The Wednesday Sisters (21 page)

K
ATH HARDLY WROTE
those next months, not even in her journal. She was emotionally exhausted, all her energy sapped by the demands of motherhood—taking care of Anna Page, Lee-Lee, and Lacy with no real help from Lee—and the drudgery of her work for the accountant. She needed to change jobs, Linda kept saying. “Why don’t you find something you enjoy doing, Kath? You could be . . . I don’t know. A journalist or an editor or a buyer for a bookstore. You could probably
run
a bookstore.” Then one Sunday in November, Linda arrived at the park looking like the canary that ate the cat. She’d met a woman at an AAUW meeting who knew an editor who would be looking to hire someone that spring. She wasn’t quite sure of the details, but it was in publishing. Wouldn’t Kath love to work in publishing?

“In the spring?” Kath said doubtfully.

“The person she needs to replace is getting married in the spring. I think she’s accepting résumés, although she won’t interview until after the New Year.”

Despite the long lead time, Kath got all in a twist right then. She’d never interviewed for anything, she said. And when we pointed out that she’d interviewed for all those jobs before she started working for the accountant, she said, “Anything that
matters.
Any job I might actually
want
.”

M
Y OWN LIFE
wasn’t as complicated as Kath’s that winter, but it was complicated enough. For one thing, being a lector at my church was turning out to be more time-consuming than I’d expected. Just a few minutes reading aloud during a Mass I would have attended anyway, I’d thought when I volunteered, and I was thrilled to do it, in part because only men had been allowed to read when I was growing up. I hadn’t counted on the psychological energy it took to stand up in front of a whole church full of college graduates, though, their squirming children letting me know just how tedious my version of a Letter from Paul to the Corinthians was.

The first Sunday I read was, shall we say, eventful. I tripped climbing up to the lectern and went sprawling at Father Pat’s feet. That got everyone’s attention as surely as Sister Margaret’s whistle had when I was in grade school—she put her thumb and middle finger to her mouth and shot out a sound that even the boys playing football on the big field couldn’t fail to hear. When I was in the third grade, I’d asked her how she did it—I was the only girl ever to ask, she said—and the first time I’d belted out a good one, she’d laughed and said, “Delightfully unladylike! Now you’d best be careful how you use it, Frances, or you’ll end up an old nun like me!”

With all those people staring at me from the pews, I picked myself up as gracefully as I could, straightened my glasses, and stood at the lectern. I could hardly find the page where I was to start the reading, even though it was marked with a ribbon. My voice croaked as I began. You could feel everyone suppressing their laughter, or holding their breaths.

The reading was from the prophet Isaiah, and I hadn’t yet recovered from my inauspicious beginning when I read, “‘None shall be weary nor . . . nor stumble . . .’” I choked up for a minute, too embarrassed to read on. I looked down at Danny, sitting with Maggie and Davy in the second pew, working hard not to laugh. At the whole congregation behind him.

I made a silly face and shrugged, and a rather delightful chuckle rippled through the church.

“‘None shall slumber nor sleep,’” I read on, cutting a glance toward Father Pat, who was known to doze off on occasion when he was assisting rather than saying the Mass himself. That got another chuckle, along with some poking of spouses who were known dozers, too.

When I’d finished reading and sat in the pew again, Danny took my hand and squeezed it, and whispered that I’d done a great job. I closed my eyes, prepared to have a few stern words with my God—privately, of course. But the God that came to me in that closed-eyed darkness looked more like a Wednesday Sister than like a stern old bearded Father, and she was chuckling, too.

All sorts of people stopped me after that Mass to say they’d enjoyed my reading. Even Father Pat had laughed, they said. And though I never did quite feel comfortable up at that lectern, in no time I went from sitting anonymously in the pews every Sunday to knowing so many parishioners that I was forever bumping into them at the parish office and the grocery store.

I was surprised to find myself controversial, too: a woman reader. Just when women had finally found our way to participating in the Mass—not reading the Gospels, that was still reserved for men, just doing the non-Gospel readings—the Vatican issued a revised Roman Missal, which restricted us. The NOW Ecumenical Task Force on Women and Religion burned part of the missal in protest that spring, and that fall it seemed half the nuns in America were in an uproar, the heads of seven orders meeting with Catholic bishops in Washington to demand a stronger voice in the Church. A nun, a woman who’d dedicated her life to the Church, couldn’t read the Gospels when a mere deacon could, just because he was a man? That didn’t seem right.

We learned that Danny was going to Canada that fall, too. His company was looking precarious—they had rushed to release the 1103, a breakthrough MOS memory product with four times the capacity of the original 1101, but as Danny’s boss said privately, “Sometimes the thing just doesn’t remember.” Andy feared the chips would all come back in returns and it would be the company’s death. But the manufacturing arm of Bell Canada offered an amount equal to the company’s entire net worth to be a second source for producing the 1103s, and Danny was being sent to Ottawa as part of the transfer team.

“Just temporarily. A few months, maybe,” he said.

“A few months!”

“Six or eight at most, I hope.”

I thought we ought to move with him—what would we do without him?—but he insisted that it wouldn’t be that long, and that if we moved we’d end up living in a shabby apartment in the heart of one of those dreadful Canadian winters. “You’d be miserable having to bundle up the kids every time you stepped out the door, Frankie,” he said. “And with no friends, no park.” He’d be working all the time, anyway, he said. It wasn’t like we’d ever see each other, even if we all moved.

The first few weeks Danny was away, I called him at his Ottawa apartment each night just before eight—eleven his time—so Mags and Davy could say good night to him, and he was always there. But he started getting back later and later as the weeks dragged on into months. I’d call every half hour, at eight-thirty, at nine; he didn’t like to call me lest the phone wake the children, and no amount of assurance from me would convince him it would not.

He’s working late, I would tell myself on those nights. He wants to finish up his work there so he can come home. I tried not to imagine him out having fun with his cohorts while the children kept me housebound and exhausted. I tried not to worry that he’d met another woman, that he was drinking his evening scotch with her. But things had been off between us lately—not on the surface but underneath. I can see now that it started that morning he found me writing, the moment I confessed to telling Bob I was writing a novel, but at the time all I could see was the strain that had crept into our lovemaking since I’d gotten my diaphragm, which, with the exception of that morning after he’d had the breakthrough on the MOS chip, I’d been using religiously.

One night when I got no answer at his apartment at eleven, at midnight, at one in the morning—4
A.M
. his time—I was sure he was in some other woman’s arms. Some mask designer, I thought, who had a life of her own, money of her own, who wouldn’t have to turn down the heat in the wintertime to save up for a second car. I don’t know why I didn’t call his office earlier that night—maybe because I rarely did even when he was here, because I hated to interrupt his work. Or maybe because I, like Kath, didn’t really want to know. But when I finally summoned the courage to phone his office, he answered on the first ring, his voice full of that funny croaky roughness it gets when he works intently for a long time.

With all that time alone while Danny was out of town—he came only for the occasional weekend—I wrote and wrote so that, by the end of 1970, I declared myself “done” with “Michelangelo’s Ghost.” Again. (There’s a wonderful quote by the French poet Paul Valéry—compliments of Brett, of course: “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” We were all beginning to see that “done” was a relative thing, not so much “finished” as “can’t bear to read a single word again.”) I made a new list of agents, and I was more prepared for rejection this time: Maggie had made me a little squid out of a toilet paper roll, complete with a black piece of paper inside, which, when you blew through the tube, came out as the little guy’s “ink.” When I got rejection letters, I could just pull out my squid and ink them!

The day I sent off my new batch of queries, Maggie lost her first tooth. She didn’t want to leave it under her pillow for the tooth fairy, she wanted to keep it herself. “I don’t need money,” she said. “I still have my dollar Grandpa gave me for my birthday.” She would leave a note under her pillow asking the tooth fairy to let her keep the tooth, she decided. If the tooth fairy promised not to take it, she would put it under her pillow the next night. If the fairy said she’d need to take the tooth to leave the money, no deal. A small thing, that first lost tooth, but I missed sharing it with Danny, missed enjoying together our daughter’s odd spin on it.

In mid-February, the phone rang: an agent calling to ask for my manuscript. No need to ink that! One part of me thought it meant nothing, that he liked the idea of the novel but when he started reading he would pass, and another part of me was worried: Who was this agent? What did I know about any of this? Five rejections poured in over the next couple of weeks, only confirming my fears. But then a second request for the manuscript came, another small measure of hope.

One afternoon later that month Maggie and her friend Karen Geisel, along with Linda’s Julie and Jamie, proudly informed me they were writing a book together. I made all the right noises—their writing was so neat, and their illustrations lovely. (“Illustrations,” I called them, not “stick figure crayon drawings.”) Karen, comfortable now, said they were going to send it to her grandpa when it was done, and he would publish it for them.

Me: “Is your grandpa a publisher?” Shamelessly milking this seven-year-old for information, thinking maybe I did have a connection to a publisher, albeit a tenuous one.

Karen: “No, he’s Dr. Seuss.”

Me (gulping): “Your grandpa is Dr. Seuss?”

Karen: “Yes. And if he likes it, he’ll get it published for us.”

I just stood there with my mouth open, thinking maybe if I rubbed her head, some of whatever made her grandfather magic would rub off on me.

Two days later the first agent, Fred Klein, called to say he loved my book and he was sure he could sell it. He was utterly charming about the fact that another agent had the manuscript. “It’s an important decision,” he said. “You need to pick someone you’re comfortable with.” And within minutes, I’d said I’d withdraw the manuscript from the other agent, and sure, I’d be happy to send him something on my second novel—as if I really did have something to send.

The moment we finished that phone call, I scooped up Davy and twirled him around, singing a tuneless, “Yes, yes, yes, I have an agent!” I called Danny in Canada—he was in a meeting and couldn’t be interrupted—and I knew I couldn’t tell anyone until I’d told him. So I waited, and called again, and waited and called yet again. Then decided I really ought to tell the Wednesday Sisters first—they were the ones who’d been writing with me. And my mom called just after I’d hung up with Kath, so I told her. And of course everyone who saw me when I went to pick up Maggie from school knew something was up and had to know the news: Maggie’s teacher and several of the parents, and, yes, her little friend Karen, whose mother responded to my inquiry about whether Karen’s grandfather was really Dr. Seuss with “Dr. Seuss?”

On the way home, Maggie picked me a bouquet of dandelions, which we put in a little pewter vase, and while they ate snacks, Davy made me a picture of a penguin—why a penguin I cannot imagine—and Maggie drew one of me with a cake and candles, my book in one hand and, ever practical, a fork in the other.

A cake is what the Wednesday Sisters showed up with that afternoon, too. A cake and champagne.

I was cleaning up the dinner dishes, exhausted and a little tipsy, when Danny finally called back. The moment the phone rang, I thought,
I can’t believe I told Karen’s mother—I don’t even know her name—and I haven’t told Danny yet.
I thought,
This must be something like what it’s like to tell your husband you’ve been unfaithful.
I thought,
But I tried to tell him first. I did.

“An agent,” he said. “That’s great, Frankie.” No “future famous novelist M. F. O’Mara.” No “I’ll try to get home this weekend to celebrate.” But he had been working so hard, hoping to wrap up things in Ottawa in the next month or so. He was exhausted.