“I need a good leaving alone,” the stocky man said. “I’d as soon not
have anybody start thinking about me too much on this detail. I don’t want
nobody following me around, all right?”
“Okay,” the driver said, “we’ll do it your way. You call me when you
get something, if you do, and if I get something, I’ll put it in front of the
U.S. Attorney. If I don’t, all bets’re off. Understood?”
The stocky man nodded.
“Merry Christmas,” the driver said. (15–16)In the first part of this passage, the conversational disclosure is straight-
forward: Eddie wants to know whether informing on Jackie (though of course
he does not name him) and his customer will persuade Foley to put in a
good word for him in New Hampshire, and Foley makes it clear how much
information he would need. The authorial disclosure, however, communicates
a discrepancy between what Eddie thinks Foley is promising him and what
Foley actually promises. Eddie wants a stay-out-of-jail card and thinks Foley is
telling him that supplying the information will get him one, but Foley prom-
ises only to say “something to somebody” about Eddie “helping uncle”—even
as Foley emphasizes how much information he needs. Higgins conveys the
discrepancy by showing that Eddie does not at all pick up on it. He does not
object to Foley’s requirements or ask for a greater guarantee but instead allows
Foley to steer the direction of the conversation with the next two questions
(about who else and when). Eddie is all too ready to mistake Foley’s limited
promise for something greater. Foley, of course, is aware of what he is and is
not promising. In communicating the discrepancy to his rhetorical readers,
Higgins is also complimenting them on being smarter than Eddie.
Additional significant authorial disclosure comes from reading across the
conversations in chapter 1 and chapter 2. This disclosure leads to our first
reconfiguration of the plot dynamics. We now see that Eddie’s question to
Jackie, “What color was he?,” was motivated by more than idle curiosity or
even knee-jerk racism. Indeed, Higgins invites rhetorical readers to recognize
that Eddie has initiated this meeting with Foley precisely because of Jackie’s
mention of this potential customer, and thus, the whole conversation in chap-
ter 2, including Eddie’s posturing about buying skis, and then later Foley’s
opining that Eddie could be facing up to five years in jail, has been leading
up to this moment.^3 The first reconfiguration involves our understanding of
- The earlier conversation also provides an excellent lesson in how to use conversational
disclosure for the authorial disclosure of necessary background: Higgins uses Eddie’s protesta-
tions of innocence and Foley’s skepticism as the mechanism for conveying the facts of Eddie’s
crime and its likely consequences to us. In this regard, Higgins is more skillful than O’Hara,
CONVERSATIONAL AND AUTHORIAL DISCLOSURE IN DIALOgUE • 177