Free The Search for Philip K. Dick by Anne R. Dick Page B

All Exactly Alike
and soon brought me another novel to read,
In Milton Lumky Territory
. “Phil, you are so incredibly productive,” I told him, and sat down and read it.
    “A strange novel, like a dreary tempest in a teacup,” I thought, “but well written, imaginative, and like other current literary novels, downbeat.”
    A nice responsible, hard-working, intelligent, and attractive young man (whom Phil named after our next-door neighbor’s little boy) is seduced by a flaky older woman who is wearing my clothes. The young man has a tremendous mistrust of this older woman but he sticks with her and works hard in her business. He is ingenious, patient, and takes initiative, but she controls and screws up everything in an aimless manner. Although Phil presented the novel as one that he had just written, it really was one of a group of literary novels that he had written in Berkeley before he moved to Point Reyes Station. The main female character was probably based on his favorite high school teacher, Mrs. Wolfson, whom he’d had a crush on. He revised the novel somewhat in 1959, blending me slightly into the lead female role.
    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