The children had to be told no, they couldn't watch from any closer, it would be dangerous, something might fall on their little heads.
“How'll that rascal mansion ghost of yours occupy herself now, Frankie?” Kath said.
“She'll have to find another home to haunt,” Linda said.
“Maybe she's done haunting,” I said. “Maybe she's found whatever she was searching for.”
“Maybe she has,” Ally said. “Maybe she can be at peace.”
We sat silently for a moment, watching the heavy ball swing back again in a long arc, almost in slow motion. It was shocking how quickly the sad old house succumbed to the tyranny of that wrecking ball. Within minutes, only a few walls of the lower floor were standing, and I was left wondering what had been done with the house's contents, hoping the tuneless piano had found a home in a house with a little girl who would just be learning to play. Then the lower walls, too, were down, the once glorious old home reduced to a pile of rubble. It didn't even kick up much dust in its last gasp.
DESPITE ALL THE DISTRACTIONS that spring (Hurricane Agnes hit the East Coast, George Wallace was shot, Title IX steamed toward passage, and the Cubs . . . well, never mind the Cubs that year), Brett presented us with her revised novel one Sunday in late May. She seemed excited about the prospects of this new version, though what she said was, “It's changed. I'm just warning you. It could be atrocious, I don't even know. I have no perspective on it anymore, if I ever did.” And when the rest of us showed up in the park at dawn the next Sunday to discuss it, she did not.
We'd just decided we'd have to go drag her out of her house when she showed up, finally, her tiny face flustered under that glorious red hair, full of hope and dread. The minute we saw her, Kath stood and started clapping wildly, and we all followed suit.
In the prior versions—all those drafts that had ended up in the fireplace—the book had been a mystery, or tried to be, but the mystery element had failed to add narrative drive to the story. Brett, astonishingly, had simply abandoned it altogether. No murder in the book anymore. And where the earlier version had been set in the present, this new one was set in the future. It was funny, because this wasn't a book I'd rush off to the bookstore for, although the original version had been. A short description of it now would read something like “as the destruction of Earth looms, fifteen women set off in a rocket ship with frozen sperm and insemination technology, to start a new world.” No men. Men couldn't give birth, so they'd have wasted precious seats on the rocket. And yet by page 3, before you even realized you were reading science fiction, you were so charmed by Elizabeth and Ratty that you were not putting the book down. Charmed and intrigued, and sympathetic to Elizabeth's plight, which was the same plight Kath had identified in the earlier draft, the mother-daughter story.
“I bawled like a babe at the end,” Kath said.
“But I was laughing out loud, too,” Ally said.
“How did you make it so funny and so touching at the same time, Brett?” I asked. “It's a little bit of magic, that.”
“There's just this one iddy-biddy li'l thing about this novel,” Kath said. “I do love it to death but—”
“More than one,” Linda said. “We all loved it, right? But that doesn't mean we don't have comments.”
We all agreed: yes, we had comments.
“But this is important,” Kath said. “Mighty important. This title? Populating Paradise Galaxy?”
Brett groaned.
“Titles are crucial, though,” Kath insisted. “Would y'all have read a book called The High-Bouncing Lover? That was what Fitzgerald wanted to call The Great Gatsby. It's not just the reading public it matters a big ol' mess of greens to, either. Agents with heaps of manuscripts on their desks? Editors with big piles on theirs? Poor li'l assistants like me? I'd just stick a nice letter in an envelope saying no thanks, and Arlene would never see page one of this book.”
Kath had an idea, though: How about The Mrs. Americas? It hit on the theme of the book, the relative importance of beauty and brains in women. And in that time of Miss America being so popular still, and yet also so controversial, the title was both appealing and intriguing. We all agreed that, yes, we would at least pull that one off the shelf and read a page or two.
• • •
A FEW DAYS AFTER we'd all given our last little comments on Brett's new, retitled draft, Kath took The Mrs. Americas into her office and handed it to Arlene. When Arlene handed it back to Kath the next morning, she said, “Tell your friend we'd like to buy this. We'd like to publish it in September—not this year, but next.”