The Wednesday Sisters(87)

While Lee took Anna Page back upstairs, and sang softly to her, staying until her breathing slowed and her thumb settled beside her lips but not in her mouth, Kath tried to imagine how she ever would explain the scene to Anna Page. What kind of example was she setting for her daughters? Or for her son, for that matter? A woman who looked the other way while her husband lived with another woman, who clung to the charade of a happy marriage—sitting together in church, Sunday dinners, even weekday breakfasts and dinners sometimes—when the truth was something entirely different. The truth was he slept in another woman's bed every night, and still Kath wanted him back. She didn't even have the dignity to say enough was enough.

Anna Page would see the truth someday, Kath knew, even if she didn't that night. Lee-Lee and Lacy would, too, and what would they think? They would grow up believing this was the way men and women were: Men were philanderers and women put up with it. That was the example they would take from watching her.

And yet what was the damned alternative? To divorce Lee, or to publicly separate? Kath couldn't imagine how that could be better for Anna Page and Lacy and little Lee. Would they go to his apartment to visit him, then? Would they sleep there, with the other Kathy there as well? Would that awful woman fix their breakfasts and brush their hair and drive them to school, or would Lee do that himself? Would their classmates find out about it and call them names? And how could they possibly understand that their daddy loved them even though he didn't want to live with them? How could she put them through the shame of that? Shame that was her fault, or Lee's, that had nothing to do with them but would hurt them all the same.





THREE MONTHS BEFORE Michelangelo's Ghost was scheduled to be released, my editor was offered a better position at a competing house. I was happy for his good fortune, but his move left me orphaned—I could see that even before we'd hung up the phone. He'd bought my novel because he loved it, but what if no one else at the publisher loved it as much as he did? What if the editor who took over thought it was a dog of a book that deserved to be left home on a Saturday night?

My new editor, when he called, couldn't even get my name right. He asked for M.F.—that was my name on the book jacket, so that was fine—but when I said he could just call me Frankie, he said, “Fine, Fanny.”

“Frankie,” I said, and he said, “Oh yes, right, sorry”—but then proceeded to call me Fanny again and again.

When my first review came in—just dreadful—Kath said not to get riled up about anything in that rag, they were just meaner than a cottonmouth to every poor soul in this whole world, and Linda said she was sure the reviewer hadn't even read the book. “He's got Risa's name wrong!” she said. “He calls her Rosa.” Still, it's amazing how one scathing review can deflate your confidence. I began to wonder if the book really was as bland as the reviewer suggested, if it really was “familiar”—not the word he'd used, of course. He, sparing no one's feelings, had outright called it trite.

That was the week Linda flew to New York to run her first race. She'd been shooting to run a marathon—the Amateur Athletic union   had finally permitted women to run in its sanctioned marathons, and eight had run Boston that May, with Nina Kuscsik finishing ahead of some eight hundred men. But Linda's training had not been going well, and she'd settled instead on running the country's first official all-women's race, the Crazylegs Mini Marathon. Mini, after the miniskirt.

It was “just a little six-mile race.”

Six miles? The rest of us could barely walk six miles.

“I'm not going all the way to New York just to run,” she said. “I'm taking the children back east to visit my brother in Manhattan, and the timing worked out well. But running with a whole race full of women? Can you imagine that? If enough women show, maybe we'll convince the Olympic Committee that women are physically capable of running long distances.” The longest race women ran in the Olympics that year was fifteen hundred meters, the “metric mile”—Linda was disgusted with that. Though not half as disgusted as she would become. Women who ran the New York Marathon that year would go so far as to stage a sit-down protest for ten minutes after the starting gun went off, and still the first women's Olympic marathon wasn't run for another twelve years.

Seventy-eight women showed up with Linda that June of 1972, to run that first mini-marathon. Really nice women, Linda said. Never mind that there were Playboy Bunnies at the start, a publicity stunt she found insulting (especially as they hopped off into the bushes rather than run the race). Never mind that after the race two of the co-founders, Nina Kuscsik and Kathrine Switzer (the woman who'd run Boston posing as a man), were asked to hike their dresses over their knees for a photograph at a press event. They refused; Linda was really happy about that.