"Hubert Bristol" by johannalipfordiolit

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6. HUBERT BRISTOL

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10. Dad used often to tell a story of how, when he was a young man of twenty or so, he had just missed getting rich. He would begin this story leisurely, first detailing his childhood on a poor farm in Georgia, a farm he and his sisters worked, run by his mother since his father was generally away following a career as an itinerant railroad construction boss. Though the family had little cash, Dad would stress that there had always been plenty to eat. He stressed this so often and so heavily I suspect either that food was the single thing not lacking or that – knowing Dad – food itself had been scarce often enough that the un-nacred memory would prick.

11. Sometimes while Dad was involved in his description of the farm he would forget what he had started to tell and would instead tell about the summer he and his youngest sister planted a peanut crop, their object to sell the peanuts and earn a few dollars for themselves. If he switched onto this story he would vividly describe how, after their farm chores were finished, they had worked and sweated other long hours in the hot Georgia sun first plowing the field, then bending over planting the peanuts, then cultivating and weeding the vines as they grew, always looking forward with countless plans to the day they were to be harvested and sold. Somewhere in the story, like the passage of a dark planet that momentarily occulted the sun, would come an artfully casual mention that his father had returned home a week or so before the peanut harvest, in time to have learned of Dad’s and his sister Dolly’s project.

12. “Well sir,” Dad would finish this story “well sir, the day Dolly and I went out to harvest our peanuts, we got up early in the morning, had Mama fix us a good big breakfast of cornbread and sorghum and fried grits to keep us for the heavy work we were going to do, you know, and we walked out onto the peanut field. And do you know what we saw?”

13. “What Dad?” I might be the one to ask, even though I, like the rest of his audience knew very well what: Dad’s stories were not simply stories they were family ritual dramas, in which Dad played the actors’ roles and Mother and my younger brother and I the chorus, they were like plays over which often hung, as over a Greek play, an aura of what to us was grim tragedy, not the less impressive and louring for the climax’s being long since known.

14. “Well sir, when we went out in the field we found the hogs rooting up our peanuts. They’d practically wrecked the field before we got out there, and by the time we drove them off, they’d eaten ***** near all our crop. Dad had deliberately opened the fence the night before and let the hogs in!”

15. And we would sit back with expressions of indignant astonishment, one of us breathing in tones of shocked disbelief “He did?”

16. “Yes sir.” Dad would vigorously nod. “Dad had let the hogs in to root up and eat all our peanuts.” Then he might laugh, wryly, and nod again and say, halfway admiringly, “He was a mean son of a *****!”

17. And silence reigned as we contemplated this lesson on the ways of grandfather Blackwood. However Dad meant it my brother and I understood it to be as well a lesson on the ways of the dark and sinister universe itself.

18. But if Dad wasn’t sidetracked on the Peanut story, he would continue the Almost-rich story, telling how he had run away from the farm and joined the Navy during the first World War, and after the war joined the merchant marine. The youngest, he had left home to escape the domination of his four sisters (all older than he), rather than of his father, whom he had rarely seen.

19. “Well sir,” Dad would continue, “We’d docked in the port of Los Angeles with a load of bananas from Maracaibo and we were all sitting in the fo’c’stle playing poker one evening, when this bird comes aboard and says ‘Psst! Hey boys.’ We all glance up from our game to look this scissorbill over, and he says ‘boys, I’m selling oil stock, and I’ll level with you – it’s on pure speculation. But my partners and I think there’s oil here near Los Angeles, we’ve formed a company to drill for it, and we need more capital. So, I’m prepared right here and now to sell you shares in it, and at only one dollar each.’

20. “We-ell…” Here Dad would look around smiling a wise-from-bitter-experience smile, then continue “Most of us laughed at him. I said ‘Look fella, this’s dandruff on my shoulders not hayseed’” – and Dad would brush at his shoulder – “’What kind of suckers do you take us for?’” And again that bitterly wise smile.

21. “There was only one of us sucker enough to buy those shares – I think Burns pooped away a hundred dollars on them, money the rest of us were smart enough to spend on women and liquor – and till the cruise ended he took a hard time about that stock around the fo’c’stle – he’d been kind of ship dummy anyway.

22. “Well sir, it was maybe a year afterward I saw this dummy again, in San Francisco. But he was dressed up fit to kill, now, and he was strolling along Market Street, thumbs hooked in his vest and a good-looking redheaded woman all jeweled up hanging on his arm and he recognizes me – I don’t recognize him – and he calls ‘Hey Blackwood!’ and I look this dude over closely, and by God it’s Burns! Well, he and I and this girl – I’ll never forget her: name was Opal and he’d bought her the damnedest largest black fire-opal ring you ever saw! – anyway, we went to the Fairmont hotel, on Nob Hill, and he bought the drinks and we got to talking. Finally I point-blank asked him how it was he looked so rich. And do you know what he tells me?”

23. “What, Dad?” Jack might be the one who responds this time.

24. “He says he got rich off those shares of stock! Do you know what they were shares of stock in?”

25. “What Harry?” Mother.

26. “Why, Signal Hill!”

27. Amid the general chorus of astonishment that would follow, Dad would be exclaiming “Yes siree. Signal Hill! The richest oilfield in Southern California, and I had a chance to buy stock in the company that drilled it. Signal Hill!”

28. There was a period in my adolescence when I passed through a stage of profound skepticism and since I had implicitly believed Dad’s stories in my childhood, I now rejected them totally. And, I have to admit, from internal evidence or from what I learned later it is probable that Dad’s stories were not completely true in the conventional sense of the word: that is, perhaps not every incident in them ”really happened”. Certainly, they had been heavily embroidered with an eye to artistic effect. But as I later came to realize they were none the less important because Dad believed them true. He had told them so many times that, I think, they had become part of his personal history, part of his experience and they acted on him just as if they had “really happened” – if that phrase has any meaning beyond believed memory.

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30. A few years after the second World War ended, Dad’s youngest sister wrote from Florida where she was living temporarily with her son and his wife saying her husband had died and she wanted to move to California. Dad had not seen his sisters since he had left home, except once in 1929 when, with “money in his pockets and a new suit of clothes on his back” he had taken Mother on a short trip down South as part of their honeymoon to present her to his mother. He had not returned even to attend the funeral two years later of his revered mother – though that dereliction because he could not afford the trip. Missing the funeral, Mother once said, had depressed him for months afterward.

31. Anyway, decades having passed I suppose he had forgotten or forgiven – or re-remembered – whatever had passed between him and his sisters that had driven him to leave and he wrote Aunt Dolly inviting her to stay with us while she looked for a permanent place to live. We had just a two-bedroom house, but Aunt Dolly would stay with us only a day or two, Dad said, and while she occupied our bedroom Jack and I could sleep in the front room on a large sofa that made into a bed. Dad was at that time working as conductor for the Pacific and Southwestern railroad, a job he’d held for fifteen years. Our family had been settled near San Jose for most of those years, in a house bought at Mother’s insistence before the war. It was the only investment Dad had ever made and though he despised the humble house he none the less now congratulated himself on his foresight, for its value had trebled in the postwar land boom in the Santa Clara Valley.

32. For some time Dad, seeing the real estate business as a sure way to get rich, had been itching to take an active role in it, but he had no money. Though the railroad paid well he had saved nothing from his salary and what we owned had been bought on monthly payments: he had always said that a man would never get rich working for wages, and so there was no use trying. Anyway, Dad said, scrimping and saving nickels and dimes was a mean and petty way to live and a man grew contemptible doing it. Though he never explicitly stated it, I think his belief was that a man who tried too hard was tempting the fates, which would be sure to strike him down by a punishing blow. No, Dad would say, a man’s capital had to come in a lump sum and, by implication, from a source unforeseen – as it would to the man who waited. Dad believed in the thunderbolt from the clear blue sky. While awaiting it he occasionally played the horses, long shots, possibly hoping to win enough to stake him in a more conservative venture, but his losses were by no means a burden on the family, and he said he played for fun anyway, not for money.

33. I don’t believe Mother ever understood him. Her lasting inheritance from her immigrant Central European father and mother was her peasant attitudes, which were that you worked hard, you saved your money, you incurred no debt, you got your hands on a piece of land, and you never, never, risked what you held to gain more. Whenever Dad would brood on the money he could be making building houses, and fret that he hadn’t capital to get started, she would say “But Harry, you have a good job. You’re making good money on the railroad, we’re paying off the mortgage on our home, and we could be saving money…”

34. They were in short a perfectly complementary couple and, like many such, their individual strengths were exhausted battling each other, leaving their weaknesses to hold the field.

35. Mother’s other inheritance from her parents, received after their closely-spaced deaths, was a sum of money. After, at her stubborn insistence, the mortgage was paid off she reluctantly handed over the remaining fifteen hundred dollars to Dad. With it and a loan from the bank on the basis of his A-1 credit rating – he was boastfully proud of his credit rating, and guarded it jealously, seeing to it that the payments on installment debts he assumed were met punctually every month – he began building a house on speculation. That is, he bought land nearby and hired two carpenters to do the building, which he supervised during his time off from the railroad.

36. For several years from then on dinnertime conversation centered on the houses Dad was building and on what he could have bought parcels of land for ten years ago that were now selling at five and ten times their old prices. And on how a man might make a fortune in contracting and real estate if he had real capital – Dad scorned as paltry the fifteen hundred dollars he was master of, and insisted that life held in store for him something larger and better. He was at this time nearing fifty years of age.

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38. Aunt Dolly’s arrival in our sleepy neighborhood was a glittering event. She drove up in a big blue year-old Georgia-plated Buick loaded with suitcases and hatboxes and purses, and parked in a cloud of dust in front of our house, which was set on a dead-end street in the middle of a vast prune orchard. When she saw Dad she burst into a gentle rain of tears and embraced him and moaned “Oh-h-h, Bubba!” while Jack and I and the neighborhood kids stood around looking curiously at her.

39. I felt a vague sense of lèse majesté at hearing Dad called “Bubba”, but it had been her childhood name for her baby brother. Though everyone called him Harry, his given names were Hubert Bristol, and, probably, being called by that or by Bubba was among the reasons he left home. I had just time to observe the first effect on Dad of his sister’s resurrection because it took the form of a lofty nod toward her car and a crisp “Snap to it, kids,” his manner abruptly become that of a Southern planter dispatching crews of darkies.

40. So, with fair fat faintly liver-spotted Aunt Dolly following, cautioning us “You kiyuds, you-all look out now, heah?” Jack and I packed her gear to what had been our bedroom. When she saw it her face fell. “But, it’s kahn of smawl, Bubba…” she whimpered.

41. Dad coughed and stated that, as a matter of fact, he was already planning on building, very shortly, a great big brand new house for us all, with guest rooms and extra bathrooms. His description made me recall a photograph I had once seen of a grand colonnaded Southern mansion brooding on the banks of the Mississippi. This little old place, Dad continued, a hint of his faded Southern accent returning, had been bought for investment purposes purely and simply, but it was all we had, right now. Aunt Dolly graciously conceded that it would “Do jus’ fahn anyhow, temporary.”

42. During the next few days Aunt Dolly let it be known that “pore ol’ Uncle Gilmore” (as she referred to her dead husband), when he had passed on had left behind only twelve thousand dollars, and since a body couldn’t live forever on that, she just didn’t know what she was going to do. She certainly didn’t want to be a burden on Bubba, so did Bubba know of any genteel jobs available for a pore widda lady?

43. Dad harrumphed and said he would use his influence to get her on the passenger reservation board in The City (San Francisco), but when he described its duties to her she said “Well, Bubba I don’ know…sittin’ around like that, all day at a telephone would prob’ly make my back act up, and I don’t b’lieve I could last.”

44. It turned out too that clerking in a store would be bad for her corns, standin’ around like that all day, and several other jobs were injurious to other anatomical parts or could not be considered because taking them would disgrace the memory of pore ol’ Uncle Gilmore and Bubba wouldn’ expect her to do that. Couldn’t Bubba think of something both healthful and genteel?

45. Well sir, yes, he could. He had been, he explained to Aunt Dolly, thinking very seriously indeed of expanding into the real estate business, but he did not have time to sit in an office all day, nor did he have extra money to sink into building an office to sit in. If, however, Sis wanted to invest a trifling fraction of her money, say a thousand dollars, he would build her that office, get himself the necessary real estate broker’s license so that she would have to pass only the simple little test for salesman, and she could sit in that comfortable little office, from time to time, when and as she chose, meeting and talking with the interesting men, and women, who would come flooding in to buy land, and making money for herself and Dad hand over fist selling it to them, her only discomfort a possible writer’s cramp from filling out sales contracts. Of course, Dad said, the office would quickly become self-supporting but until it did he as broker would meet the trivial running expenses. So did Sis want to become her brother’s independent self-respecting real-estate saleswoman?

46. I have often reflected that Dad missed his vocation. Had he himself quit the railroad and devoted his time to selling real estate, I am convinced he would have got rich at it. He was a natural-born salesman, and many a time I have seen him pile a shred of stale opinion on a wisp of dry fact, set fire to them with a spark off his enthusiasm and gently puff. And there before you roared a gigantic all-consuming blaze of ardor, which you found yourself, spite of yourself, helping to fuel too. It is how he sold Mother on, against all her principles, forking over her fifteen hundred dollars; it is how he sold Aunt Dolly on becoming a real estate saleswoman, and on lending him a thousand dollars to build himself an office; it is how…but all that, to come.

47. While the office was being built Dad and Aunt Dolly began studying, Dad to get his broker’s license – he decided, while he was about it, to get a general contractor’s license too – and Aunt Dolly studying to be a real estate saleswoman. Dad passed with ease his examinations for broker and contractor, but Aunt Dolly spent several bemused months studying. Once in awhile she would throw up her hands and turn to Jack or me to wail “Buddies, how does Bubba expec’ me to learn awl this stuff? Listen can you-all point out where the northwest one-qua’tah of the southeast one-qua’tah of the southwest one-qua’tah of section tayun is?”

48. But after two humiliating failures she managed to pass her examination, and shortly she was ensconced between the four bare pine walls of the Blackwood Realty office outside town. For company she had a telephone, a splintery wooden desk, a squeak-ing uncomfortable swivel chair, a battered steel filing cabinet for her “listings” and a scrapbook in which she could paste newspaper clippings of her advertisements.

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50. Now that he had a going real estate sales office Dad’s restless attention turned to building houses on a larger scale. He had sold that house I’ve mentioned and made a few hundred dollars profit, and built two or three others singly and sold them with about the same result. So with his profits and Mother’s fifteen hundred dollars, and with the indispensable aid of his credit rating, he began a three-house tract, the profits from which he expected to pyramid, by building next a six-house tract, and so on up to a grand scale of forty- and fifty-house tracts. Of course could he put his hands on real money, such as, say, eleven thousand dollars, he could skip the intermediate stages.

51. I don’t know all the machinery used in the siege Dad laid to Aunt Dolly, but I recall a few attack and defense maneuvers that took place at the dinner table, and one scrap of conversation I remember in particular from a few months after she’d come to live with us temporary. Aunt Dolly had just delicately sliced up her rare steak into bite-sized chunks, had closed her mouth on one chunk and taken a swallow of her ”acid”, a blood-red liquid she drank with meals to help digest her food (her doctor, she said, had told her she was just so sweet her stomach didn’t generate enough hydrochloric acid). As her jaw crushed the meat she said “Well, Bubba, you know, that money is awl Ah’ve got in the world. Pore Uncle Gilmore always said it would see me through when he passed awn, and Ah’d feel like Ah was betrayin’ a sacred trust if Ah was to lose it…”

52. On this, as on similar occasions, Dad’s reply was that he understood perfectly how she felt and that he himself would be the last person on earth to let his Sis risk her money in a dangerous speculation. But when you considered that she herself had chosen out of all the wide and various world to live in the one ideal place in it, namely the Santa Clara Valley, verdant and lush and ripe, with a climate mild as a maiden’s breath, where you need only stretch forth a hand and a blushing peach or succulent plum or heavy bunch of fat purple glistening grapes would plop right into it, was it any wonder if other folks too were flocking there by the hundreds of thousands to live? And since each of these folks had to reside in a habitation, was not the construction of fine homes the safest and surest and most dignified form of investment? No, Dad would conclude, while it would be criminal to risk a widow’s few poor dollars in a hazardous venture, it was sinful to let them mildew in a bank, barely earning a few measly percent of interest that was only devoured by inflation when they could be doubling – trebling! – in no time at all. Why, within months of her investment all she would need do for the rest of her life would be to clip her coupons and repose in idle and luxurious leisure.

53. Aunt Dolly held out for a long time however, probably because the promise of the real estate office had fulfilled itself neither as Dad had led her to expect nor as she had led herself to expect (there was a discrepancy, as will appear, between their two views of its object). This negative experience, with which she renewed positive contact every muttering resentful day she sat in that office served as a kind of inoculation against her too readily catching gold-fever from Dad again.

54. For after a few months sitting lorn alone in that pathetic office, abstractedly picking splinters from the palms of her hands her avocation, each slightest movement of her body causing her chair to utter a dismal shriek that echoed funereally between the six pine sides of her cubicle – at that, the only earthly sound to keep her company in her by now sullen and apathetic wait for infrequent customers – Aunt Dolly began to exhibit signs of restlessness. Its symptoms were at first mere wistfully plaintive remarks such as “D’you know, Bubba, Ah’ve been sittin’ in that awffice six months now, and I haven’t had one man so much as smahl at me? Ah think the least persons could do in business affayuhs would be to be pleasant, don’t you?”

55. I do not now recall when it was she progressed to “Bubba I don’ believe the good Lord meant persons to stay single awl their lives after the decease of the one they loved, do you?”

56. Aunt Dolly never made a sale, of real estate, during the year she sat in the office. And though, when he could find time away from his contracting and the railroad – he was, at Mother’s frantic insistence, still holding down his job as conductor – Dad managed occasionally to sell a house, his commissions didn’t meet the expenses of keeping the office, which therefore became a steady drain on his salary. The three-house tract he had built had, at the time I am now speaking of, been sold. He was surprised to find he had sustained a small loss on it, but he said building it had been good experience, and had proved what he’d always known: that you had to go into things big to make money.

57. Far from disheartened then, by the failure of a dream, he began dreaming a larger dream: the immediate construction of a tract of fifty houses. This, he said, would be big enough that all the petty expenses would somehow cancel, perhaps as stray ocean currents cancel, leaving a Gulf Stream of gold on which we would all float to Bermuda-in-winters.

58. But to realize a vision of this scope he definitely needed Aunt Dolly’s money. As part of that siege I mentioned he, while driving her around the valley, had from time to time been pointing out new housing tracts and saying “Look there, Sis; that land was worm-eaten prune orchard, worth no more than a hundred dollars an acre ten years ago; farmer sold that land to a subdivider last year for a thousand dollars an acre and the lots themselves --- three lots per acre, mind – sold at a thousand dollars apiece!”

59. He now so relentlessly pursued this course that we all began to look on worm-eaten orchards with respect. Further, while Dad never actually said he’d been shrewd enough to buy in on the ground floor, one might have understood, and thereby gained confidence in his financial judgement, that he needed Aunt Dolly’s money only because vast sums of his own were tied up in steadily appreciating land. I do not mean to imply that Dad lied; he never in his life, I believe, told a deliberate untruth. But, when he had made a remark such as I have quoted above Aunt Dolly might marvel “Ah declayuh! Did you have something to do with that Bubba?”

60. Dad would now be in a fix. If he flatly said no, he feared to appear dull for not having foreseen how land prices would rise at the end of the war. Too, he had for so long been gazing wistfully at property he might have bought, I think he finally came halfway to believe that he had bought some of it. Therefore, truthfully, he would say “Well, no, Sis, not with that one. There were so many opportunities around at the time, no one man could have taken advantage of them all.”

61. “Ah declayuh Bubba, you’re such a businessman?” Aunt Dolly would say, voice rising as it did on any statement, making it sound almost interrogative.

62. Eventually, then, inevitably, after months of seeing with her own eyes how easily and quickly others had got rich – that is, her eyes saw something and her brain interpreted the messages they sent by aid of Dad’s persuasive rhetoric – Aunt Dolly finally – eagerly – capitulated and handed Uncle Gilmore’s sacred trust over to Dad to double for her or, perhaps, treble.

63. Besides greed, another motive for her capitulation could have been a faintly guilty conscience. One evening, after dinner, while Dad was glaring over the bills and statements that were already pouring from the monster tract in a chillingly bewildering stream, Aunt Dolly said “Bubba?” and Dad looked up crossly from his calculations to growl “What?”

64. “Bubba, tomorra Ah’d like to invite a very nice gentleman acquaintance of mine over to dinner, so’s you-all can meet him?”

65. Dad stared at her and began asking questions. She broke down and admitted that she had met the gentlemen through a local lonely-hearts club, that for the past several months she, like a renegade nun, had been sneaking out of her cell to go out with him, and that they wanted to get married.

66. Dad exploded. I think what enraged him was the realization that he was paying heavy advertizing bills while she left the office unattended to see her boyfriend, but he was never a man to let relevancy stand in his way and he shot out remarks about Aunt Dolly’s being “in heat” and that he was damned if he was going to meet her “mail order gigolos”. The scene ended with Aunt Dolly bursting into tears and running from the room. Dad was a hot-tempered man, and very often when he flew into a passion he said things he regretted immediately afterward; but he was also proud and stubborn and he never took back what he said and he never apologized.

67. However, two months later, a few days before she got married, Dad and Aunt Dolly made it up – I think Dad offered to get her free train tickets for her honeymoon – and they began speaking again. We met the gentleman. Will was a mild, placid, almost stupid soul, retired from the waterworks, who had besides his pension a small independent income from ten or fifteen thousand dollars in waterworks stock he had accumulated during his long uneventful years as a bachelor. He appeared to have no bad habits and but one disconcerting: from time to time, while you were talking to him, he would rise right in the middle of the conversation and excuse himself to leave the room. Occasionally this was for obvious personal reasons, but more often he simply vanished (“Has anyone seen Will?” Aunt Dolly might ask during a family get-together. “Well,” someone might answer, looking about puzzled, “he was here just a minute ago...”) and no one had an idea what he was doing during these hiatuses until Mother started finding empty port wine bottles hidden in odd places about the house and yard. Jack and I were suspect, but we convincingly denied any acquaintance with port, and, too, Mother had already noticed a curious coincidence: she would always find a couple of empty port quarts after Aunt Dolly and Will had been over visiting.

68. Aunt Dolly quit the real estate office when she married, and went to live with her husband in his San Jose apartment. Before she left she wondered aloud when Bubba might find it convenient to return her investment?

69. Dad replied that now was a very critical period but in awhile she would receive it all back. I doubt she attended at the time to his exact words: that she would receive it all back. No mention of double or treble.

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71. I imagine that a number of the causes of Dad’s failure are already abundantly clear; certainly both his money and his energies were spread too optimistically thin, and certainly he had essayed an ambitious undertaking for his meagre experience in construction. But there was a factor, less obvious though inherent in his personality, of weight at least equal to all the others: it is a truism that good salesmen have low sales resistance, I think because to sell to people you must have a genuine desire to please them, and it was owing, not to his optimism but to Dad’s desire to please coupled with his arrogant disdain for finely calculated details that he failed so disastrously. For, at the planning stage, Dad’s optimism had been rationally enough based to convince bankers, founded as it was on each of the houses in the fifty-house tract being built on contract. This meant that each house would already be sold before its foundations were poured; thus, costs and profits seemed mathematically sure things.

72. But contracting is a human pursuit and, very humanly, after having agreed in detail to exactly the house they wanted built, the fifty owners each, when they visited the site to inspect what was now become their growing home, might suddenly decide they wanted, say, a bath at the end of the hall as well as in its middle, or hardwood flooring throughout instead of only in the living room, or aluminum-sash in place of wood-frame windows. They would request these changes of Dad and he, wanting to please, and perhaps hypnotized by his role as big-time contractor, would say, with a magnanimous sweep of the hand “Why certainly; that’s a mere bagatelle”. Probably his thought was that the change would cost so little he could absorb it in his profit – a thousand dollars or so on each house, after all, left a margin large enough that he did not have to niggardly haggle over nickels and dimes. And if he hazarded an estimate of the cost of a change, that estimate was a mere bagatelle – perhaps deliberately made low to avoid discomfiting the homeowner.

73. So, when the tract was about half-finished Dad was having money troubles. Even so, since he was still working on the railroad he was forced to hire an assistant superintendent, who was later jailed when another more attentive contractor caught him eking out his not-inconsiderable salary by imagining carpenters and paying himself their real wages. Spending all his spare time at the tract as he was, Dad had none left to supervise the real estate office. So he threw up its lease eliminating, along with his thousand-dollar investment, the expenses of rent, telephone and lights, newspaper advertisements and association fees. Though he had hired a succession of salesmen after Aunt Dolly, none of them had much more ability than she, perhaps because, being a warm man, he hired them as he had hired his assistant super: because he liked them personally.

74. Still, Dad always radiated cheerful confidence and optimism when Aunt Dolly was about, and not through a disingenuous desire to deceive, but because he was basically a salesman. That is, Aunt Dolly might inquire “Well Bubba, how’re thangs goin’ at the trac’?”

75. And Dad, wanting to please her by telling her what she wanted to hear, and further, having a vision burning in his mind as to how things could be, and how, indeed, they ought to be, would report to her directly from the vision, instead of from its distortion by reality. So Aunt Dolly, rather than receiving a brisk douche of chill anxiety, went away warmed by a rubdown with soothing oil, confident Uncle Gilmore was smiling down at her from Heaven.

76. But just as religious prophets have their days in the wilderness, there were days when the vision grew fuzzy; then Dad’s temper was on hair trigger with the rest of us, and he and Mother quarreled bitterly. These quarrels allowed Jack and I to gather what was happening, because after the explosion, like bomb fragments remarks would have flown out that he and I could piece together to get an idea of the initiator and the nature of the explosive charge. And what we put together was that he had lost money on the twenty houses he had completed. At least he thought he had lost money, though he wasn’t sure because he couldn’t be bothered keeping formal books. I recall his once airily replying to Mother’s anxious question that bookkeeping was for men with dim vision and crabbed minds.

77. I suspect Aunt Dolly finally scented an oddly too-sweet odor – which, I am told, sacred relics often exhale, decaying – even though she was living fifteen miles away, for there came an afternoon she drove over from San Jose to talk with Mother. At first it appeared she only wished to inform us that she and Will were planning a move to Florida. Her son, she said, had bought property there with cash she and Will had sent him (it was Will who later remarked that he had sold his waterworks stock) and was building a house on it for them, in which they were decided to live out their retirement. After explaining this, Aunt Dolly said “Ah really thank it’ll be good for Will to get away from California an’ awl these grapes; you know…” She paused, then hissed in a scandalized whisper “Ah do believe Mary, that that man drinks?”

78. “Oh Dolly, do you really think so?” Mother replied, just as if she had not found a whole Arlington of dead soldiers buried beneath the garden tools.

79. “Yayus,” Aunt Dolly affirmed. “Ah loathe to say it, but I do believe Ah’m married to a drinkin’ man; if Uncle Gilmore found out about it why he’d turn over in his grave Ah do declayuh.”

80. ”But how do you know, Dolly?” Though Mother prided herself on being a realist she was keen for giving the benefit of the doubt, when it cost her nothing.

81. “Well, Ah happened accident’ly to enter the water closet once, while he was in it, and surprised him just guzzlin’ some sort of cheap wahn. He actually had a bottle of the nasty stuff hid in the..in that sort of white tank behind the..the..”

82. “Well, of course, Dolly,” Mother said, “I don’t suppose a little wine once in awhile would really hurt—“

83. “A drinkin’ man,” Aunt Dolly interrupted musingly. “Ah do declayuh. Ah wonder, d’you suppose that would be grounds for divorce?”

84. Awhile later it transpired that she had come not merely to report that Florida sun was ideal for drying out winoes, nor to inquire legal advice, but also to ask Mother if she thought Dad could give back her twelve thousand dollars and, if it had doubled yet, give her the profit too.

85. “You’ll have to talk to Harry about that,” Mother said cautiously. “But I believe things are temporarily a little tight with him, right now…”

86. “Well Ah don’t see why Bubba couldn’t,” Aunt Dolly whined. ”After all, he’s got ever’thang started now, why’s he need my money any more?”

87. “I’m sure I don’t know, Dolly,” Mother said; then, incautiously and unnecessarily going on to what was topmost in her mind continued “But I do know he was talking the other day about mortgaging our home, and I told him he had better stop thinking about that, because I would find it terribly hard to forgive if he did. But if it could even occur to him to take such a step, it shows you might have to wait awhile before you can get your money.”

88. “Oh?” Aunt Dolly said. She patted Mother’s hand. “Well, you just oughtn’t to give that mortgagin’ business another thought, honey. Ah’m sure Bubba wouldn’ never do a thing like that – an’ why on earth should he, when thangs’re goin’ so well and all with him?”

89. Shortly afterward she kissed Mother and left. During the drive back to San Jose Aunt Dolly must have figured out the answer to her question all by herself, for she couldn’t have had time to more than step into her apartment and glimpse an empty jug before getting into her car again and driving back. She met Dad just as he pulled up in the garage and demanded her money. Dad replied that he couldn’t put his hands on it all just this instant, but if she needed it, he would try to get her some of it, in awhile.

90. Aunt Dolly did not like this answer, and to express how little she liked it she began by stating that she had thought if there was anybody in the whole wide world she could confide Uncle Gilmore’s sacred trust to it was Bubba, and now here was Bubba sayin’ he wouldn’t give her back the money she had trustingly and graciously loaned him to get him started. She had tried to help out her Bubba from the goodness of her heart and here was her reward. She had apparently forgot that besides its being a spontaneous bubbling up of heart’s goodness, her liquid capital had flowed in to be frozen on hard speculation, with the ice-clear object underneath of making a lot more of it, and Dad did not remind her. She began asking questions (“Well, Bubba, Ah’d just like to see in your books wheah you spent awl that money…my stars! You mean theah ain’t any books?”) and presently the discussion had worked around to where Dad was faced by a choice between two embarrassing alternatives: either of admitting he had blunderingly mismanaged his affairs, or of defending himself against a charge of having swindled his poor widowed sister of her dead husband’s savin’s. Characteristically, he disdained either alternative. Goaded by her cross questioning, he flew into a fury and, perhaps using it as cover to cave in with dignity to his older sister, roared that if she trusted him so little he didn’t want her money, and would give her back every cent of it within two weeks.

91. He raised it. He mortgaged the house, he visited every loan company in San Jose – his credit rating was still A-1 – and he drained every possible dollar from the business. Two weeks later Aunt Dolly got her twelve thousand dollars and, saying she’d just known she could trust her Bubba, she drove contentedly off to Florida with her husband, ostensibly to a tranquil retirement near the Everglades National Park, which, even at the time, Will must have known was populated by weasels and snakes and, especially, cottonmouth moccasins.

92.

93. Now that so much money had vanished from Dad’s working capital, what had been a struggle on the thin edge of meeting payrolls and paying lumber bills became a heart-in-the-mouth drop into a chasm of mechanics’ liens and expensive delays and crippling interest payments on hasty patch-up loans. During his plunge Dad caught at two very curious handholds.

94. One evening at month’s end, the month Aunt Dolly and Will had left, Dad came home with a fire-opal ring he had seen passing a jewelry store. Thinking, he said, that it was about time the wife of a man in his position had some pieces of fine jewelry, he had put down on it a hundred dollars from his freshly-cashed paycheck and signed up (A-1 credit) to pay seventy-five dollars a month for the next six months. Mother was angry, for she knew very well that seventy-five dollars less in his paycheck would make it hard for us to eat and meet loan company payments too. When she told him he would have to take it back he refused, growing very offended and aggrieved that she had so little confidence in him. In any event they quarreled so over the ring that evening that she forgot to ask if Dad had deposited the rest of his check in the household account.

95. That night, while Jack and I were sleeping, we awakened after midnight to the sound of angry voices from the living room. Though we realized it was only our parents quarrelling again some nightmarish quality in their tones made us understand that it was no ordinary quarrel. We did not have to listen long to find out what it concerned: that day, in between Dad’s passenger “runs” to San Francisco, he had gone to Bay Meadows and lost the rest of his monthly paycheck, around five hundred dollars, on the horses. He had also borrowed two hundred fifty dollars from a friend and lost that, too. After the outburst that had awakened us their voices settled down to a murmurous rise and fall, from time to time Mother’s anguished, stunned, hiss “…but…how could you…? I mean how could you…?” and Dad’s subdued reply “Well, Mama, I was positive I’d be lucky, this once, when I really needed it…”

96. After this incident you could almost sniff tension in the air around our house as ozone can be sniffed near powerful electrical machinery. You could hear it crackle menacingly at the sharp points of random spinosities when a disgruntled homeowner started telephoning at odd times of day and night to harass Dad over a change he had half-promised then reneged on, at discovering its cost. For awhile the homeowner kept his threats vague, but one evening, after dinner had been interrupted by one of this man’s telephone calls, Dad returned to table shuddering and choking with near-apoplectic rage. The man had filed a complaint against him with the state Realty Board, putting his contractor’s and broker’s licenses in danger of being suspended.

97. It may have been only the equivalent of the inevitable discharge of static electricity after its build-up to critical potential that made Mother shriek “Oh thank the dear good sweet Lord! I hope he succeeds! I’ll even drive him down to the courthouse – I’ll be witness for him! -- if he’ll do something – anything! – that will pry you away from this horrible horrible business!”

98. Dad stared at her a long moment, then replied evenly – and, perhaps, accurately as to the spring that drove him – “I’ve only been doing this for you, Mama. I’ve been trying to do something for you all my life, and instead of having a wife who understands and encourages and helps, I’m cursed with one who can do nothing but thwart me, and now wants to stab me in the back!”

99. He looked and sounded so injured that even Mother grasped how stupid and uncomprehending she had sounded, and she partially apologized, saying “I meant only that I don’t want to be a rich widow, I don’t want a fortune built on your blood and bones…”

100. Within a few weeks Dad had his first, serious, heart attack – he had it at the tract, bellowing at that homeowner; he had always been a heavy smoker, and the added stress of worry and knowledge of failed hopes must have almost literally broken his heart. During his six-month convalescence in the railroad hospital the tract was completed by a man appointed by the bank. At the end, Dad received nothing from it but the debts, which were considerable. His financial recovery took longer than his physical recovery: for years thereafter most of Dad’s paycheck went each month to pay his notes. He did not declare bankruptcy, and not only because it would have destroyed what remained of his credit rating: he was a man who paid what he owed.

101.

102. A year after Dad’s heart attack I came home from high school one day to find Dad and Aunt Dolly’s husband in the living room, both sitting on the sofa with a couple of drinks in front of them. I was surprised to see Will returned from Florida, since he had been eager to go there, and I asked where Aunt Dolly was, preparatory to inquiring why they had come back. Will, looking at his feet, muttered simply that she was in Florida still, but Dad said to me “Say, do you want to hear something?”

103. I sat down across from the two of them, saying I did.

104. “Do you know what Dolly did to poor Will here?” And Dad licked his lips. “Why, she’s divorced him! And do you want to know what her son George did with that money Will sent him to buy land?” Dad was smiling now.

105. I nodded, wanting to avert my eyes from that smile as, through some instinctive sense of decency, one would avert one’s eyes when a man too nakedly reveals himself – yet fascinated by it, understanding neither my fascination nor my wish not to see.

106. “Why he took it and bought the property in his own name! And when Will and Dolly went back there to live in the house Will thought he owned, do you know what George said? Why he said they could live in that house with him and his family for awhile, till they found something else! The house Will had paid for on property Will had paid for! Can you beat that?”

107. I tore my eyes from Dad’s face and looked at Will’s. It seemed a carved wood mask of shock and half-understood betrayal. I suppose he had worn that face ever since he had discovered that his wife and stepson had swindled him.

108. “Yes sir,” Dad was saying and I looked back to see him still smiling. As he continued speaking it struck me just what it was I was seeing: I was seeing how utter had been his defeat. Never again would he seek satisfaction in the battle – he would find it now gloating over others’ defeats, and not even defeats sustained on the field where he had once fought, but any defeats of any kind anywhere. For his smile was not the bitter welcoming smile of ”Well, we’re both in the same boat”, it was a smile of malicious pleasure in another’s misfortune and disguised – though very ill-disguised – as a smile of sympathy. And to see that smile on Dad’s face, on the face of the man whose faults had been many but had never included hypocrisy or malice, was like seeing an appalling seal stamped on it, a kind of certificate of his disintegration.

109. “Yes sir. And when Will asked Dolly to be a witness for him in court, to why he’d sent that money, you know, she said how could he expect her to testify against her own flesh and blood, and that if he could actually bring himself to ask her to do a thing like that maybe they’d better just get a divorce! Isn’t that the damnedest thing you ever heard of?” Dad’s voice assumed a sanctimonious note. “Yes sir, I hate to admit it, but it looks to me like my own sister formed a conspiracy with her son to defraud poor old Will here! Isn’t that terrible?”

110. I don’t recall my reply; I remember only feeling awe, and helplessness – perhaps the awe and helplessness that primitive man felt on seeing an eclipse of the sun, when it was brought home to him that powers beyond his control were changing the universe around him.

111.

112. As a sort of coda to all this, still vivid in my mind is a day when, in spite of the family’s debts, Mother decided we could afford dinner out in San Francisco. As we sat down in the restaurant Mother said, with an all-embracing gesture that made her ring flash dark fires in the candle light, “Now, isn’t this nice, Harry? Don’t you feel relaxed? Don’t you feel better, now that horrible tract and all its worries are over with?”

113. Dad said nothing and with desperate insistence she pursued “We could never have eaten out when you were involved in it. Isn’t this really nicer?”

114. “Oh, yeah,” Dad said at last. “Oh yeah, this is nicer, all right.”

115. “There,” Mother said, relaxing. “See?”

116.

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118.

119.

120. end

121.