Philip Dick: Humpty Dumpty in Oakland

He said, “You got that from your course?”

Briskly, with no intention of abandoning her mood, she replied, “Yes, I got that from my course, Mr. Terrible Gloom.” She would fight a good fight for happiness, he saw. Her smile was enriched by determination; it defied him. Under all conditions, behind any reaction, she kept this, the faith; he would get nowhere.

In this house, he thought, in my house, I can’t even be depressed. At least, not out loud. It’s not permitted. Like dirt.

Swept out the door.

She moved a little faster. Her hands flew from butter plate to coffee cup to napkin. Lots of spunk, he thought. Where does it go, when I’m pushing up daisies? I’ll push up—not daisies—but skunk cabbage, he decided. Imagine her at my grave with an armload of flowers from her garden in the back, roses and stuff; and there the skunk cabbage is, growing like hell. He laughed.

“Ah,” she said in a full-throated voice.

It came to his attention, watching her, that she was a lot younger than he. Of course he knew that, always had the fact available. But he did not usually dwell on it. Her hands. Still smooth. Well, she didn’t have to scrub them with Dutch Cleanser four times a day. Who did the floors in the house? She had a colored girl come in twice a week; that girl did the heavy work, the dirty stuff. Lydia did only the dusting, the dishes, the shopping, fixing the meals; the rest of the time she was out learning.

“What did you learn?” he said. “Today.”

“Are you interested?” she said in a merry voice.

“Sure,” he said. “Since I pay for it.”

“Money,” she said, “is the arbiter of worth in a society of barbarians, who identify themselves by when they see a sacred tablet in the: temple made of gold.” Her eyes fixed themselves on him. No timidity, there.

He said, “You’re going to be a pretty big-time barbarian, one of these days.”

The eyes continued. Watching.

“Thirty-five thousand,” he said, with such fury that she did, at last, cease smiling. “Why don’t you start a fund? The Fergesson Fund for Bums. Pay bums to sleep all day.” His voice rose. “In the parlor,” he shouted. “On the couch.” His voice, squeaky, shook. “Here in my house!”

She said nothing. Watched.

“Maybe I go see Louis Malzone,” he said. “My attorney. Maybe I take the trouble to invest the money in bonds.” But why? he asked himself. Because she got it in the end anyhow, for nothing, for doing nothing. And he, for all he had done; what did he get?

But he felt tired. He ate his roll, spread butter—real butter— on it. And all the time she watched.

“Describe to me this run-in you had with Al,” she said.

He said nothing. He ate.

“That is responsible for this overpowering incorrect view of things as they are,” she said.

At that, he laughed.

“That man,” she said. “Such a deliberate waste of his life, as he reveals. And his attitude toward others for what actually lies inside his own inner reality. When he and his wife—the latter whom I care a great deal for, as you know—appeared in this house for dinner on that particular Sunday afternoon, I had an even stronger impression than ever before.”

“What impression?”

Lydia said, “Are you not acquainted with my impression? Why that is I could not say. I know in the past I took pains to discuss it with you. How long is it that he has rented the lot next to you for his cars? At this point a number of years. During that period I can see in you a change. There is no coincidence. What is it that I remarked when you arrived home tonight? That you were in a bad mood. I am familiar with that mood. Formerly you did not return home so much in that mood. What is he in your life? He indicates to you the absolute stupidity, without hope. Man making himself stupid. But it is you that take onto yourself for nothing at all responsibility.”

Looking up, he saw that she was pointing her finger at him and frowning.

“Because,” she said, “he has marred his own life with doing nothing, he manages to make you feel that you owe him something, but in fact you owe him to leave. To have him leave.”

Fergesson said, “Just because he dresses bad.”

“What, my good dear?”

“Christ,” he said. “He tripped over the God damn ashtray. What about that? All this theory stuff, and you know what it is? It’s nothing but he tripped over the ashtray that first time he came here. And the way he dresses.”

“Pardon me,” Lydia said. “Because I know better, my good dear. That man has contempt. Tell me. What is his preference?”

He did not understand; his wife had gone into her rapid Greek kind of speech, and when she did so, when she was this way, most of what she said was lost to him.

Lydia explained, “What is the church of his faith?”

“How do I know,” he said.

“None,” she said.

“Maybe so,” he said.

“Do you know,” she said, “that what a man believes about God is actually as Freud showed his attitude toward his father? And a man who has no ability to find in himself any proper reverence in the Heavenly Father, which is a good word, has no father here on earth that he relies on? I want to know what you think about this. What makes the character in this old world of ours? The family. It is in the family that the laughing little baby grows. Who peers down at him over the edge of the blessed cradle?”

“His mother,” Fergesson said.

“His mother,” Lydia said, “is known to him through the tit, the source of eternal plenty.”

“Okay,” he said, “but he also sees her.”

“He experiences her as nectar,” Lydia said; “as the food of the gods. But the father he gets nothing from. There is between him and the father a separation. Whereas with the mother there is unity. Do you see?”

“No,” he said.

“The father,” she said, “is all society and his relation to it. Once he has that he never outgrows it. But if he doesn’t have it, he can never get it.”

“Get what?” he said.

Lydia said, “The trust and hope.”

“I give up,” he said. “You better throw in a course in English, along with the Plato.”

“I know,” Lydia said, “that if you had got a happier man in with you, you would not now look forward so emptily. Another man, in your place, retiring with so much accumulated wealth— what would be in his mind? Let me see it and depict it to you, my good dear. Joy.”

“Joy,” he echoed, with bitterness and some amusement.

“The joy of tomorrow,” his wife said.

“I’m sick,” he said. “Tired and physically sick. Ask the doctor. Ask Dr. Fraat. Call him up. I mean, ask what the facts are, instead of spinning a lot of philosophy. At my expense! What am I supposed to do, start taking great books courses along with you? Reading those guys? What do you know? I’d like to see you fix any simple thing there is, like a lightcord plug. Fix that and then come to me.”

“You’re so much like that man,” she said.

He grunted and sat rubbing his forehead.

“He is that part of you,” she said. “But you are more. He is nothing but that. Nothing but defeat. Because he lacks that faith.”

At last he resumed eating his dinner, drinking his soup and spooning up the stewed chicken with its cooked, soft, colorless bones.

After dinner Jim Fergesson did something that had become natural to him, in the recent years. He turned on the TV set and placed his overstuffed easy-chair before it.

Not again, his wife would have said, had she still been home. But tonight Lydia had a seminar; she had been picked up by a car—it had honked once, and out she had gone with her books, wearing her coat and low-heeled shoes. And so she was not here to say it.