The Wednesday Sisters(89)

THE ARRIVAL OF Michelangelo's Ghost in bookstores did not make the headlines for Saturday, September 2, 1972—that honor went to Bobby Fischer, who beat Boris Spassky to become the first American world chess champion—but it sure was exciting for me. Kath and Linda were at the Stanford Mall that afternoon when Linda spotted it, right there on the front table by the door at Books Inc. She screamed, literally screamed, so that everyone in the store turned to look, and she picked up the book and held it high over her head. “This is a great book,” she said, loud enough for half the mall to hear. “A really great book. You all should buy it.”

“It was so dried-apple darn funny I nearly wet my drawers,” Kath said. “It's a good thing Linda's about kin to Doris Day or they'd have called the police to haul her away.”

They called me from the pay phone outside Macy's—the twins in the background asking if they couldn't get ice cream now and Linda shushing them, saying yes, ice cream in just a minute, but girls, that's Frankie's book, that's Mrs. O'Mara's book! When I arrived, with Danny and Mags and Davy in tow, I was too excited to see the book right in front of me. When I did, finally, I just started bawling, tears streaming, and there was nothing I could do to stop them. Danny, tearing up, too, wrapped me up in a big hug and spun me around the way he had on our wedding day, while everyone in the store turned to stare.

“It's her first novel,” Kath explained. “It's the first time she's seen it. You folks sure would tune up, too, if you were lucky enough to be her.”

“Dream-come-true time,” Linda said.

Two newspaper reviews of my novel came out that week. The Chicago Sun-Times called me “a writer to watch,” and my dad's hometown Iowa paper said I “deftly explored the dark underside of religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular, while delivering a compelling story about the redeeming power of friendship.” My dad started carrying his copy of Michelangelo's Ghost with him wherever he went, and I got a lovely note from Sister Josephine saying, “I'm so very proud to see you are using those gifts we once spoke of” and mentioning nothing about any dark underside of anything, religious or otherwise.

As the weeks passed, though, I watched my books move from the tables at the front of Bay Area stores to the O shelf in general fiction, buried between a slew of O'Connors (Frank and Flannery) and Animal Farm. By the time Nixon won reelection in a landslide that November despite Watergate (it was just too incredible to believe the president himself might have been involved), I despaired of my book ever selling more than a few copies to my mother's friends and my own. Even my agent had gone from saying more reviews would come, just be patient, to saying he couldn't imagine how my book had slipped through the cracks. Slipped through the cracks, it had, though. By Christmas, Michelangelo's Ghost was gone from bookstore shelves everywhere.

Danny tried to console me, tried to pull me up with his own joy, which was one part having a little breathing time at work and one part the soaring Intel stock. He brought me flowers, and pretty new clothes purchased on his lunch hour, and a brand-new IBM Selectric II typewriter. He took me out to dinner and started talking about taking a vacation together, just the two of us. And one morning, after he'd left for work very early, I came down to the kitchen to find the coffee made, some fancy pastries under plastic wrap on a plate, and several piles of paper that were, on closer inspection, applications to Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley.

And all the while I listened with fascination to what was going on with Brett's book. Kath and Arlene—who insisted Brett hire an agent—flew with Brett to New York to lunch with agents Arlene thought Brett might particularly like. Within weeks she'd sold rights for publication in England, Germany, and Japan, of all places. Then The Mrs. Americas caught the attention of one of the biggest film agents in Hollywood.

Movie rights? It wasn't even a book yet!

Even her author photo was nothing like mine. She was sent to a professional photographer who used a stylist who painted more makeup on Brett's face than she'd worn all the days of her life put together. Kath was sent along, too, with a single instruction: make sure the photographer got Brett's gloves in the photograph.

“Well, it's not the coffin photo,” Linda said as we sat hunched over the picnic table one Sunday morning, admiring the result. “You know what I was thinking when we took that coffin photo, Brett? I was thinking if you really were dead, I would definitely peek under your gloves to see what was there.”

“Linda!” I said.

“I swear on my aunt Tooty's grave,” Kath said.