A Likely Story

Friday, November 25th

I am still recuperating from yesterday, Thanksgiving Day. A true harvest festival, the closest thing in Puritan America to real hedonism, the one day a year when gluttony is not only acceptable but required. (Another of the seven deadly sins memorialized.)

While it is true that the first Thanksgiving Day was celebrated as a sit-down harvest gala among the early Pilgrims and some tame neighborhood Indians, the feast did not become a national holiday until 1863, when Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation on the subject. Proclamations kept the holiday alive year by year until 1941, when Congress made it a permanent addition to the American calendar.

Lincoln’s proclamation — Thanksgiving, not emancipation — was done at the urging of one Sarah Josepha Hale, then editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, who was also the author of “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” among other works, and who, an ardent feminist, persuaded Vassar Female College, founded in 1861, to delete the word “Female” from its name in 1867. If she’d stopped to think how many American women down through the decades would be struggling to cook (without drying them out) twenty-two pound turkeys on the fourth Thursday of every November, she might well have told Lincoln to forget it.

It’s been six weeks since I added anything to this history; not since labor and management got together out there in Pennsylvania to kill my baby. I understand the strike is still going on, is likely to last a lot longer, and has begun to spread to some of the company’s southern plants as well. It looks as though both sides are going to suffer a lot. Good.

There is no Christmas Book, but good things did come of it. The money, for instance; the lack of a book wasn’t my fault, nor the contributors’ fault, so we all got to keep our payments. And then there’s Highest Previous Score, which is our working title for the history of video games. Since my track record now includes the money I was paid for The Christmas Book, Annie got me a much higher advance for Highest Previous Score than would have happened last year. (Beat my highest previous score, in fact.) Also, Dewey continues to combine contriteness for past misdeeds with a wonderful galumphing enthusiasm for this new book, so it may even get good support from the company when it comes out next September. (It’ll be next year’s Craig, Harry & Bourke Christmas book, of course.)

And video games are really interesting when you get to know about them, in a way. Sort of. Well, bearable, anyway. (There’s something I wouldn’t tell anybody but Mary, which is the truth: Video games are even more boring to read about and write about than to play. But what I am is a professional, and what Highest Previous Score is is what they’ll pay me to write. Listen, it could be Erik Estrada’s autobiography.)

But what made me think about The Christmas Book again is something that came in the mail today, from Pompano Beach, Florida: a birth announcement. “Mr. and Mrs. Harold J. Goldbaum are pleased to announce the birth of their daughter, Tiffany Rachel Goldbaum,” etcetera. At first I couldn’t figure out why Mr. and Mrs. Harold J. Goldbaum, of whom I have never before heard, wanted to share this glad news with me, but then all at once the penny dropped and I said out loud, “Vickie!”

Has to be. I counted backward, and from what she told me she should be almost due now, so she dropped the kid a couple weeks early, which would be very much in character, she being sort of jumpy and neurotic and impatient. I cannot begin to picture Harold, but whoever he is he clearly didn’t stand a chance.

So; the publishing world’s loss is Florida’s gain. I hope she’ll be— Well, not happy, let’s stay within the range of the possible. I hope she’ll be reasonably content part of the time.

Speaking of happiness, Hubert Van Driin of Federalist Press has agreed to take Happy Happy Happy, for a shitty amount of money. It’s on the back burner right now, because of Highest Previous Score, but if the deal with Coca-Cola works out this book too might become a winner. Indirectly, this is also a result of The Christmas Book.

It all began with the Andy Warhol contribution, the Coca-Cola tray with Santa Claus on it. I cut out that middleman by dealing directly with a Coca-Cola PR lady in Atlanta. Naturally, she’s one of the people I informed when the book was murdered, and just last week she phoned to say she was in town for a few days on Coca-Cola business, and could we talk.

So we talked. Her name is Lynn Mulligan, she’s tall and quite attractive, early thirties, and in truth she was in New York because she’d talked the company into relocating her to their advertising liaison office in New York. Seems her marriage recently came to an end, so she wants to pick up the kids and move out of Atlanta. She’ll make the move after Christmas, so what she initially wanted to talk about was apartments and schools and all the rest of it.

But then the subject of Happy Happy Happy came up, and when I described our failure to get Hallmark to sponsor and subsidize the project, she suddenly said, “We might.”

“You might what?”

“Be interested in the book. Will it be published by next fall?”

“It could be,” I said.

“If Coca-Cola could get some placement in the book,” she said, “maybe something on the jacket and title page—”

“Lovely,” I said. “But why?”

“Well, we might take a printing,” she said, “make it the corporate Christmas present next year. Say twenty, twenty-five thousand copies.”

Hubert Van Driin has been known to do hardcover printings of specialized nostalgia books of twenty-five hundred copies. If I go into his office with one customer’s order for twenty-five thousand, his gaiters will absolutely snap. His bow tie will spin like an airplane propeller. He’ll have to go home and change his trousers.

Lynn is back in Atlanta now, laying the groundwork for the idea, and I won’t know until after the first of the year, but I am very hopeful. On the other hand, I am for the moment leaving Happy on the back burner, to concentrate on Highest Previous Score; I have seen great expectations sag before.

Whether this Coca-Cola deal works out or not, my having met Lynn at least proved one thing to me; I’m home for good. If I were on the alert for another Ginger, by golly, here she is. And she made it clear she wouldn’t hate it if I made overtures.

But I did not, and I won’t. I remember now why Mary and I got together in the first place, and it was because we belonged together. I’d allowed myself to forget that over the years. With Mary the only steadfastness in this constantly shifting and ridiculous life, it became easier and easier not to notice her.

Or, that is, not to notice any but the bad parts, the little annoyances and irritations that every one of us distributes like a squid’s surrounding cloud of ink. Mary’s dogged determination to become a first-class photographer, for instance, when she just simply was not graced with that gift. She doesn’t do anything about being a first-class photographer, just gets up every morning as the same old bush-league picture-taker and takes some more bush-league pictures, in the calm hope (not expectation, merely hope) that some magic transformation would have taken place in her eye and mind since yesterday.

In fact, her very calm, her bulldog staying power that looks so suspiciously like passivity but somehow is not, can become annoying. The smell of chemicals in the bathroom, there’s another. The fact that she usually knows more about me than I do. All of that ink gradually filled the foreground, obscuring the large and more important truths. And so, self-bewitched, forgetting I already had the Blue Rose, out I went in quest of it. That’s not a mistake I’ll make twice. (Apart from anything else, Jennifer and Bryan would hate Santa Fe.)