The Search for Philip K. Dick (9 page)

That fall, my late husband’s family, the Handelsmans, came on one of their yearly visits. Part of the time, they stayed in a suite at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, and the girls went into the city to stay with them. They came loaded with presents: Chicago kosher corned beef and my favorite Pratzel’s Jewish rye bread from a St. Louis delicatessen. Phil describes all this in
Martian Time-Slip
. Phil charmed the Handelsmans, and he and Maury Handelsman drove around the area looking for real estate; Maury was always looking for profitable investments. Phil based Leo Rosen in
We Can Build You
and Leo Bohlen in
Martian Time-Slip
on Maury. Maury was a father figure to him.

After the Handelsmans left, Phil and I attended a school-board meeting with a group that was trying to get a kindergarten started. The members of the board, mostly ranchers who dominated the local political scene, regarded a kindergarten as an unnecessary extravagance. There was a tradition of yelling at political meetings in this rural area and the school-board chairman yelled at me for circulating a petition to get a kindergarten started. I had violated their trust. I should have consulted them first. When we got back home and went to bed that night, Phil put the fossil hammer on the floor by his side of the bed. I thought his reaction to the school-board meeting was a little extreme but he pointed out to me that it wasn’t terribly long ago that the windows were shot out of the house of a person who disagreed with the local political machine. I had heard this story before, it really had happened, but it seemed to me that this was in the distant past. No one would do that sort of thing now.

That year we cooked a big Thanksgiving dinner and invited the Hudners. We couldn’t have any cranberry jelly, though. That was the year the entire cranberry crop was seized by the federal government because it was contaminated with insecticide. Such a thing had never been heard of before and we never expected that anything like this would occur again. Even without cranberry sauce, we had a great holiday family gathering.

In January 1960, Phil was awarded a contract for a new novel with Harcourt Brace on the basis of their interest in
Confessions of a Crap Artist
. Harcourt Brace wanted Phil to fly to New York to work with one of their woman editors, but Phil said he wouldn’t think of it. I wanted him to go. It was a great opportunity. I was disappointed to hear him say, “A few years ago I was asked to go to New York to write episodes for the
Captain Video
show for $500 a week, and I didn’t go then and I’m not going now.”

“Why not?” I asked, wondering why he hadn’t gone to New York to write the
Captain Video
series. What a great opportunity. Why hadn’t he told me about this before?

“I can’t,” he said in such a definite tone of voice that I didn’t want to pursue the topic further.

He worked with the woman editor by mail, but later that year she got pregnant and quit and Harcourt Brace merged with Jovanovich. Phil’s novel got lost between the cracks, and it wasn’t published for many years.

Phil arranged his writing career cleverly in regard to that contract. He wanted to help with the new baby, due in February. Instead of writing a new novel he had sent Harcourt Brace a revision of a novel that he had written in the fifties,
A Time for George Stavros
, which he retitled
Humpty Dumpty in Oakland
. I thought it was the best literary novel that he had written. Neither Harcourt Brace nor I knew that
Humpty Dumpty in Oakland
was not a new work. Phil told me that
Humpty Dumpty in Oakland
was exceptional because it was a novel about the proletarian world from the inside, whereas most novels about the proletarian world were written by middle-class writers who didn’t really understand the proletarian life.

As my pregnancy came near its end, twice, because of false labor pains, we had to drive at breakneck speed to Kaiser Hospital in San Francisco, a thirty-five-mile drive. After the second trip, Phil, emotionally exhausted, insisted that I stay with his mother in Berkeley, where I would be closer to the hospital. Reluctantly, I agreed and stayed with Dorothy and Joe for the next ten days. They were lovely to me. Their home was peaceful but somewhat melancholy. When I left, Dorothy was sad. She told me seriously that she wished I could continue to live with them in Berkeley. This was a nice thing for her to say, but a little odd, too. What about Phil and my three daughters?

On February 25, 1960, Phil and I had an eight-pound baby who popped out into the world like a cork out of a champagne bottle, a beautiful, blonde baby girl. Waiting at the hospital was hard on Phil. After the baby was born he told me, “I was terribly afraid something would be wrong.” I laughed at him, “Oh, Phil, you’re so morbid. Look, isn’t the baby darling?”

He leaned over the hospital bed and looked into the baby’s face, and said, “Now my sister is made up for.” Well, that was Phil, always saying off-beat things.

We decided that Phil could name the baby, and he decided on Laura, Laura Archer Dick. Phil and the three girls came to pick me up the day after Laura was born. Phil was in a state of utter enchantment. When we got home he sat entranced, watching me nurse the baby. Joe and Dorothy drove up from Berkeley to see their first grandchild, but Phil would only let them look at her for one minute. Literally one minute. Then he rushed them out of the room. I couldn’t believe it. “Maybe he’s afraid of infection,” I thought. I was too busy with the baby to worry about this, however.

After Laura was born my weight sank to 135 pounds and stayed there. Phil said sadly, “All my wives get fat.” He let on that he really liked thin, dark-haired women, but that I was an exception.

At that period Phil stopped writing every day and helped me with the house, the other children, and the baby although he didn’t have the rapport with the baby that he had with the older girls. A few weeks after Laura was born, Phil started having terrible pains in his chest. We were afraid that he was having a heart attack. I left the baby with Hatte and rushed him to Kaiser Hospital in San Francisco. Phil was put in bed in an emergency room and a doctor ran in with an electrocardiogram machine. My heart sank. I thought, “Oh no. Not another husband dying.”

Phil said cheerfully, “I think I’m either going to die or else I’m going to have a baby.” It turned out that he was having pyloric spasms. The doctor told him to drink less coffee and read and meditate more to stimulate his parasympathetic nervous system, which was out of balance with his other two nervous systems.

Taking care of the new baby didn’t keep us busy enough. We managed to get involved with a project that was to cost us a lot of money and a lot of conflict. The Peugeot Phil had bought wasn’t performing well, so we jumped from the frying pan into the fire and bought a 1953 Jaguar Mark VII saloon, a beautiful curvy white car with a mahogany dashboard, complicated instruments, tucked gray leather upholstery, and a sun roof. We paid $2,000 to the owner, the head mechanic at British Motors, for it. Phil looked elegant driving this car. It was in beautiful shape except for the carpeting, so we bought the best-quality royal blue plush wool carpeting that we could find. We took it out and drove it ninety-six miles an hour on the Nicasio highway. Later we found it still had its original tires, retreaded seven times. They were so soft we could almost poke our fingers through the sidewalls.

We’d only had it for two months when the mechanic at our small, local garage made an adjustment to the idle mechanism. Later that day on White’s Hill, the car, full of children, blew a valve. No sooner had we had the valve fixed than the axle broke. After we had a new axle installed, something else happened, and something else, and something else. We needed a British mechanic under the hood to keep that car running. When it started raining that fall, a steady heavy rain that went on for days, the sunroof leaked and the blue carpet started to grow small white mushrooms. I wanted Phil to help me build a shelter for the car but he wouldn’t, so I took the car into San Rafael and traded it in on a new Volvo. Phil was furious. He was still talking about this twenty years later. I think he really liked that Jaguar, but wouldn’t admit it. He probably liked the mushrooms growing on the carpet, too.

That same fall we saw an advertisement in our local weekly newspaper, the
Baywood Press
, for a repossessed spinet. We decided to look for a musical instrument for our house, perhaps a piano, or Phil thought he might want one of the new electronic organs. Finally, we bought a Baldwin acoustic spinet and Phil went to Berkeley and bought a lot of sheet music. Phil used the spinet advertisement we had seen in the newspaper in the novel
We Can Build You
.

I started on a new project that was to have a big effect on Phil. While Laura was napping, I would visit our neighbor, Lorraine Hynes, and we would chat about this and that as we drank coffee. One day we decided that we were tired of just sitting around talking; we wanted to do something worthwhile.

I had been fascinated with all the accidental metal shapes and splashes that were produced while I was working on my welded sculpture. Lorraine and I thought we could turn them into an interesting form of jewelry. Phil encouraged us and bought me an anvil, a drill press, and a polishing motor. He built a well-constructed workbench in the utility room where I kept my welding tanks. He told me, “I don’t like to do carpentry. I made this bench extra strong so I won’t ever have to make it over again.”

Lorraine and I worked out wild new techniques for making jewelry using a tiny welding torch. We forged black iron bracelets with pearls set on them, made jewelry out of fire-glazed red copper and textured bronze, and learned to weld bronze rod into various shapes. About the same time I began to tile the master bathroom in our house. I bought different colored small tiles and made a mermaid, several fish, a cosmic eye right over the toilet, a boat, and a large sea serpent. It felt like you were under water when you were taking a bath. Phil wrote about this mural in
We Can Build You
. In that novel the bathroom tiling project is done by Pris Frauenzimmer, a horrible woman.

We had been having louder arguments. Phil claimed that he loved it. “We’re like a Mediterranean family, everyone waving their hands and yelling,” he said with great relish. A couple of times I threw a few dishes to punctuate my point. Later, I would be sorry that I had become so angry. But Phil said to me lovingly, “You can do anything you want, as long as you don’t bore me.”

Afterward I could never figure out what those fights had been about. In our everyday life we seemed to get along well, even have an exceptional understanding. The fights seemed to have no identifiable source. One day I threw many more than just two dishes. One crashed through a narrow window by the front door. I threw the penny bank, too. Tandy picked up the pennies as we continued to yell at each other. Afterward, I was very upset. I had scared myself with my very angry outburst.

I had an idea that would make everything better. We would all, except baby Laura, go to Disneyland. The next day we took the girls out of school, left Laura with our neighbors, and drove to Los Angeles. We walked around Disneyland all day, going on most of the rides. I loved the Rocket to the Moon. Phil was fascinated with the Lincoln robot. When we got back home the following day, we were exhausted and had forgotten all about the fight. Later, I made a stained-glass window of a monk raising his hand in blessing to replace the broken window by the front door. We never did deal with the unknown source of those fights. Years later Phil described himself as an emotional terrorist. He certainly knew how to push my buttons; I had many at that time.

Phil told me about his out-of-body experiences: “I walked in the living room and I saw myself already there.” Another time he said, “I was lying in bed and I saw myself standing by the bed getting dressed. Suddenly I was in the body that was getting dressed, looking down on the body that was in bed.” Another time he told me, “I saw a ghost walking around, an elderly Italian gentleman. It may have been the ghost of the man who used to live on the farm that was once here.” At night when the wind blew he thought he heard a train, the ghost of the narrow gauge train that came through Point Reyes Station in the early 1900s. But I could hear it, too. It was only the wind.

I’ll bet he wished he could have had an out-of-body experience when he had to knock the yellow-jacket nest off the eaves. At first it was just a little nest, and we watched it grow with interest. Suddenly it was as big as three basketballs. Hundreds of yellow jackets were zooming around our patio and we were afraid to go out of the house. Phil put on a long yellow raincoat, a strange hat, and boots and draped himself with mosquito netting. The girls and I nearly died laughing at his appearance. He knocked the nest down at night and sprayed it with insecticide. We all told him how brave he was. He loved this.

That fall, we bought a bird book to identify the many species of birds that migrated through the West Marin area every year. The book listed only red-shafted and yellow-shafted flickers, but ours were orange-shafted. We watched the Kennedy-Nixon debates. Phil wrote in Martin Luther King’s name for president. Later he felt bad for Nixon, as much as he disliked him, when Nixon cried after he lost.

In spite of faithfully using birth-control techniques, I became pregnant again. I felt that I didn’t have the resources to raise a fifth child. In fact, I could barely manage with the four children and Phil. At first, Phil argued against my getting an abortion. But I was determined to do what was best for the family. It made me furious to be faced with two such bad choices. I fumed, dumb scientists. They could put a man in space but couldn’t figure out a reliable method of birth control.

After a great deal of carrying on with psychiatrists, trying to get a legal California abortion, we went up to Seattle to have an illegal operation. When we came back, I started taking the new oral contraceptive, Enovid, a pill that the newspapers said was going to change the world and revolutionize the relationship between the sexes.