There followed five more years of frustrating grief during which her husband died, her own health declined, and eight publishers rejected the novel. "Every time it came back, I died a little," she was later to recall. Whatever message John's suicide note had contained, she convinced herself that it was the rejection of the novel that had made life unbearable for her darling.

In 1976, through a happy circumstance, she learned that Walker Percy was teaching a creative writing course at Loyola University. One day she appeared in his office, thrust the novel into his hands, and dramatically announced, "It's a masterpiece." Though understandably reluctant at first, Percy was so impressed by her adamant determination that he agreed to read it. Pleased and amazed by what he found in those worn and battered pages, he convinced Louisiana State University Press to publish A Confederacy of Dunces. In 1981 the novel received the Pulitzer Prize and to date has been translated into more than ten foreign languages.

Fame came too late for John Kennedy Toole, but with the genius of her son officially certified, his mother began to see people again and to grant interviews. In public performances she dramatized scenes from the novel, discussed her son, played the piano, and sang old songs such as "Sunny Side of the Street," "Way Down Yonder in New Orleans," and "Sometimes I'm Happy." Inevitably at some point in the program she would announce in carefully enunciated English, a result of all those years of studying and teaching elocution, "I walk in the world for my son." It became her signature, her justification for whatever pleasure and satisfaction she derived from her long-delayed moment in the spotlight.

It was at the time of the publication of Confederacy that, through another sequence of the coincidences with which the story of John Kennedy Toole abounds, I became a friend of Thelma's.