"The sum of $30,000 is to be paid         out to you for editing and completing Irwin Isaac Meiselman's work in progress on the subject of immigration to America."

A joke, right? I think. Someone's pulling my chain. Yet I never told anyone but my wife about Meiselman. 

"There are other stipulations," Freifeld continued. "The completed book is to bear the name Irwin Isaac Meiselman alone on the title page. The book is also to be copyrighted in his name, with all royalties going to the Irwin Isaac Meiselman Estate."

"Mr Freifeld," I say, "I think you should know that I scarcely knew Mr Meiselman. I also know nothing out of the ordinary about immigration, to America or anywhere else. Much as I'd like to have the thirty grand, I am in no position to undertake the work needed to collect it."

"Interesting," said Freifeld. "In my meetings with him at the St Francis hospice, Mr Meiselman led me to believe that you were friends and that you have had a deep interest in his book."

 "I was not a friend of Mr Meiselman's, and it is more precise to say that I had — and continue to have — a nearly complete lack of interest in his book."

"Maybe before you make a final decision you do best to visit my office, where Mr Meiselman's unfinished manuscript and notes reside in three large boxes. This book, as you must know Mr Kastell, was everything to Mr Meiselman."

"I know it very well," I say. "But I don't feel the need to give three or four years of my life to making a dead man's dream come true."

"Your call," says Freifeld. "But if you change your mind, the manuscript and other items are here, 116 S. Michigan Avenue, 14th floor." If I don't hear from you in within the next six months, the $30,000 will revert to the estate."

I thought a fair amount about that $30,000 during the next few weeks. I thought about it when I took our seventeen-year-old daughter Janeane on a tour of colleges in the east. I thought about it when I learned that I would have to have three back teeth removed and implants set on the lower left side of my jaw. I thought about it when my editor instructed me that the characters in the rough draft of my new novel failed to come alive, and perhaps I would do best to abandon it. I thought about it because it seemed a shame to allow Freifeld and the other legal bandidos in his firm slowly to filch the money over the years in legal costs. I thought about it just because, as the man who climbed Mount Everest is supposed to have said, it was there. 

And so here I sit, in the small extra bedroom in our apartment that I call my study, Meiselman's three boxes of manuscripts and notes dominating the room, heavily rewriting the book he planned to call Huddled Masses. Turns out I was mistaken when I told                Sidney Freifeld that it would require three or four years to clean up Meiselman's book; I now think that working nights and weekends, it can be made presentable and I hope publishable in a year or so. I don't say it will be a great book; I don't think it will be a distinguished one. I've shown a few of my reworked chapters to Letitia Baumgartner, who has no interest in handling it but tells me that it is a book that might find a home at a secondary university press, Missouri, maybe, or Northwestern. God, I hope she's right. I want this book out in the world so that for the rest of my life I need never give another thought to Irwin Isaac Meiselman.