A Likely Story

Friday, September 2nd

I hate Dewey Heffernan. He’s not only an idiot, he’s a nasty idiot.

In the three weeks I’ve been working downtown, I’ve left a message on the uptown answering machine, giving this phone number down here and saying this is where I’ll be during working hours. Everybody else wanting to reach me has managed to work out the intricacies of that message and dial the new number and talk to me — some, by the way, congratulating me on “seeing through” Ginger and returning at last to Mary, which leads to a great deal of embarrassment all around — but could Dewey Heffernan accomplish that great feat? For years I have heard the expression, “He couldn’t find his ass with both hands,” and thought it hyperbole, but now I have met someone who couldn’t find his ass with both hands tied behind him.

Around six last night I returned to the uptown apartment to find a message on the machine from Dewey: “Give me a call as soon as you can, Tom. You’re being sued.” Well, of course, at that hour everybody was gone from the Craig, Harry & Bourke offices, so I had a night to think about that message before I finally managed to reach Dewey at ten-thirty this morning. “Sued?” I said. “What have you done now, Dewey?”

“Gee, Tom,” he said, all innocence (which I no longer trust), “why act like that? Gee whiz, I wasn’t the one who made all that trouble-”

There are statements so outrageous there’s no response possible at all. Besides, I was more interested in today’s shit-storm than yesterday’s. “Tell me about this suit,” I said.

“We were served yesterday,” he told me. “They’re going to serve you, too, but I guess they can’t find you. You sure are tough to track down, Tom.”

“Who are ‘they,’ Dewey, and what is the subject of the lawsuit?”

“Wait a minute, I’ve got it here somewhere, I’ll just... Hold on, I’m... I know it’s...”

There followed a period of sound effects: rustlings and scuttlings, very like mice in a wall. This was followed by a brief silence, and then Dewey, sounding a bit out of breath, came back on the line, saying, “I’ll have to call you back, Tom,” and he hung up.

“Wait!” I said, but of course it was too late.

So I called him back, and when I got through to him I said, “Since, Dewey, I know you would call me at the other number and leave a message on the machine, why don’t I tell you this phone number here and save some time?”

“I just found it,” he said.

“The phone number?”

“His name is— What?”

“Whose name?”

“The man who’s suing you. He’s Harold Muddnyfe of Muscatine, Iowa, and he’s suing on behalf of his wife Maureen.”

“And what am I supposed to have done to Maureen Muddnyfe?”

“Stolen her idea for The Christmas Book.”

“WHAT?”

“The suit says it was her idea, and she was in correspondence with many of the same people you approached, and you stole her idea and she wants all royalties plus punitive damages.”

“Jesus H. Christ!”

“The reason it’s the husband doing it is because his wife is in an iron lung.”

“Oh, I don’t believe this.”

“She’s been confined to this iron lung for the last twelve years, so all she can do is read, so she’s written a lot of letters to writers over the years, she’s been in correspondence with all these people, and three years ago she got her idea for a modern book about Christmas, with things written especially for it by all her favorite writers, the book to be called Joy to the—”

“Tacky.”

“—World, and she wrote to a bunch of writers, and they all told her it was a great idea.”

“Sure they did,” I said. “Of course they did. The woman’s in an iron lung in Muscatel, Iowa—”

“Muscatine.”

“Who’s going to rain on her parade? Did she ever approach any publishers?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

Dewey coughed. “Well, us, for one.”

“Oh, that’s just—” I said, and the doorbell rang, the upstairs doorbell. “Don’t go away, Dewey,” I said. “Do not, under pain of death, go away.” I put the phone down and ran to the front door and opened it, and standing in the hall was a woebegone man with a big nose and a tan raincoat and a folded packet of papers. He said, “Thomas Diskant?”

“Yes?”

“Here,” he said, and gave me the papers.

“Whats this?”

“You have been served in a civil suit,” the man said, and walked away.

Son of a bitch! Slamming the door, I ran back to the phone to find that Dewey — astonishingly enough — had not gone away. “I’ve just been served,” I said, fumbling to open the packet and talk on the phone at the same time.

“I knew they’d probably find you,” Dewey said, with what sounded suspiciously like satisfaction.

I said, “Is there correspondence between Craig and this Mudsill woman?”

“Muddnyfe.”

“Yes, here it is,” I said, reading the indictment against me. “Muddnyfe. She has correspondence from Craig?”

“Yes. I’ve got a copy of the carbon. It just says thank you for your letter, it’s an interesting idea, if you do the book we’ll be happy to consider it.”

The standard brush-off. “What’s the date?”

“Well, it’s two and a half years ago.”

“So it’s prior to me and she can prove access. This is terrific. Who signed the letter?”

“Well, it’s kind of unreadable,” Dewey said. “Nobody seems to know who it is, and the initials on the lower left are all smudged.”

“Is there a job title under the unreadable signature?”

“Associate editor.”

A slush-pile reader. A recent college graduate, or maybe somebody’s wife or boyfriend, long out of that job. There’s nobody to say what happened to Maureen Muddnyfe’s query letter once it arrived at the Craig, Harry & Bourke offices, no one to swear that it wasn’t shown to me (already a Craig author, leave us not forget), no one to state that he or she was the only person connected with Craig, Harry & Bourke who read or saw or had any knowledge of that letter. “I think, Dewey,” I said, “I think I ought to call my lawyer.”

“Listen, Tom? Can I ask a question?”

“Sure.”

“Did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Get the idea from this letter.”

“Someday, Dewey,” I said, “I shall unscrew your head and bowl with it.” I hung up on his flabbergasted silence — gee whiz, what was old Tom mad at now? — and phoned my attorney, Morris Morrison, who had taken today off because it was the start of the Labor Day weekend.

Labor Day. Another damn holiday. This one was dreamed up by the Knights of Labor, a kind of nineteenth century American Wobblies, a secret society founded in 1869 and dedicated to organizing all workers, skilled and unskilled, clerical and professional, and even including small businessmen, into one huge union. By 1880 they’d come out of the closet and had started attracting a lot of membership; almost a million by 1886. However, they were a little too radical for their time, and believed rather too enthusiastically in confrontational strikes. Also, the AFL and other craft unions were coming along and didn’t want to give up their autonomy to be in this huge amorphous organization. The result was, by 1890 the Knights had been unhorsed, never to return, and by now they’re just about completely forgotten.

Except for Labor Day. It was their invention. They chose the date, the first Monday in September, and on that date in 1882, 1883 and 1884 they paraded in New York, demanding a holiday for the workingman (as though the goddam workingman doesn’t have enough holidays as it is; but you know what they meant). Every other labor organization joined the effort, and in 1887 Oregon became the first state to make the first Monday in September a holiday devoted to big-L Labor. New York and New Jersey and Colorado (with all those miners to pacify) soon followed, and in 1894 (after the Knights were already kaput) Congress made the affair national. So the Knights of Labor finally accomplished, after heroic effort, just one thing: a day off.

Well, but it’s a lot more than one day off by now, isn’t it? It’s a looooonnnnng weekend, with people taking off Friday and probably Tuesday, as well.

Oh, my God, I just looked at the calendar, and Rosh Hashanah starts next Thursday! And then Yom Kippur after that. Next Wednesday is the only day in the foreseeable future when I will be able, if I am very very lucky, to talk with my attorney.

If Dewey had only phoned me here yesterday...

If Dewey. Is there any point in a sentence that starts, “If Dewey...”?