A Wilder Rose: A Novel

by Susan Wittig Albert

  “You have a point,” I agreed. “But I have a plan.”

  Troub snickered.

  “No, seriously,” I said. “The first order of business is to hire somebody to help my father with the farmwork. That means building a tenant house, something simple that can be put up in a few weeks. About the crowding and my mother—” I glanced at her. “That part of my plan will take a little longer, but it will be the answer to everything.”

  “Oh, really?” Troub wrinkled her freckled nose, interested but skeptical.

  “Yes, really.” I made myself sound more confident than I felt. I wasn’t sure that my mother would go for my scheme. “I’m going to build them a modern cottage with electricity and central heating and hot water and an indoor bathroom, all on one floor, so Mama Bess doesn’t have to climb the stairs and Papa doesn’t have to haul coal in and ashes out. Just the other day, I saw an ad for a Sears kit house in a magazine, an English-style bungalow that would be just about perfect. There are plenty of pretty places to build it on the farm. All my mother has to do is pick the spot. They could be moved in by October, snug and ready for winter.”

  “A new house.” Troub, who had plumbed the depths of my passion for houses, eyed me doubtfully. “Won’t that be expensive?”

  “The price for the house I saw was around twenty-two hundred dollars, so even with the extras I have in mind, it’s not likely to be more than four thousand dollars. And the Palmer account just keeps growing—I can afford it.”

  Troub cocked her head. “What about the old farmhouse?”

  “That’s where the real fun comes in.” I was beginning to get excited, the way I always do when I am about to be seduced by a house. “I could fix it up for us, Troub—do some painting, wire it for electricity, install a furnace, and get rid of those awful stoves. It will be our place to stay in, to travel from. When we’re there, we can hire somebody to cook and clean for us, and I can write. And we can invite friends from New York—Genevieve, Catharine, Mary Margaret. I’m sure they’ll jump at the chance to spend a few weeks at a writing retreat in the country.”

  Inviting friends had been one of the thorny issues the last time Troub and I had stayed at the farm together. Mama Bess complained that we sat up too late and made too much noise, and Papa was annoyed when he found the outhouse occupied. (“Every time a fellow wants to use the privy, there’s some hen on the roost,” he’d grumbled.) I couldn’t blame them, actually. The farmhouse looked large, but the rooms were small, and there were only the two extra bedrooms upstairs. If four was a crowd, five or six was even more so—and a serious disruption in my parents’ daily routines. But if Mama Bess and Papa had their own house on the other side of the ridge, our visitors wouldn’t bother them.

  “A writing retreat.” Troub sat up straight, catching my enthusiasm. “We could have our friends, and parties, and both of us could write.”

  A couple of years before, Troub had showed me her war diary. She was trained as a nurse and had volunteered in France in the last years of the war, where she’d specialized as an anesthesiologist and been promoted to captain. When I saw what a splendid piece of writing she had done, I mailed it off posthaste to the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, who quite naturally snapped it up. We polished it a bit, and it ran as a serial in the magazine and would shortly be published as a book, Sister. Troub could be a fine writer if she settled down to it. But she had inherited a little money, enough so that she could choose to write or not to.

  I’ve never had the luxury of choosing to write. For me, writing has always been a financial necessity. Now, that would be more true than ever, given my ambitious plan for the farm. But I could manage it. All I needed was a thousand words a day, a dozen short stories a year, another book-length serial for the Country Gentleman or the Saturday Evening Post, which paid better. By 1930, if I buckled down to work, my parents would be provided for and I would have a solid, secure fifty thousand dollars invested in the market. I could divide my time between New York and the farm. I could live where I chose and write what I liked, without having to depend on magazine fiction for a living.

  Fifty thousand dollars. Now, looking back, fifty thousand dollars seems like a maniac’s hallucination. But it wasn’t, then. Then, we were all caught up in the rah-rah-rah of the euphoric days before the crash. The stock market was on its way to the moon and the future had no horizons. There was plenty of everything and more to be dreamed of and reached for. More, more, more. Fifty thousand dollars was a goal to be grasped, not a joke to be laughed at.

  “Yes, friends and parties,” I replied. “We can both write. And spend time together, doing just as we like. What do you say?” I wanted her to come, but I couldn’t insist. Our commitment to each other had always been for the moment. We made no promises and imposed no obligations, other than to respond to each other in the truest of ways. When it came time to look ahead, I always felt the temporariness of our relationship. Sometimes, that served. Right now, it didn’t, quite.

  Troub considered, scratched her freckled nose, frowned. After a moment, she said, “Guess I don’t have anything better to do. Sure, Rose. I’ll come.” That was pure Troub: easy come, easy go, with no plans of her own except to enjoy whatever she was doing, and no designs on a particular future. She added, with a shrug, “For a while, anyway. For as long as it suits both of us.”

  I nodded. “Good,” I said. “I’m glad.”

  “I’d enjoy being out in the country again,” she went on, as if she hadn’t heard my emphasis. “Do you think your father would mind if I bought a horse and kept it in his barn? I could ride in the afternoons.”

  “He wouldn’t mind a bit,” I said. “Papa likes you.”

  It was true. Mama Bess regarded Troub with more than a little jealousy and was always wondering, half-aloud and nervously, what others thought when they saw us so much together, and what they said about me behind her back, and what they said about her when they were talking about me. But Papa, who never cared a bean for what anybody thought, found Troub clever and fun loving and admired her tomboy energies.

  “And he’s a horseman,” I added. “I’m sure he would be glad to help you find the perfect horse.” A Morgan, probably. Papa loved Morgan horses.

  Troub nodded. “Tell you what, then. I’ll go home to New Hampshire and visit my father for a few weeks, then I’ll join you at the farm.” She flung both arms around me and kissed me. “Come on, Rose, smile. Another adventure, together.”

  So we packed our bags and boxes. I made arrangements to sublease the Tirana house and cabled Mama Bess that we would book passage as soon as we could. In February, we took Mr. Bunting, the white Maltese terrier we had bought in Budapest the year before, and sailed on the Italian liner Saturnia for New York—a gay sailing, with good weather and lighthearted company. Somewhere off the coast of Spain, I settled down with my journal, making plans for the new year, for the next three years. I was looking forward to the fresh, sunny, open-air life of the farm, a busy life, active, energetic. I would content myself with magazine work, paying work, and free myself from the smoldering discontents about writing something authentic. As I looked out across the fog-veiled Azores, I thought how good it would be to live on an island, and filed it away, another possible dream, in another possible life.

  Disembarking in New York on February 16, we paid an unexpected $4.50 in customs duties for Mr. Bunting, checked into the new and luxurious Berkshire Hotel, and dashed out onto Madison Avenue. Around us, the city was booming. It was splendid and lively and invigorating and above all exciting, reminding me how much I loved the streets and shops and noise and energetic bustle and hurry, loved seeing my agent and stockbroker and editors and, most of all, my friends, all of whom were writers—Mary Margaret McBride and Catharine Brody and Genevieve Parkhurst and Berta Hader. Like starving survivors rescued from a desert island, Troub and I indulged in giddy rounds of restaurants and shopping and the theater and parties
and talk-talk-talking about ideas and books and politics and people.

  And I saw Guy Moyston. We sat together in the bus-terminal cafeteria until past one a.m. on a cold February morning, over cups of hot coffee, holding hands across a stained wooden table and saying (but not quite saying it) a final good-bye. Tall, thin, thinner than he was when I had seen him last, glasses sliding to the end of his nose, he was dear to me, in a way. But not in the way he wanted.

  Guy and I had met in the wild San Francisco days during the Great War. He was an Associated Press correspondent with an inquiring mind and a strong desire to push past the fences. He lent me his publishing-house connections and helped me find publishers for my books about Henry Ford and Charlie Chaplin. “You’re off to a swell start, Rose,” he had said. “I’ll be watching to see what you do—and expecting good things. See that you don’t disappoint me.”

  We kept in touch, and in early 1921, both of us were abroad again. I had been to Albania and was in Paris. Guy was posted to the AP’s London bureau, then dispatched to Ireland to cover the Sinn Féin rebellion. It was a dangerous assignment, for a bitter civil war was brewing. He tried for weeks to arrange a meeting with Éamon de Valera, the leader of the revolt. Then, one rainy night, he was blindfolded and shoved into the backseat of an automobile between two burly guards. As the car careened through the midnight streets of Dublin, he told me, he knew he was a dead man. Many informers had been taken out like this, their bodies found with an IRA death warrant pinned to a sleeve. But Guy was being escorted to de Valera’s hideout, where he got his interview, a big event in the news world.

  I was recovering that spring from the breakup of a year-long romance with Arthur Griggs. Arthur was an agent for the Agence Littéraire Française; we’d met when he was looking for an English translator for several of Sarah Bernhardt’s stories. I translated them (rather freely, I confess) and Arthur placed them in McCall’s. When the romance ended, I was miserable about the breakup but relieved at the same time, for Arthur was a hurricane fueled by alcohol, and he’d threatened to suck me into his vortex.

  In May—ah, Paris in May, nothing lovelier!—I moved into an apartment at 8 Square Desnouettes and began to assemble The Peaks of Shala from my Albanian travel pieces. Guy came to Paris to see me, and we went walking in the Loire Valley; a little later, I joined him in London. I needed love, all kinds of love—friendship, affection, physical passion. But I also needed freedom, craved independence, and I hadn’t yet learned—would never quite learn, I think—how to reconcile the two. He suited me, because he was detached and ironic and wanted a casual caring without commitment. After a few months, I was no longer wildly romantic about him. But he gave me a warm place to park my heart while I went about my work.

  For the next several years, as Guy and I traveled separately around Europe, we wrote regularly and saw one another when we could. Then, in 1925, I went back to Rocky Ridge and he dropped in for a few days. He stayed for three months. After that, we went east together and spent another three months with friends in Croton-on-Hudson, collaborating on a magazine serial and working on his play, Smoke. For me, it was a good time, with trips to the city and rambles in Guy’s Ford and walks around the countryside.

  Troub was staying with her father then. She joined us when she could, and I loved the energy and lightness she brought with her. It was the beginning of our friendship and time together—mine and Troub’s, I mean. When I went back to Rocky Ridge, Guy stayed in the East, and Troub came west with me.

  Those three months in Croton, happy as they were, seemed to change things between Guy and me. I suppose he might have been jealous of my friendship with Troub. Whatever the motive, he began to want a closer connection, a commitment, permanence, even exclusivity. Writing from Albania later, I told him that, although I still had a kind of love for him, I didn’t want to be married. I couldn’t marry. I didn’t have it in me to be a wife. There at the bus station, on that chilly March morning, I told him again.

  Years before, I had borrowed the title of my almost-biographical novel from Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken.”

  Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

  I took the one less traveled by,

  And that has made all the difference.

  Now, I recited the lines for Guy. We fell into a long silence that was finally broken with a crash of crockery in the cafeteria kitchen.

  Guy pushed back his chair and stood up. “I’m sorry,” he said, sounding resigned, and kissed me.

  And then . . . and then I was back in Missouri.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Houses: 1928

  Days on the farm do not fill diaries.

  But spring in the Ozarks is unspeakably lovely. In a single madcap April week, all the countryside becomes a green riot, glorious with violets and buttercups and wild pansies and anemones. And then the elms and dogwood and maples and white oaks assert themselves, and after that, in an impetuous rush, the white flume of wild plums and the pinks of peach blossom spill across the hillsides, while the fresh spring grass surges in an emerald tide across the meadows—all of it reminding me of that very first spring we lived at Rocky Ridge.

  Our family fled to Missouri from South Dakota when I was seven years old, after a series of disasters: the disease that lamed my father, the drought and hailstorms that destroyed the crops, the death of a baby boy, the loss of our house. I had burned the house. My mother was sick in bed, and I, trying to be helpful, stuffed too much slough hay in the stove and set the place ablaze. I was not yet three, but I quite well remember the searing despair I felt as I watched it burn and knew that I had done it. After that, there were stays with my mother’s family in De Smet and my father’s in Spring Valley, Minnesota, and two years in Florida and two more back in South Dakota. There, we stayed for a time with Mama Bess’s family and then moved into our own small house while my parents saved enough for another new start. A neighbor, Mr. Cooley, had heard that southern Missouri was a wonderful place for growing apples, and when he came back with promotional brochures about a pretty little town called Mansfield in the “Land of the Big Red Apple” and a box of beautiful apples, my mother was smitten. We would go with the Cooleys to the Missouri Ozarks and buy a farm.

  We traveled, Mama and Papa and I, in a black-painted hack with an oilcloth top and curtains, a wooden hen coop fastened at the back and Papa’s mares hitched to the front, with their colts, Prince and Little Pet, following along. In the hack was a bedspring for Papa and Mama to sleep on, and Mama’s writing desk, and as many other of our scant possessions as could be tucked into or tacked onto the load. We left on July 17, traveling with Mr. and Mrs. Cooley and their two sons, Paul and George. We reached Mansfield six weeks later, on the last hot, dusty day of a hot, dusty August. We pitched camp near the town, and Papa and Mama Bess began looking for a farm. A few weeks later, they bought Rocky Ridge—forty acres and a log cabin—with a three-hundred-dollar mortgage (at a usurious 12 percent, compounded every three months) and a hundred-dollar bill, saved by my mother from her hundred days’ labor as a dollar-a-day seamstress back in De Smet and terrifyingly lost for several breathless days in a cranny of her writing desk. And then, thankfully, found again, and we could all breathe.

  The green Ozark woodland they purchased was beautiful: heartbreakingly, unpromisingly beautiful. My father, a flatland wheat farmer, would later say that the place looked so rough and hostile—nothing but gullies and ridges and rocks and timber—that he was reluctant to buy it. But my mother had taken a violent fancy to the property, crying that it was the only land she wanted and that if she could not have that, she did not want any. My mother didn’t cry often—the Ingalls girls had been tutored in the stiff-upper-lip school, and she always said she didn’t like a row. But when tears were necessary to get the job done, she knew how to use them. My easygoing father rarely opposed her when she was set on having her way. He didn’t now, whatever his own judgment might have
been. Rocky Ridge, they called it.

  Our first house at Rocky Ridge was the tiny log cabin that the previous owner had built on the lip of the ravine. Its most interesting feature, to me, was the newspaper pasted as wallpaper on one of the walls, and I stood stock-still, entranced, reading. “Carter’s Little Liver Pills: What is life without a liver?” This philosophical question haunted me for years.

  By the time we broke camp and moved into the cabin, we were down to our last bit of salt pork and cornmeal, with winter coming on. To earn money for food, my father cut wood and sold it for fifty cents a wagonload. With my mother on one end of the crosscut saw and my father on the other, they began to clear the land. The next spring, they set out the tiny apple trees—twigs, really—that had come with the property. My father was no orchardist, but his father had raised apple trees on the Wilder farm in upstate New York, and he was willing to give it a try. He was proud of his apples, when the trees came into bearing seven years later: Ben Davis, they were, and Missouri Pippin. He always said that his orchard was a success because he took care of each individual tree, giving it whatever it needed, which meant a great deal of work.

  Mostly, from those years, I remember the work, and it wasn’t just the apples. My father turned the cabin into a barn and built a two-room frame house with a sleeping loft for me, a steep, ladderlike stair climbing up to it. My mother raised a garden and chickens and prepared every meal and washed the dirty clothes, and I was expected to help as far as my child-self was able, carrying water and stove wood and hoeing and weeding. All this backbreaking, dawn-to-dark work took both my parents away from me, but especially my mother. It made her snappish and quick with her temper, so that many things I did, or did not do correctly, or left undone, disappointed her. I knew her disappointment. I felt it like a lance.

  Indeed, it has often seemed to me that in those days—except for a brief golden hour after supper and before bed—I had no mother, for she had no time to give me attention or affection, and I was left to ask for it or beg for it or even misbehave for it, which earned instead her sharp anger and my sullen guilt. Then, I thought this lack of mothering was my own particular privation, and I resented it and pitied myself. Now, I know that many children do not receive the mother-love they need and that they keep on needing and wanting it for a long, long time, perhaps all their lives. Do I? Do I do what I do for her now because of the lack, the emptiness I felt then? I don’t know. Perhaps. Perhaps.