The Stepmom
In many stories of put-upon young kids, it is the stepmother that takes the brunt of being the unpleasant parental figure. In this story, Davy’s stepmother beats his biological mother in every single category of humanity. She is even more intuitive about him than his actual mom:
“The next day when I go out with my father and Stephanie, I am a regular gloomy Gus. My father doesn't pay any attention to me, but Stephanie can tell right away that I'm not the usual trying-to-please me. I already mentioned that Stephanie is schmaltzy. She has a cool outside, but if everything isn't hunky-dory she knows it in two minutes, and I can see her trying to find out what's wrong. I try to be jolly as hell and it's fake, and Stephanie knows it, so she works even harder, which makes me gloomier, and so forth. You get the picture. On some days it is not satisfactory to deal with people.”
1969
A conversation with his unexpectedly understanding father about how people easily settle into their own tribes is remarkably timely considering that the novel was written in the late 1960’s. Imagery just goes to prove that when it comes to people choosing up sides, everything old is new again:
“Then Father talks a lot about how hysterical people sometimes get when they discover that other people aren't just what they are expected to be. He tells me there are Republicans who are always secretly disappointed when friends turn out to be Democrats, and Catholics who like their friends to be Catholic, and so forth. He says that such people are narrow-minded, he believes, and funny too, unless they become hysterical about getting everyone to be just alike. Then they are dangerous. They become religious bigots, super-patriots, super-antipatriotic, and do I understand? I tell him I think I do, but can't people learn to understand other people? He thinks they can, but only if they want to.”
The New Home
The occasion of his grandmother’s death is the stimulating event for the entire story. He has been forced to move in with his mother in New York City and the change in environment is proving to be a very big deal:
“Mother's house is in the middle of the block. It was built in 1834 and has high ceilings. There are a couple of fireplaces in her apartment and a nutty-looking porch over the kitchen of the people who live under her on the second floor. We're all shivering with the cold when we come in, and it's the back porch Mother wants to show us first. She calls it her terrace, and I can see right away that she thinks Fred can live out there. I tell her that Fred loves heat, and if she will show me where I'll live, I'm sure Fred can squeeze in there too. She's very real-estate agent about the whole thing though, so we have to wait to see my room. We see her study, which has a desk in it with a quill pen stuck in a china inkwell. Then we see her bedroom and her bed, which is a sight, with a big floppy lace ceiling over it. We see the kitchen, which must have been a closet in former days, and the bathroom.”
Business Advice
Davy receives a lot of advice from a lot of people over the course of the novel, but some of the best is business advice from a simple candy store owner. It is advice worthy of a semester at business school:
"When you've got a business, you remember things which help the business. What people like is very important in candy. Take, for example, if you were to buy Dougie a bag of candy as a present for his birthday, it would be important not to have black jelly beans in it. That's business, sonny. Business is giving people what they want. Remember that, when you're a big man doing a big business somewhere. It's advice like this you need. You'll grow up and go to college someday, and you'll learn business from books and you'll learn economics, and the Wall Street journal will become your favorite comic book, and you might forget what a lady in the candy business told you. But you try to remember: Give the people what they want. That's business.”
