says, or he may be finding the pattern after the fact, as people do.
"'So?' Olsen said."
Hadley's pitch, step by step.
- Demand. People now paint, plumb, wire, lay floors and sand them themselves. Not hobbies, not "that Popular Mechanics stuff," but "the basic services of construction and maintenance."
- Barrier. "To do a fifty-dollar job you need two thousand dollars' worth of power-driven tools."
- Gap. "Contractors own all the stuff; their own crews use them." Ask to rent, "and they laugh at you," because lending would put them out of business.
- Offer. "A little place near the center of town, some store, maybe with a lot for people to park and load stuff in trailer carts." "Everything from screwdrivers to pneumatic drills. Blasters, scrapers, power lathes, grinders... the works."
- Pricing. "By the hour, the day, whatever people want." The customer buys use, not the tool: "people won't have to buy any tools at all."
- Capability. The tool crib, the parks, the ice rink: "I think I know what I'm doing."
- Funding. "I can write back east and get it from my mother."
- Partner sought. Olsen, for "Just your experience and common sense."
The salesman's last pitch. Compare this with the pitch Hadley made to Fergesson at the dinner of Chapter 13: plate glass, full-page advertisements and radio spots, each idea costing money and each about making the store look bigger. That pitch was about display; this one is about use. That pitch asked the boss to spend; this one asks customers to stop buying. Hadley spent the novel selling consumer goods on easy terms. His new business is in a sense the opposite of Modern: it lets people do without owning. The skill is the same. He still knows how to build a case, anticipate an objection and end with a clear offer. What has changed is the thing being sold.
"'You'll have to know a lot about tools,' Olsen said doubtfully. 'You'll have to service them all. It'll be a bass-ackward headache.'"
"'I think I can do it,' Hadley said. He glanced up. 'Don't you think I can?'"
Service them all. Olsen goes straight to the operating cost: "You'll have to know a lot about tools," "You'll have to service them all. It'll be a bass-ackward headache." This is the repairman's view of any rental business, and he is right. A tool lent out comes back dirty, blunt, bent or broken, and somebody has to put it right before the next customer. That is why the line about the city job matters: "The discipline of tool maintenance was taught him." Hadley has learned the one skill the plan most needs. Then the man who once demanded constant reassurance asks for it one more time: "Don't you think I can?"
"'No, you haven't had enough experience,' Olsen said bluntly. 'You'd go broke. And it'll take plenty of loot to get hold of those power tools; they cost like hell.'"
Olsen's answer is the bluntest assessment anyone gives Hadley in the novel: "No, you haven't had enough experience," "You'd go broke," and the tools "cost like hell." He names the three standard risks of a new business in one breath: competence, failure, capital.
"'What do you think of the idea itself?'"
"'It's great,' Olsen said. 'It'll eventually put me out of business, of course. Nobody'll hire TV servicemen once this damn thing gets going.'"
It'll put me out of business. Asked about "the idea itself," Olsen calls it "great" and adds the most perceptive line in the conversation: "It'll eventually put me out of business, of course. Nobody'll hire TV servicemen once this damn thing gets going." He is a skilled tradesman who sees a world of self-service coming and knows he will have no place in it. The joke is also a prophecy about the economy that was coming. Dick's characters keep seeing the future in this novel; Dave Gold predicted the plot in Chapter 3. Here a TV repairman sees the logic of self-service.
"'Why don't you come in with me?' Hadley asked. 'You've had the experience... You know what you're doing. All during the war you were operating a turret lathe... while I was sitting around wasting my time in college.'"
The turret lathe. Hadley offers Olsen a partnership on the strength of his war: "All during the war you were operating a turret lathe... while I was sitting around wasting my time in college." A turret lathe is a production machine tool with a rotating head of cutters that lets one operator do a sequence of cuts quickly, the workhorse of wartime machine shops. The line places both men in history. Olsen spent the war in a factory, as millions did; Hadley, too young to serve for most of it, was in college, which he now calls "wasting my time." The college education that once marked him off from the men on the floor is now the thing he apologises for.
"I'm a bum"
"Olsen's face writhed with pain. 'Damn it, I wish I could. It sounds wonderful.' He glanced wretchedly at Ellen. 'I sure wish I could, but I can't.'"
"'Why not?' Hadley asked. 'You don't have to put up any of the money; I can write back east and get it from my mother.'"
Money from back east. The plan is financed by Hadley's mother. In Chapter 6 Ellen told Fergesson that Hadley's father died when he was eight, that "His mother and sister brought him up," and that "They always had money; his father left them property and life insurance." Fergesson's reply was "He never had to work for a living." The new working-class Hadley, with his lunch pail and union card, will set up his business on the family money he has had in the background all along. In Chapter 3, with only "A couple hundred for hospital expenses" put by before Pete's birth, he told Dave Gold: "I hate like hell to write back east. I want to make this alone. I... don't write to her unless I really need the money." Now he offers to write without being asked, and calmly. The pride that made him want to "make this alone" has gone with everything else. Dick lets the irony stand without comment. It is a realistic touch: most small businesses of the period started on savings or family loans, not on bank credit. It also quietly weakens the story of the self-made man.
"'What, then?'"
"'Just your experience and common sense.'"
"Olsen reflected. 'No,' he said emphatically."
"'Why not? What are you risking?'"
"'I'm a bum,' Olsen said simply. 'I've stayed at Modern too long... I have to be getting on, out of this town. You know that. I can't stay in one place... I'd go in with you for a while, and then I'd pull out. It isn't right; I'd leave you holding the bag.'"
"I'm a bum... I can't stay in one place... I'd go in with you for a while, and then I'd pull out. It isn't right; I'd leave you holding the bag."
Olsen, declining
Olsen's honesty. Olsen's refusal is the most self-aware speech he makes in the novel. "I'm a bum." "I've stayed at Modern too long." "I have to be getting on, out of this town." And the reason he will not take the gift: "It isn't right; I'd leave you holding the bag." He refuses because he knows himself, and because he cares about Hadley enough not to fail him. It is a moral act in a book where most of the moral acts end badly. It also makes Olsen the novel's real drifter: the restlessness Hadley had, and lost, is Olsen's permanent condition.
"'You don't think you'd find this satisfying?'"
"'I'm restless. I always was; I always will be.' Olsen got to his feet and paced unhappily around the room, a huge hunched-over man, his jaw blue and stubbled, his hair a tangled, weedy mass. 'I'm sorry as hell. But I'm not dependable. I just can't stay put.'"
The stage direction is a portrait: "a huge hunched-over man, his jaw blue and stubbled, his hair a tangled, weedy mass," pacing "unhappily around the room." In Chapter 21 he was "hunched over, head turned like an enormous crab." He is too big for the basement and too restless for any room.
"Hadley said thoughtfully: 'Neither could I.'"
"'That's different. You were looking for something; you wanted something better than a two-bit salesman job. That wasn't for you... You've got something on the ball. But not me. I don't have anything. If I had half the mind you've got.' He shrugged. 'But I don't.'"
Neither could I. Hadley says "thoughtfully": "Neither could I." He means that he too could not stay put, at Modern or anywhere. Olsen will not let him have the comparison. "That's different. You were looking for something; you wanted something better than a two-bit salesman job." And then, with real pain: "If I had half the mind you've got." Olsen is the one man in the novel who sees Hadley's restlessness as a sign of quality, and he gives the most generous account of the whole story: not a weak man going to pieces, but a man looking for something better. It is the kind reading of the novel, spoken by the least educated character in it.
"Ellen got to her feet and hurried into the kitchen for coffee."
Ellen "hurried into the kitchen for coffee." She leaves at the moment Olsen praises her husband's mind, as if it were too much to hear, or too private.
The drive
The next scene jumps two months or more.
The old Chevrolet. They drive "an old Chevrolet that Joe Tampini had helped them patch up." In Part Three Hadley stood in a car lot admiring "a bulging tanklike Hudson." Now the family has an old car fixed by a friend. Tampini, the young salesman now selling on the floor Hadley left, has become a helper; the store's staff have stayed loyal to the family even as Hadley left the store. Ellen drives. In the whole of this chapter she is at the wheel, and Hadley looks out of the window.
Oaks. The country is "dry brown fields and mountains," with a "steady, unmoving blue haze" on the coast range and "cows lay dozing under clusters of ancient oak trees." This is the summer country of the Sonoma and Marin hills: brown grass, valley oaks and live oaks, coastal haze. In Chapter 21 the city basement had "a vast dirty palm" outside it, which Hadley wanted to saw down. The palm is the tree of the ornamental California of the boom; the oak is the tree of the old native country. The lot they buy will have "one old oak tree."
"'It's peaceful out here,' Ellen remarked."
The town. The description of the town is a list of what it is made of: "Decrepit, massive barns," "a towering grain and feed store," "a dilapidated hotel, a barbershop, a general supply store," and at the far end "a modern shopping center: a supermarket, a drugstore, a soda fountain." Then "a Shell station and a rotting garage." Old and new sit side by side: the barns and feed store of a farm town, and the supermarket of the 1950s. The "rotting garage" will be the last thing Hadley looks at in the book.
"Ellen parked the car. She and Hadley and Pete got out and roamed around. They crunched along a narrow gravel road; hot sunlight beat down on them and the expanse of brown fields."
"'It's hot,' Ellen said."
"'We're a long way from the city.' Hadley made out a sign on an old-fashioned yellow train depot; freight cars lay immobile on a siding."
Heat. "Hot sunlight beat down on them and the expanse of brown fields." "It's hot," Ellen says. The novel began in "the bright cold sunlight" of a June morning in Chapter 1, with Ellen holding up the covers to shield her husband from the window. It ends in the hottest light in the book, and nobody needs shielding. Part Four is called "Night," and every scene in it that matters happens in the sun.
Woodvalley Station
"WOODVALLEY STATION"
"'That's what it's called,' Ellen said, examining the map. 'Woodvalley Station, elevation twelve feet. The nearest big town is Petaluma.'"
Elevation twelve feet. The sign on "an old-fashioned yellow train depot" reads WOODVALLEY STATION. Ellen reads the map: "Woodvalley Station, elevation twelve feet. The nearest big town is Petaluma." Two oddities. First, there is no Woodvalley Station near Petaluma; the town seems to be invented, perhaps on the model of the small railroad towns of the North Bay that took their names from their depots, as Point Reyes Station in Marin County did. Second, they have just climbed "a long range of hills," and the town is twelve feet above sea level. Petaluma itself, on its tidal river, sits at about thirteen feet. A town at twelve feet could lie on the flats of the Petaluma River or the edge of San Pablo Bay, but not over a range of hills (see Flags). The detail is exact in the way of maps, and unreliable in the way of fiction.
"Nobody stirred. The town was quiet, unmoving, sound asleep in the midday summer heat. To the right of the gravel road stood a small white and green bungalow; bushes grew up its sides, and in the backyard were gnarled apricot trees. A vast old woman sitting in a rocker on the front porch watched them mildly as they passed."
Sound asleep. "The town was quiet, unmoving, sound asleep in the midday summer heat." The sleeping town recalls the sleeping Hadley of Chapter 1. The bungalow is "small white and green," with "gnarled apricot trees" behind it; on the porch is "A vast old woman sitting in a rocker" who watches them "mildly." Mildness is the note of the whole place.
"'That's like back home,' Ellen said. 'You see old women sitting around on front porches everywhere.'"
"'You don't see that everywhere,' Hadley said, indicating the backyard. Tied up among the fruit trees was a goat. The goat raised his head and glared belligerently at them until they were gone. Then he suspiciously resumed eating."
Back home. Ellen says, "That's like back home." She means the Bay Area towns she grew up in, or perhaps any American small town. Hadley corrects her: "You don't see that everywhere," and points to the goat tied among the fruit trees, who "glared belligerently at them until they were gone." The goat is the only angry creature in the chapter. Hadley's old belligerence has passed, it seems, to an animal on a rope.
"'If we lived out here we could have a goat.' Hadley set Pete down for a minute to light a cigarette. Pete, in his red and white summer suit, began staggering back toward the fence, back to the yard where the goat stood. 'Pete would like that. He could drive the goat out into the forest every day and load him up with faggots.'"
A fairy-tale line. Hadley imagines Pete driving the goat "out into the forest every day," to load him up with firewood. The word Hadley uses, quoted once above, is meant in its old sense of bundles of sticks for burning, the sense of European fairy tales where the poor woodcutter's child goes into the forest to gather firewood. It is a joke about a simple life, and it is the language of story books, not of 1950s California. There is no forest at Woodvalley Station, only brown fields and oaks. Hadley's image of country life is a picture from a children's book.
"'Is that how we'd live?' Ellen asked, smiling. 'That would be the problem... They don't have very many ice rinks around here.'"
"They don't have very many ice rinks around here." Ellen's practical question about how they would live is met with the start of an answer.
"After a moment Hadley said: 'They don't have anything. No shops of any kind, only groceries and farm supplies.'"
"'And the barbershop. And gas.'"
"'What happens when things break down? What do they do when their radios blow out tubes?'"
"'Maybe they don't have radios,' Ellen said."
"'All farmers have radios.'"
"'Then maybe that garage over there fixes them.'"
All farmers have radios. "They don't have anything." The town lacks every service but groceries, farm supplies, the barbershop and gas. Hadley's question is a repairman's question: "What do they do when their radios blow out tubes?" Ellen suggests they may not have radios; "All farmers have radios," he says, which by 1953 was nearly true (see Outside facts). Her last guess is "maybe that garage over there fixes them." Hadley does not answer. He is looking at the town as a set of unmet needs. And he is still, at bottom, a radio man: the first service he thinks of is the one he spent his working life selling.
The realtor and the lot
"Next to the drugstore was a tiny real estate office. Hadley and his family entered and seated themselves in front of the old-fashioned oak desk."
"'What sort of property did you have in mind?' the scrawny dried-up old realtor asked, fitting on his glasses and scrutinizing them. He unscrewed his fountain pen and pushed aside papers on his desk. 'This isn't resort country, you know. That's higher up, around the Russian River. I've got a wonderful cabin right on the river; city people like it up there, with all the redwoods.'"
Not resort country. The "scrawny dried-up old realtor" offers what city people want: "This isn't resort country, you know. That's higher up, around the Russian River. I've got a wonderful cabin right on the river; city people like it up there, with all the redwoods." The Russian River, a few dozen miles north in Sonoma County, was then the summer resort of the Bay Area, with cabins under the redwoods. The realtor assumes the Hadleys are city people looking for a weekend place, and he is selling them a holiday. Hadley wants the opposite.
"'I'm not interested in that,' Hadley said. 'I want something here in the farm country.'"
"I want something here in the farm country." The man who sold dreams for a living refuses the dream on offer.
"There was enough money in the bank for a lot, and nothing more. They left the realtor's office clutching the deposit receipt, feeling awed and foolish."
Awed and foolish. "There was enough money in the bank for a lot, and nothing more." They have savings; perhaps Ellen's wages, perhaps something from the sale of their things in Chapter 21, perhaps a first sum from Hadley's mother. The novel does not say. They leave "clutching the deposit receipt, feeling awed and foolish." It is the most exact description of a first property purchase in the novel. The Hadleys who bought furniture and appliances on easy terms through Part One now own a piece of ground outright, and they feel like children.
"'What are we going to do with it?' Ellen asked. 'It's just an empty lot... nothing but weeds and one old oak tree. We can't live up here, can we?' Wistfully she took her husband's arm, and he shifted Pete to the other side. 'Can you build a house? You can't build a house by yourself.'"
"'I can if you help,' Hadley answered."
Weeds and one old oak tree. The lot is "just an empty lot... nothing but weeds and one old oak tree." Ellen's questions come in a rush: "We can't live up here, can we?" "Can you build a house? You can't build a house by yourself." Hadley's answer is the simplest declaration of partnership in the novel: "I can if you help." In Chapter 21 he could not pour concrete steps; now he plans a house. The sentence also puts Ellen into the work, as she was on her knees with the tiles at the start of the chapter.
"'When?' Wildly, Ellen hurried to keep up with him as he strode back toward the car. 'Right away?'"
"'Not for a while,' Hadley answered. 'There's no hurry. I want to find out what kind of services they lack here... I want to find out what this town needs that it hasn't got.' He halted to peer around. 'Did you see any sign of an ice plant?'"
"'An ice plant!'"
What this town needs. "There's no hurry." And: "I want to find out what kind of services they lack here... I want to find out what this town needs that it hasn't got." It is the language of a careful businessman, and it is the reverse of the salesman's method. A salesman starts with a product and finds someone to sell it to; Hadley starts with the customer and looks for the need. "Did you see any sign of an ice plant?" Ellen's "An ice plant!" is half laughter and half dismay. The man who once dreamed of greatness wants to make ice for farmers.
"'I'm just thinking,' Hadley said as he opened the car door. 'Where do you suppose they go when they want shoes repaired?' On his face, on his ruined eroded face, was an expression of great seriousness."
"On his face, on his ruined eroded face, was an expression of great seriousness." The narration repeats the word face, as if correcting itself. The seriousness is the new note. The old Hadley was rarely serious; he was nervous, sullen, excited or afraid.
"'You can't fix shoes,' Ellen said gently."
"'It's not up to me to decide. It depends on what they want.'"
It depends on what they want. "You can't fix shoes," Ellen says "gently." Hadley's answer is the key to his new self: "It's not up to me to decide. It depends on what they want." He has handed over his wants to the market, or to the town. The salesman's creed of Part One, that customers can be made to want things, has been replaced by a servant's creed: find out what they want and supply it. It is modest, sensible and practical, and it has no Hadley in it.
"'Doesn't it depend on... what you want? I think that's important, too.' She added, 'It is to me.'"
"'I should find out what they need,' he repeated, with conviction. 'We'll come back up here now and then... There's no hurry. I'll talk to people and find out. We'll take our time.'"
It is to me. Ellen's reply is the most important line she speaks in the book: "Doesn't it depend on... what you want? I think that's important, too." She adds: "It is to me." She is asking for the husband she married, the man with wants, and she is telling him that his wants matter to her. He answers by repeating himself, "with conviction": "I should find out what they need." He has not heard her, or he has heard her and has nothing to give. "There's no hurry." "We'll take our time." Patience, again, has taken the place of desire.
The kiss
"Ellen started up the motor and they sat listening to it, waiting for it to smooth itself out. Beside her, Stuart sat with Pete on his lap, his hands resting on the baby's stomach. The serious expression remained; it had not gone away. Probably it was not going away. It was part of that face, part of that damaged bone and ruined tissue that Stuart Hadley had become."
Damaged bone and ruined tissue. Ellen starts the motor and they wait "for it to smooth itself out." The old engine and the man beside her are described in the same breath. Hadley sits "with Pete on his lap, his hands resting on the baby's stomach," and the serious expression "had not gone away. Probably it was not going away. It was part of that face, part of that damaged bone and ruined tissue that Stuart Hadley had become." The last clause is exact and terrible. Not the face that Stuart Hadley had, but the face he had become. The narration, which in Chapter 21 had him say he was "not Stuart Hadley at all," now uses his full name for the injured flesh.
"Gently, she reached up and smoothed his blond hair back, away from his ears. The warm country wind had blown it there, disorganized it, undone the careful combing that he patiently practiced each morning of his life. Stuart smiled at the pressure of her fingers."
"'Thanks,' he said."
The careful combing. She smooths "his blond hair back, away from his ears," undoing what "The warm country wind" did to "the careful combing that he patiently practiced each morning of his life." It is the last trace of the vain young salesman of Part One, the "pretty and blond" young man behind the counter. Whatever else has gone, the morning ritual remains. Ellen's gesture is maternal and tender, and he smiles "at the pressure of her fingers."
"'Can I kiss you?' she asked hopefully."
"'Sure.' He bent down a little, still holding the baby. She leaned up toward him, steadying herself with one hand, turning her face up to his. For an interval her lips touched his; against her, his mouth was calm, not withdrawn, but almost without emotion."
Almost without emotion. She asks "hopefully" if she can kiss him, and he says "Sure." The kiss is described from her side: "his mouth was calm, not withdrawn, but almost without emotion." Each word in the phrase cancels a fear. Not withdrawn: he does not reject her. Calm: he is not afraid. But "almost without emotion": he is not there. The word "almost" is where the whole ending lives.
"Troubled, she sank back. 'You're not very... I mean, you seem so far away.'"
"'No,' he said. 'I'm right here.'"
"You seem so far away." "No... I'm right here." Both are true. He is physically present and contented; she cannot reach him.
"And then she remembered what she had found there, that morning, as she bent over him in the instant of awakening. The terror that had risen then, the timid fright that had quivered across his mouth as she kissed him. The fear was gone now."
That morning. "And then she remembered what she had found there, that morning, as she bent over him in the instant of awakening." The most natural reading is the dated morning of Chapter 1, Thursday 5 June 1952, when Ellen bent over her sleeping husband and "gently touched her lips against his timid, anxious mouth." In Chapter 1 she watched the terror grow in his sleeping face: "A sullen, uneasy distaste; and with it a growing terror." Now, thirteen months later, "The fear was gone now." The novel ends by returning to its first scene, the wife bending over the husband's mouth, and finding the opposite of what she found then. The text does not name the morning, so the reading is the guide's, but the match of kiss, mouth and fear is close.
"'You're not afraid anymore,' she said wonderingly. 'I didn't realize.'"
"'It's gone,' he agreed. 'Finally.'"
"You're not afraid anymore," "wonderingly." "It's gone," he agrees. "Finally." For Hadley this is relief. For Ellen it is the beginning of grief.
Ellen's wish, granted. In Chapter 1 Ellen watched her sleeping husband and thought him "without rancor or excitement or knowledge," "Perfectly content to lie," and "She wished he could always be like this, utterly peaceful, not needing, not suffering, not driven by any knowing of things." The last chapter grants the wish. A few lines from the end the narration says: "He was without rancor. He blamed nobody... He was content." The phrase "without rancor" appears in both places, and nowhere else in the novel's account of Hadley. Dick has shaped the ending as the fulfilment of a wish made on page one, and shown that the wish, granted, is unbearable.
The glass wall
"'Do you... ,' she began haltingly. It was hard to say; she was afraid of the answer. 'Do you really think you'd be happy here? Away from the city?'"
"The dreadful answer came without hesitation. 'Yes,' he said."
The dreadful answer. She is "afraid of the answer," and asks: "Do you really think you'd be happy here? Away from the city?" "The dreadful answer came without hesitation. 'Yes,' he said." The word "dreadful" is the narration taking Ellen's side completely. For the length of a word the reader is asked to feel as Ellen does: that a "Yes" given without hesitation, by this man, about this place, is a kind of death notice.
"In anguish, she protested: 'There wouldn't be much to do! There isn't anything here... There's nothing. It's just a drab little country town.' Gazing fearfully up into his ruined face, she demanded: 'Don't you want more? Your ability...'"
"'Wrong,' Hadley said. 'There's plenty to do here.'"
Your ability. She protests, "In anguish": "There wouldn't be much to do! There isn't anything here." "It's just a drab little country town." "Don't you want more? Your ability..." She breaks off. The unfinished phrase is everything she believed in him: the talent, the intelligence, the "something on the ball" that even Olsen saw. Hadley's "Wrong" is a single word, and it closes the subject. "There's plenty to do here."
"He did not seem to know that nothing of him had survived. None of the dreams, the driving fury that had made him strike out, frenzied and irrational, against the indestructible glass wall of the world. He had broken himself against that wall; the world had remained." This is the novel's verdict, given through Ellen. The glass door of Modern, which Hadley went through head first in Chapter 20, becomes in her mind "the indestructible glass wall of the world." The door broke. The wall did not.
And he didn't even know it. The last clause, "And he didn't even know it," is "the terrible part, the part she couldn't bear." What survives is a man who is content because he does not know what he has lost. Notice that the dreams and the fury go together. Ellen grieves for both: the ambitions she loved and the rage that destroyed them were one thing, and the cure has taken both.
"'Is there?' she asked wildly. 'Is there really something for you here? You'd be satisfied?'"
"Is there?" "Is there really something for you here? You'd be satisfied?" Ellen asks "wildly," twice. She is trying to provoke the old discontent, to find any sign of the man who wanted more.
"He took her hand; around her flesh his fingers were strong and hard. There was no bitterness in the pressure, only total certainty. He was without rancor. He blamed nobody, not himself, not her, no one and nothing. He was content."
Strong and hard. "He took her hand; around her flesh his fingers were strong and hard." The hands that a year ago were a salesman's are now a workman's. "There was no bitterness in the pressure, only total certainty." Then the litany: "He was without rancor. He blamed nobody, not himself, not her, no one and nothing. He was content." The paragraph is the calmest in the novel and the most frightening. Every word of it would be praise in a different book.
Natural law
"'It isn't anybody's fault,' he said. 'A thing like this is...' He grinned. 'The result of natural law. You put your hand on the stove and you get burned. You bump into a door in the dark and you get a black eye.'"
Hand on the stove. "It isn't anybody's fault." Then, with a grin: "The result of natural law. You put your hand on the stove and you get burned. You bump into a door in the dark and you get a black eye." Two images, both of everyday accidents. The stove is the one he was mending at the end of Chapter 21, "the corroded stove." The second image is a grim joke on his own injury: you bump into a door in the dark and get a black eye. What actually happened was that he went through a glass door at night and lost an eye. He has turned the catastrophe into a household mishap, and he grins as he does it.
Marsha's doctrine, secular. "Natural law" has been said before in this novel. In Chapter 12, at the Watchmen's camp, the woman who interviewed Hadley told him: "Nobody decides who can be saved. Nobody selects, like a draft board picking eligible men. You're saved for the same reason a ball rolls downhill... because of natural laws." Hadley then said, "It isn't fair. I have to do something." Now he says it himself, of his own ruin: "The result of natural law." He has accepted the doctrine he resisted, with the religion taken out. Salvation by natural law has become damage by natural law. Both leave nobody to blame and nothing to do but accept.
The fault chain closes. Fault is a running thread of Part Three and the climax.
- Chapter 18. The voices over him in the street: "His own fault," and "It's his own fault."
- Chapter 19. When the couple on the street turn on him, Hadley answers: "My fault."
- Chapter 20. Fergesson, after the glass door: "It's my fault."
- Chapter 21. Tampini reports: "I think he feels it was his fault," and "I think he feels responsible."
- Chapter 22. Hadley: "It isn't anybody's fault." And: "He blamed nobody, not himself, not her, no one and nothing."
The chain runs from blame laid on Hadley, through blame he takes and blame Fergesson takes, to the refusal of blame altogether.
"Blindly, Ellen released the brake and the car moved forward."
Blindly. "Blindly, Ellen released the brake and the car moved forward." The word is chosen. The one-eyed man is the one who sees nothing wrong; the wife with two good eyes drives "Blindly," probably through tears, though the text does not say. The novel's last image of motion is a car going forward with its driver unable to see. Hadley is the passenger, looking out.
The last line. Hadley watches "the tumbledown garage slide past," the "rotting garage" of the town, which might fix radios or might be the place he will rent. The narration insists that the line is not thought but recital: "reciting something learned," "repeating something," "cut into the deepest matrix." It is the speech of a man who has been trained, as the discipline of tool maintenance "was taught him." The final sentence of the novel is cheerful, practical and empty. A list of jobs is all the future Hadley has, and it is enough for him.
Read the other way, it is the sentence of a man who has been reduced to his functions, whose inner life has been burned out and replaced by a task list. The narration gives Ellen's reading the last word, but the sentence itself is Hadley's, and he means it.
How the chapter is built
The chapter has three movements, like Chapter 21, and they are laid out the same way: scene, summary, scene. The first is a single night, the message and the refusal, told in dialogue on the kitchen floor. The second is about eight months in summary and one long evening: the three jobs, the refrigerator, the heating, then the dinner and the pitch, which is the longest dialogue in Part Four. The third is a single late-July day: the drive, the town, the realtor, the lot, and the scene in the parked car, which ends the novel.
The proportions are telling. The months of work get a few paragraphs. The business plan gets the longest single conversation. The ending, in the car, is told slowly, almost line by line, and the point of view shifts decisively to Ellen. Through Part Four the narration has stayed close to Hadley; in the last scene we see him from outside, through her eyes, and the effect is to make him a stranger. The reader, who has spent most of the novel inside his head, is put out of it in the last two pages.
The chapter also closes the novel's large threads, one by one.
Threads the chapter closes.
- Fergesson and the store. The offer to return is refused twice, politely, and O'Neill's is to be sold. The father-son struggle of the novel ends in indifference.
- Selling. The salesman makes his last pitch, for a business that lets people stop buying.
- Hands and tools. Ellen's diagnosis of Chapter 6, that he wanted to express himself "through his hands," is answered by a year of manual work and a tool-rental plan.
- Ice and cold. The "icy asphalt tile" of Chapter 1, the icebox of Chapter 21, the ice rink, the refrigerator, the ice plant.
- Glass and eyes. The glass door becomes the "indestructible glass wall"; the black eye in the joke; the "one peeper"; Ellen driving "Blindly."
- The stove. From "the corroded stove" of Chapter 21 to "You put your hand on the stove and you get burned."
- Trees. The city palm he wanted to cut down; the "ancient oak trees" of the country; the lot with "one old oak tree."
- Fault. From "His own fault" to "It isn't anybody's fault."
- Money. From "I want to make this alone" (Chapter 3) to "get it from my mother."
- Ellen's wish. From "not needing, not suffering" in Chapter 1 to "He was content."
- Night. A part titled "Night" ends in the hottest sunlight of the book.
Reading the diagram. The chain follows the chapter in reading order. The first two boxes are the night of the message. The next four are the months of work, each a step up in mechanical skill. Boxes seven to nine are the dinner: the news about O'Neill's, the pitch and Olsen's refusal. The last five are the July day, from the town to the final line.
The earlier, shorter version of this guide carried a smaller diagram for this chapter, kept here for comparison.
| Chapter 1 (June 1952) | Chapter 22 (July 1953) | |
|---|---|---|
| Light | "The bright cold sunlight" of a June morning | "Hot sunlight beat down on them" |
| Floor | "The icy asphalt tile of the floor" | Squares of asphalt tile, laid by hand |
| Ellen and his mouth | She kisses his "timid, anxious mouth" | "Calm, not withdrawn, but almost without emotion" |
| His fear | "A sullen, uneasy distaste; and with it a growing terror" | "The fear was gone now"; "It's gone... Finally" |
| Ellen's wish | "Utterly peaceful, not needing, not suffering" | Granted: "He was content," and it appals her |
| Rancor | Asleep, "without rancor or excitement or knowledge" | Awake, "He was without rancor" |
| Work | Salesman at Modern TV, dreading the day | Tool crib, parks, ice rink; plans a rental shop |
| Money | Easy terms; "I want to make this alone" (Chapter 3) | A lot bought outright; "get it from my mother" |
| Face | Good-looking, blond, carefully combed | "Ruined eroded face"; the combing still practised |
| Ellen's body | "Protecting him with her body" from the window | At the wheel; she drives off "Blindly" |
| Old guide (short version) | What the book says | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Alice came to her office and got the address from Ellen's mother | "She found out where I work from my mother" | Confirmed |
| Three jobs and a refrigerator | Pipe factory, city parks, ice rink; then the Westinghouse | Confirmed |
| Radiant heating, the comfort Fergesson boasted of at his dinner (Chapter 13) | Chapter 13: "And I put in radiant heating"; "I laid the pipes and then the tile over it" | Confirmed |
| Contractors laugh at you if you ask to rent a mixer or sander | "Try to rent a mixer, a floor sander, heavy-duty paint sprayers, and they laugh at you" | Confirmed |
| Rented by the hour, the day | "By the hour, the day, whatever people want" | Confirmed |
| Olsen: Hadley wanted something better than a two-bit salesman job | "You wanted something better than a two-bit salesman job" | Confirmed |
| Fault chain: My fault (the German) | Chapter 19: Hadley himself says "My fault" | Corrected: the line is Hadley's, not another speaker's |
| That morning, apparently the June morning of Chapter 1 | "That morning, as she bent over him in the instant of awakening" | Confirmed as a reading; the text does not name the morning |
| Twelve feet fits Petaluma (about 13 ft) | "Elevation twelve feet. The nearest big town is Petaluma" | Confirmed; see Flags |
| United Rent-Alls franchises open in Illinois by 1954; American Rental Association 1955 | No rental business is named in the novel | Confirmed as outside facts (see below) |
| Marsha is never mentioned again | No mention in Chapters 21 and 22 | Confirmed |
A CLOSER LOOK: healed or emptied? The ending is the most argued-over part of the novel, and Dick built it to hold two readings at once. On the first, Hadley is cured. A man who spent a year sliding into rage, drink, cruelty and violence, who raped and beat a woman (Chapter 16), abused a friend with a slur and finally threw himself through a glass door, has come out the other side as a quiet worker with a plan, a family and a piece of land. He blames nobody and hurts nobody. By most ordinary standards, that is recovery. On the second reading, the one Ellen holds and the narration voices, the man has not been healed but hollowed out. "Nothing of him had survived." His contentment is the contentment of someone who no longer knows what he wanted. The evidence for this reading is in the details: the "almost without emotion," the "reciting something learned," the expression that "was not going away," the word "dreadful." The evidence for the first is in the facts: he works, he plans, he is gentle and he is kind. Neither reading is complete without the other. What Dick will not allow is a simple happy ending. The wish Ellen made on the first page has been granted, and the novel's last scene is her horror at it.
A CLOSER LOOK: what the ending forgets. The chapter's calm is bought partly by silence. Marsha Frazier, whom Hadley raped and beat, is not mentioned; nor is the law, beyond "the legal arrangements"; nor the night Pete spent locked in the car. "It isn't anybody's fault" is, from one side, a man's hard-won peace. From the side of the people he harmed, it is a refusal of responsibility, said with a grin. Dick may mean the reader to hear both. Hadley blames nobody, "not himself," and the novel has given us good reason to blame him. A modern reader is right to notice that the man's serenity costs him nothing in the eyes of the story, and that the only person who grieves at the end is grieving for him, not for anyone he hurt. The guide's earlier version raised this point, and it stands.
A CLOSER LOOK: Dick's ending and the 1950s. The novel was written in the early 1950s and not published until 2007, long after Dick's death in 1982. Its ending reads now as a quiet attack on the decade's ideal of adjustment: the man who stops wanting, accepts his lot, works with his hands and settles in the suburbs or the country is shown as a man with nothing left inside. It also anticipates the turn Dick's own life took, away from the record and radio shops of Berkeley where he worked as a young man, towards a life in the country north of San Francisco (he moved to Point Reyes Station in 1958). The guide does not claim that Hadley is Dick. The novel's ending shows both a longing for the plain life and a fear of what it might cost.
A $2,000 kit for a $50 job is the case for pooling idle capital, and Olsen's objections are a fair list of what makes such businesses succeed or fail. Four points carry over.
- Pay for use. "By the hour, the day, whatever people want" is the pricing of cloud computing and GPU rental, where firms rent processing by the hour or second instead of buying servers that sit idle. The case is the same as Hadley's: when the asset is expensive and the need is occasional, ownership is waste. Amazon began renting computing capacity by the hour in 2006 on exactly that logic.
- Utilisation and servicing are the business. "You'll have to service them all" is the operating cost of any shared asset. Equipment lessors, car-rental firms and cloud providers all live or die on utilisation (how much of the time the asset earns) and on maintenance (the cost of getting it back into shape between users). A bank lending to an equipment-rental business looks at exactly these two numbers, and at the age and condition of the fleet. Hadley's year of learning "The discipline of tool maintenance" is, in this light, the most valuable part of his preparation.
- Capital and its source. Olsen's "it'll take plenty of loot" is right: rental firms need large up-front capital before the first rental, and Hadley's comes from family. Hadley has the equity and none of the track record, and Olsen says so.
- Needs-first discovery. "I want to find out what this town needs that it hasn't got" is the method of good product and architecture work: find the unmet need before you build. It is also the reverse of the push-selling Hadley did at Modern, where the job was to move stock on easy terms. Ellen's question, "Doesn't it depend on... what you want?", is the warning that a team which serves only the customer's wants, and never its own sense of what is worth doing, can lose the thing that made it good.
Olsen's "It'll eventually put me out of business" belongs here too. Every shift from ownership to access leaves some skilled trade behind, as rental and self-service did to the television repairman. Architects who move a bank onto shared platforms face the same human cost in their own teams.
Flags for this chapter.
- Police hospital or county hospital. Here "the police hospital"; in Chapter 21 "the prison ward of the county hospital." Possibly the same place described two ways.
- Elevation twelve feet. The family climb "a long range of hills" and arrive at a town "elevation twelve feet." Petaluma itself, on its tidal river, is about 13 feet. A town at twelve feet would lie on the river flats or the bay margin, not over the hills.
- Woodvalley Station. I found no place of that name near Petaluma or in Sonoma or Marin County; it seems to be invented.
- No such course. Hadley thinks "there seemed to be no such course" in refrigeration. Courses were widely advertised (see Outside facts). The word "seemed" makes this his impression, not a fact the narrator vouches for.
- Two years ago. "Two years ago nobody would have poured his own concrete...now everybody does." A salesman's exaggeration in both directions. Home concrete work was growing fast, but neither "nobody" nor "everybody" is literal.
- Heating in May. In Chapter 21 the heating "could wait; it was still some time before winter." It is installed in May, after the winter it was needed for.
- All day long. Hadley says he handed out tools "all day long"; the narration put the shift "from midnight to nine in the morning." A natural slip in talk.
- The soldering iron. "All you need for that is a two-dollar soldering iron and a pair of pliers" is a boast, not a fact about building a television receiver in 1953.
- Korea. The war that ran through Part Three, including Fergesson's dinner speech in Chapter 13, is not mentioned. The armistice was signed on 27 July 1953, which falls in the "late July" of the drive. The novel does not say so, and Dick may not have intended the coincidence.
- Money. "Enough money in the bank for a lot, and nothing more." The source of the money is not stated. Hadley's mother is the funder of the planned business, not necessarily of the lot.
- Marsha. Not mentioned in Part Four.
Outside facts checked for this chapter.
- Tool rental. Leonard Hawk opened United Rent-Alls franchises in Moline and Rock Island, Illinois, in 1954, and in 1955 helped found the association of rental operators that became the American Rental Association (renamed in 1961). Hadley's plan, set in 1953, is a year or so ahead of the organised industry.
- Do-it-yourself. TIME's cover of 2 August 1954 was devoted to Do-It-Yourself: The New Billion Dollar Hobby, treating home improvement as a national craze. Black & Decker launched its Home Utility line in 1946, the first power tools marketed to consumers, and its quarter-inch drill sold a million units by about 1951.
- Popular Mechanics. Founded in Chicago in 1902 by Henry Haven Windsor, the best-known American magazine of home projects and mechanical hobbies.
- Refrigeration courses. The December 1950 issue of Popular Science carried an International Correspondence Schools coupon listing a Refrigeration course, and a technical-school advertisement offering a Refrigeration Serviceman certificate in six months.
- Belt-driven refrigerators. Early electric refrigerators drove an open compressor from a separate motor by a belt; sealed hermetic units, pioneered by General Electric's Monitor Top of 1927, replaced them during the following decade.
- Radiant floor heating. Hot-water pipes laid under floors were popular in American housing of the late 1940s and early 1950s; the Levittown houses on Long Island used hot-water coils in concrete slabs.
- Farm radios. By 1953 well over 90 percent of American farms had electricity, according to the electric cooperatives' own histories; radio ownership was close to universal by the early 1950s.
- Petaluma. In Sonoma County, about 32 miles north of San Francisco, at an elevation of about 13 feet on the tidal Petaluma River; population 10,315 in 1950; known as the Egg Capital of the World.
- The Russian River. Guerneville and the lower Russian River in Sonoma County were a Bay Area summer resort from the late nineteenth century, reached by rail from 1877 and by car later, with cabins among the redwoods; still popular in the 1950s.
- Point Reyes Station. A Marin County town that began as a stop on the North Pacific Coast Railroad in 1875 and took its present name in 1891; Dick moved there in 1958.
- Korean War. The armistice was signed at Panmunjom on 27 July 1953.
- Turret lathe. A lathe with an indexing turret holding several tools, allowing one operator to perform a sequence of cuts quickly; widely used in wartime production.
- Prices. The United States consumer price index rose by a factor of about 11.8 from 1953 to 2025 (Bureau of Labor Statistics data), used for the rough conversion in the box on the pitch.
- Cloud computing. Amazon Web Services launched its Elastic Compute Cloud in 2006, renting virtual servers by the hour (used in the IN PRACTICE box).
Takeaways from Chapter 22
- Tile at night. The last chapter opens with Hadley and Ellen on their knees laying asphalt tile, the floor of the first page of the novel and the job Fergesson told them to do in Chapter 6.
- The refusal. "Tell her to thank Fergesson and tell him I'm not coming back." Ellen: "Thank God." He says it again over Olsen's stew.
- Blurred. The police hospital, the judge and the lawyers are "blurred and uncertain in his mind." The law is never told.
- Three jobs. Night shift in a pipe-factory tool crib, the city parks, the ice rink. Each is a step up in mechanical skill.
- Discipline. "The discipline of tool maintenance was taught him": clean, oiled, put away. Ellen said in Chapter 6 he lacked discipline.
- Hands-on. He learns refrigeration from an old belt-driven Westinghouse on the floor, not from books, thought or talk.
- Radiant heat. He lays it with his own hands, as Fergesson did in Chapter 13. "After a fashion, it worked."
- O'Neill's sold. Fergesson is "too damn old and broken-down" to run two stores. Hadley is "suddenly perturbed," and still says no.
- The pitch. A rental shop for people who now do their own work: "By the hour, the day, whatever people want." It begins with a need, not a product.
- Olsen's view. The idea is "great"; Hadley would "go broke"; and "It'll eventually put me out of business."
- "I'm a bum." Olsen refuses the partnership because he knows he would leave Hadley "holding the bag," and tells him he has "something on the ball."
- Mother's money. The man who wanted to "make this alone" will now write back east for the capital.
- Woodvalley. An invented farm town near Petaluma, "elevation twelve feet," with barns, a feed store, a goat and a rotting garage.
- The lot. Weeds and "one old oak tree," bought with all they have. "I can if you help."
- What it needs. "It depends on what they want." Ellen: "Doesn't it depend on... what you want?... It is to me."
- The kiss. "Calm, not withdrawn, but almost without emotion." The fear of the Chapter 1 kiss is gone.
- Glass wall. "Nothing of him had survived." He broke himself against the "indestructible glass wall of the world"; "the world had remained."
- Natural law. "It isn't anybody's fault." Hand on the stove, a door in the dark, a black eye. Marsha's doctrine, with the religion taken out.
- Blindly. Ellen drives off "Blindly."
Main Points
- The enemy is inside, as the epigraph warns. Hadley blames the masses, the Jews, the store, the baby and his wife, and every enemy dissolves on contact; Mills's line about people "betrayed by what is false within them" is the plot in one sentence.
- He is looking for grace, and no one can give it. Ellen names it in Chapter 4: "A hundred years ago it was called grace. It's a search for someone he can have faith in." Fergesson, Beckheim and Marsha are each tried for the part, and each fails it or refuses it.
- A cause sells an identity plus an enemy. Marsha tells a TV salesman he is a painter, gives him mass culture and then, "matter-of-factly," the Jews to blame, and has him in three days; the recruiting script works because it flatters what he already wants to believe.
- The one honest prophet hands the burden back. Beckheim reads Hadley's wallet aloud, sells him a card for a dollar fifty and says "I can't make you well... But you can. It's up to you." Hadley hears the only true thing in the sect as rejection.
- A store is firm, but it is not a world. Fergesson's shop is a "neat little cosmos" made fresh each morning; for Hadley it is "not big enough to be a world. You can't live in a store," and the promotion meant to save him closes the trap.
- His violence is chosen, and the book says so. The coast road was "not a sexual thing"; the motel rape was decided "in the silent hours of the previous night," and "he enjoyed hurting her." Dick refuses to make Hadley's acts weather.
- The fault passes from hand to hand until it reaches physics. "His own fault" (the San Francisco street), "My fault" (Hadley to the German couple), "It isn't his fault; it's your fault and everybody else's" (Ellen to Fergesson), "It's my fault" (Fergesson at the shattered door), and at last "It isn't anybody's fault... The result of natural law." Beckheim had preached that a suspended natural law would be "a denial of God" (Chapter 5), and Marsha had said people are saved "for the same reason a ball rolls downhill" (Chapter 12). Hadley ends with the doctrine and without the God.
- The ending holds two readings and will not choose. Hadley is calm, practical, good with tools, kind to his son and planning a business; Ellen sees that "nothing of him had survived," and that he broke himself against "the indestructible glass wall of the world" while "the world had remained."
- Every father fails, and the son repeats the failure. Fergesson polishes a counter and thinks "If he had had a son he would have come out right"; Beckheim refuses to be anyone's father; Bob Sorrell bullies; Hadley, the only real father among them, locks Pete in a car outside a bar and plans to hand him to Beckheim. Dick's own parents separated when he was a small boy, and absent or false fathers run through all his later work.
- The resentment is older than any cause. The boy who smashed his toys, the girl hit with a hoe in childhood (remembered in Chapter 5 and again by Sally), the temper his sister says she "teased" out of him, the "archaic fury" that could pull down "the only world in which he could exist": the book insists the fury was there before Marsha or Beckheim gave it a name. In Chapter 16 he feels it as a core that "did not seem really to be his sole property."
- He knows what he is, and the knowledge changes nothing. "We're not rebels... we're traitors," he tells Marsha, and "the fault is in me." Self-insight in this novel is accurate and useless, which is one of its bleakest ideas.
- Truth "in the old sense" is whatever pleases. Marsha's statements ring with "the higher veracity of pleasantness... it pleased the teller and the hearer." Hadley's lie that he paints, Marsha's changing history (twenty-six and divorced in one chapter, thirty-two, married and the mother of three in another) and Bob's boom-time talk all live by that rule.
- Polish is not provenance. Succubus "looked like Fortune," on thick book-bond paper, and has no circulation; Hadley's starched shirts cover panic; the basement's cheap white enamel hides "a lovely old walnut." Dick keeps asking what lies under a finish, years before The Man in the High Castle made genuine against fake its whole subject.
- Belonging is issued, and it can be withdrawn. The blue card, of which "only a few dozen" exist, comes from Beckheim's own hand and is torn into the gutter; the white card the usher asks for in Chapter 17 is one Hadley never had; the store key stops fitting; the name "Stuart Hadley" becomes "something to answer to." Access is the last thing he loses and the first thing the book takes from him.
- Money is counted to the cent, and the count is the fall. $250 plus 5%, a $1.50 membership, $300 plus 1% of gross, a hundred-dollar settlement, ten dollars left on a dresser as an "intended irony," $53.22 counted in a doorway, five dollars and no dime, $3.95 left, "four hundred down." The descent can be read as a ledger.
- The postwar boom runs on credit, defaults and repossession. Bob settles veterans at "five bills down" on forty-year loans and gets "the shacks back in six, eight years"; he buys the furnishings of 342 condemned flats for seventy-five dollars because nobody else bid; the Hudson is "four hundred down" with no price quoted; in Chapter 21 the refrigerator, stove and television go back and only the paid-for furniture stays.
- Fergesson's tragedy runs alongside Hadley's. The self-made creator of Modern dreads the chains, buys O'Neill's rather than growing it, plays poker in a concrete cellar while the faithful march overhead, changes the lock, watches through a snow globe and opens the door. "It's my fault" is the one sentence in the book in which someone accepts blame and a duty at once: he goes to call Ellen himself.
- Women carry the cost, and the ending forgets one of them. Ellen carries the baby, the money, the diagnosis and finally the man; Alice arranges the promotion and then says "Out!"; Sally shaped his temper; Marsha is raped, beaten and robbed of her car, and after Chapter 16 the novel never says what became of her. It also never says how Pete was found or what the court decided, which lets the last chapter read as recovery without a reckoning.
- Cranks gather where purity is sold. The health-food store and its celery extract, Wakefield's fear of poisoned vaccines, Mrs. Krafft and the Society's hunger for the end, a follower's nostalgia for the Nazis, Fergesson's poker players and their "marching morons": the novel draws a whole town of people sure the world is about to be cleansed, and only some of them are in the sect.
- The bystander city fails him three times, and a bar does not. On the San Francisco street the sentences of help break off ("Maybe we better..." "No. He'll be all right." "His own fault."); the young men in a bar the book draws as a 1952 caricature are the only people who try to look after him. The blindfold game is his life in one image: grope for someone "To pass the blindfold on."
- There is no map out. He steals maps of states he has never seen from a car with Maryland plates; the hotel's rack covers only the Bay, the county and the town, "Not even California"; a car like that "could go anywhere," all the way to Canada. The road he takes in the end runs north to a farm town near Petaluma, elevation twelve feet, with "No shops of any kind, only groceries and farm supplies."
- Hands outlast talk. Ellen praises his "wonderful sensitive hands" to sell the promotion; Beckheim tells him he has "interesting hands"; in Part Four he learns tool discipline, refrigeration on an old belt-driven Westinghouse and radiant heat, and the narrator notes that such things are not learned "by thinking about it. Or even... by talking about it." The talkative salesman ends as a man who works with his hands and hardly speaks.
- He wakes without a self again and again. The jail cell and "What the hell are you?" (Chapter 1), the German couple's bed and "Who was he?" (Chapters 18-19), the face in the broken mirror and the man who is "not Stuart Hadley at all" (Chapter 21). Each waking strips a little more.
- Descent has a geography. Hayes Hole, the dip in the city where Marsha lives, the poker cellar, the San Francisco gutter, the transient hotel and the basement flat where the Hadleys live "like Mister and Mrs. Mole" lead step by step downward, and the last scene stands on a lot at sea level under an open sky.
- The prejudice is the period's, and the book is uneven about it. Antisemitism, anti-Black racism and contempt for gay men drive key scenes (Marsha's magazine and her slur on Beckheim followed by "But," Hadley's slur on Dave Gold, the bar). Dick shows them as symptoms of the fury, and the Jewish friend Hadley abuses is the man who drives him home, yet the targets rarely get to speak for themselves.
- Period detail is exact. Stonestown, a Hudson with Hydra-Matic, credit terms that returned after controls ended in 1952, Ford's planned Milpitas plant, the Roosevelt men Hillman and Hopkins in Fergesson's grievances, Kornbluth's "marching morons" of 1951: the book is a record of the Bay Area in the summer of 1952 as well as a novel about one man.
- It seeds later Dick in realist dress. A TV shop and its owner, a prophet with a cosmology, a cult awaiting the end, repairmen and their tools, a mind coming apart, a world that "remained," and a question about what is genuine under the finish all reappear in the science fiction.
- It is stronger as a portrait than as a plot. The book is long, melodramatic in its last third and careless with dates, and it leans on coincidence; its best passages, Fergesson's mornings, Beckheim's sermon, the San Francisco night and the quiet, unsettling last page, are as good as anything Dick wrote in his twenties.
| Framework | What it says | Where | Use it when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inner betrayal (Mills) | People who cannot find their outside enemies are defeated by what is false within them | Epigraph, every Part | Reading Hadley's self-sabotage, or any grievance that keeps changing its target |
| The search for grace | A vague longing for someone who "won't let him down," with no name and no object | Ch4, Ch11, Ch15 | Seeing why each father and each cause fails him |
| Identity plus an enemy | A cause hands you a flattering self and someone to blame for your small life | Ch9-10, Ch12 | Spotting how extremist movements recruit |
| Marsha's recruitment script | Secrecy, a shared grievance, learning as credential, the payload told "matter-of-factly," a diagnosis of his soul, a new self, access to the leader with a deadline, a small task that isolates | Ch9-10 | Recognising grooming by a person or a movement |
| Truth "in the old sense" | A statement is true if it pleases the teller and the hearer | Ch9 | Judging stories people tell because both sides enjoy them |
| Beckheim's catechism | Confession, a full inventory of the self, membership for a fee, and the burden handed back | Ch11 | Seeing how a sect binds a member, and where it refuses to |
| The default is a decision | "It will not suffice to plead that you made no choice"; the gun in the rack cannot refuse, a man can | Ch5 | Weighing Hadley's drift as a choice |
| Store as cosmos | The owner makes order each morning; chaos creeps back at the edges | Ch1, Ch13, Ch20 | Reading Fergesson and small business ownership |
| Grow or shrink | Expand, or the chains swallow you; buy growth if you cannot grow it | Ch4, Ch22 | Fergesson's O'Neill's gamble and its sale |
| Originate to repossess | Lend thin, expect default, take the asset back and resell | Ch7-8, Ch21 | Bob Sorrell's tracts and the Hadleys' repossessed appliances |
| The why-chain | Trace a fault back through each cause to the part that failed | Ch14 | Hadley's repair talk with Alice |
| The fault chain | Blame moves from self to others to "natural law" | Ch12, Ch17-20, Ch22 | Judging the ending |
| Access over ownership | Rent costly tools "By the hour, the day, whatever people want" | Ch22 | Hadley's business plan and Olsen's warning |
| Motif | Moves through | What it carries |
|---|---|---|
| Blue and white cards | Ch11 issued, Ch12 torn, Ch14 explained, Ch17 demanded | Belonging granted by one man and thrown away |
| Keys and locks | Ch1 Fergesson's keys, Ch16 Marsha's keys, Ch20 the new Yale lock | Who may enter which world |
| The paintings | Ch9 the lie, Ch12 left in her car, Ch15 delivered home | A false self that comes back by parcel |
| Celery extract | Ch2 the errand, Ch17 the cruel joke, Ch20 thrown away | The store's small duties, and Hadley's relics |
| Glass | Ch1 shop window, Ch20 the snow globe and the door, Ch21 the mirror, Ch22 "glass wall of the world" | The barrier between Hadley and the world, and what breaks on it |
| The fault chain | Ch12, Ch17, Ch18, Ch19, Ch20, Ch22 | Blame looking for an owner |
| Eyes | Ch2 the television's single eye, Ch20 the glass, Ch21 the blind side | The fantasy of shooting the eye that comes true on his own face |
| Maps and roads | Ch10-12 the coast road, Ch19 "Not even California," Ch20 stolen maps, Ch22 Woodvalley | Escape imagined, and the small road actually taken |
| Walnut under paint | Ch21, set against Succubus and the starched shirts | The genuine under the cheap finish |
| The Waring blender | Ch8 the castoff, Ch21 kept | Sally's condescension, and what survives the repossession |
| Cellars and basements | Ch11 Hayes Hole, Ch17 poker cellar, Ch21 the Moles | Descent and shelter |
| Hands | Ch13 "sensitive hands," Ch11 "interesting hands," Ch21-22 tools | The self that outlasts the talker |
| Whiskey | Ch1 the drunk, Ch12 "the water of life," Ch16-18 drinking "methodically" | Warmth that numbs and then erases |
| Wakings | Ch1 cell, Ch19 strange bed, Ch21 the mirror | A self lost a little more each time |
| The full name | Ch11 "This is Stuart Hadley," Ch21 "not Stuart Hadley at all," "something to answer to" | Identity as a label others read off him |
| Mirrored pair | First side | Second side | What the pairing shows |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chapter 1, two mornings | Fergesson makes light in his store | Hadley wakes in a cell | The creator and the drifter on the same dawn |
| Chapters 6 and 7 | Ellen and Fergesson on a Sunday | Hadley at the Sorrells' the same Sunday | Two kinds of care, and his absence from one |
| Chapters 12 and 16 | The coast road: coercion, "not a sexual thing" | The motel: rape and a planned beating | The same act, worse, and this time decided |
| Chapters 11 and 17 | Beckheim hands him a blue card | An usher turns him away without a white one | The control works; the person it was for is shut out |
| Chapter 20, two sides of the glass | Hadley outside: "Let me in!" | Fergesson inside, with the snow globe | Each locked in his own world |
| Chapters 1 and 20 | The store opened like Genesis | The store dead, its relics cleared | Creation undone in a single summer |
| Chapters 4 and 22 | Fergesson buys O'Neill's | He sells it, "too damn old and broken-down" | Growth bought, and given back |
| Chapters 1 and 22 | Ellen kisses his "timid, anxious mouth"; he leaves without kissing her | A kiss "calm, not withdrawn, but almost without emotion" | The timidity gone, and much else with it |
| Chapters 13 and 22 | Fergesson lays radiant heat | Hadley lays it with his own hands | The son becomes the father's kind of man, elsewhere |
| In this book | Later in Dick |
|---|---|
| Jim Fergesson and Modern TV Sales and Service | Fergesson again in Humpty Dumpty in Oakland (a garage owner) and Dr. Bloodmoney (a TV shop); Modern TV and Olsen again in Puttering About in a Small Land |
| Beckheim, a prophet with a cosmology | Floyd Jones in The World Jones Made; Mercer and Mercerism in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? |
| A group awaiting the end of the world | The end-of-the-world circle in Confessions of a Crap Artist, set in West Marin, near Dick's later home at Point Reyes Station |
| Hadley as repairman and tool man | Jack Bohlen in Martian Time-Slip; Joe Fernwright in Galactic Pot-Healer |
| Walnut under paint, Succubus's polish | Genuine against fake, and historicity, in The Man in the High Castle |
| "Not Stuart Hadley at all" | The split self of A Scanner Darkly |
| Fergesson as boss and false father | Dick's later employer figures, many traced to Herb Hollis |
| An older shop owner and a younger protégé | Joseph Schilling's record shop in Mary and the Giant (Volume 03) |
The book as a whole. It is long and often melodramatic, and the last third leans on coincidence: the truck in the dark, the German couple who take him in, the hotel owner with a dream, the car lot open on a Sunday. Marsha is hard to believe as both Beckheim's companion and a fascist editor, and her history changes between chapters (twenty-six and divorced, then thirty-two, married, with three children and a war in England that includes a meeting with Mosley, who was interned from 1940 to 1943). After the rape she vanishes, and the novel never says what became of her, how Pete was found, or what the judge decided about Hadley, so the ending reads as healing without a reckoning. The narrator names Hadley's violence plainly, which is to the book's credit, yet the last chapter lets him and Ellen move on as if the crime had happened to someone else. Slurs against Jews, Black people and gay men are frequent and mostly unanswered, and the gay bar in Chapter 18 is drawn in the cartoon terms of 1952 even as its young men are the only people who try to help. Dates drift: Hadley is "born in 1927" and also "only ten" in 1936; five weeks from late August becomes "late-September sun"; Part One's days slip against its dates. Against all this stand Fergesson's chapters, Beckheim's sermon, Ellen's diagnosis, the San Francisco night and the quiet, unsettling last page, which is better than most of the endings Dick wrote in this decade.
Who's who
| Name | Role | Why they matter |
|---|---|---|
| Stuart Hadley | 25; salesman at Modern on $250 plus 5%, then manager on $300 plus 1% of gross; fired; one-eyed tool man | The resentful dreamer who breaks himself on the glass |
| Ellen Hadley | 22, his wife; Pete's mother; later a typist | Diagnoses him, carries him, and sees that "nothing of him had survived" |
| Pete | Their son, born late June 1952 | Taken from his bassinet and left in a locked car (Ch16-17); found offstage |
| Jim Fergesson | Owner of Modern TV Sales and Service since 1932; buys and later sells O'Neill's | Boss, shop-creator and would-be father; "It's my fault" |
| Alice Fergesson | His wife, childless | Plans the promotion with Ellen, then tells Hadley "Out!" |
| Theodore Beckheim | About 55, born in Vinegar Bend, Alabama; preacher of the Society of the Watchmen of Jesus | The prophet who issues the blue card and refuses to be a father |
| Marsha Frazier | Editor of Succubus; lives with Beckheim ("Ted") | Recruits Hadley, falls for him, is raped and beaten, and disappears from the book |
| Horace Wakefield | Florist and Society member, holder of a white card | Brings Hadley to Beckheim and tells him how rare the blue card was |
| Mrs. Krafft | A follower at the Society's meetings | Part of the crowd hungry for the end |
| Dave and Laura Gold | Old school friends, left-wing; Dave is Jewish | Abused and fought in Ch17; Dave drives him home from the prison ward |
| Sally and Bob Sorrell | His older sister and her husband, a tract builder | The idol who shaped his temper and the boom-time bully |
| Olsen | Modern's repairman, once a lathe hand | Blunt friend; praises the rental plan and declines a partnership: "I'm a bum" |
| Joe Tampini | Salesman at Modern; later married | Visits the basement and hints that Fergesson "feels responsible" |
| Jack White | Salesman at Modern | Fired before Chapter 21 |
| The old woman | A customer with a broken radio | Tells Hadley in Chapter 2 that he does not belong in the store |
| The German couple | An elderly pair in San Francisco | Nurse him, threaten him and ask to be paid (Ch19) |
| John Preovolos | Owner of a transient hotel | Gives Hadley a cigarette and a dream of Milpitas |
| Mrs. Nevin | Top-floor tenant of the basement house | One of the neighbours of the Moles |
About this book
Voices from the Street by Philip K. Dick, 2007. 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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- The enemy is inside, as the epigraph warns. Hadley blames the masses, the Jews, the store, the baby and his wife, and every enemy dissolves on contact; Mills's line about people "betrayed by what is false within them" is the plot in one sentence.
- He is looking for grace, and no one can give it. Ellen names it in Chapter 4: "A hundred years ago it was called grace. It's a search for someone he can have faith in." Fergesson, Beckheim and Marsha are each tried for the part, and each fails it or refuses it.
- A cause sells an identity plus an enemy. Marsha tells a TV salesman he is a painter, gives him mass culture and then, "matter-of-factly," the Jews to blame, and has him in three days; the recruiting script works because it flatters what he already wants to believe.
- The one honest prophet hands the burden back. Beckheim reads Hadley's wallet aloud, sells him a card for a dollar fifty and says "I can't make you well... But you can. It's up to you." Hadley hears the only true thing in the sect as rejection.
- A store is firm, but it is not a world. Fergesson's shop is a "neat little cosmos" made fresh each morning; for Hadley it is "not big enough to be a world. You can't live in a store," and the promotion meant to save him closes the trap.
- His violence is chosen, and the book says so. The coast road was "not a sexual thing"; the motel rape was decided "in the silent hours of the previous night," and "he enjoyed hurting her." Dick refuses to make Hadley's acts weather.