A Wilder Rose: A Novel

by Susan Wittig Albert

  “Courage,” Norma Lee said thoughtfully.

  Mrs. Lane made a noise in her throat. “Adversity,” she said. “Sweet are its uses. And sweeter still its contradictions.” She straightened up and they stood for a moment, looking at their work. “Making good progress, don’t you think? Tomorrow, we’ll put in some carrots and radishes, if you’re still game—oh, and spinach. And when it warms up, we’ll plant corn and beans and squash. The weather willing, I’ll grow enough vegetables this summer to feed myself—and you and Russell, too.”

  “Is that your pioneer spirit asserting itself?” Norma Lee asked with a little laugh, using her hoe to pull the earth over the seeds Mrs. Lane had planted.

  “Maybe,” Mrs. Lane replied. “But I rather think it’s my instinct for self-preservation. And my refusal to buy food crops that are subsidized by FDR’s New Deal government. Farmers could do better if the government didn’t meddle and the free market was allowed to take its course. And we could all grow at least some of our food, if we invested a bit of work. And faith.”

  “Faith?” Norma Lee was surprised. Mrs. Lane was not a religious person.

  “Not that kind of faith, my dear. Faith in the natural order of things. Faith that these seeds will sprout—in this climate, anyway. I wouldn’t bet on it in Dakota.” Mrs. Lane pointed toward the row of berry bushes on the other side of the garden. “I gave the blackberry and raspberry bushes a severe pruning a few weeks ago. They needed it—hadn’t been pruned in years. Culling the old dead canes and cutting back the live ones makes the bushes tougher, stronger, more productive. I have faith that there’ll be enough for pies—and plenty left over for jam.” She chuckled. “Sweet are the uses of adversity. Even the simplest story in McGuffey’s Reader had to have a moral, you know. Patience. Faith. Courage. Although I rather imagine that these days, the moral of most stories would not be so clear—if you could find one at all.”

  Norma Lee had reached the end of the row. “Courage,” she repeated, leaning on her hoe. “That was the working title of your book about Caroline and Charles, wasn’t it? I think I like that better than Let the Hurricane Roar.”

  “That’s because you don’t know the song,” Mrs. Lane replied. In a throaty contralto, she sang:

  Then let the hurricane roar!

  It will the sooner be o’er!

  We’ll weather the blast,

  And land at last,

  On Canaan’s happy shore!

  “But as a title, Courage would have done as well,” she added briskly. She paused, frowning, holding out her hand and glancing up at the sky, which had clouded over since they had begun their work. “Speaking of blasts, was that rain?”

  “Oops!” Norma Lee exclaimed, as more drops splattered into the dirt at their feet.

  “Then it must be time for a cup of tea,” Mrs. Lane said, picking up the spading fork. “And we can get started on that cake for Russell. It won’t be ready by lunchtime, but we can have it for dessert after supper tonight. Oh, and bring the hoe. I don’t want that wooden handle to get wet.” They hurried into the house, leaving their tools on the back porch.

  “Let the Hurricane Roar,” Norma Lee said, getting out the cups and the tea canister as Mrs. Lane put on the kettle. “I read the serial, you know, when it came out in the Saturday Evening Post. I was still in high school then. My English teacher brought the first installment to our class and said your story was the best thing she had ever read about pioneer life.”

  “Really?” Mrs. Lane asked, sounding pleased.

  “Truly. She said the characters were so real, and they faced so many hardships. It was realistic and optimistic at the same time.”

  “Optimistic,” Mrs. Lane said. Her voice changed. “Yes, it was optimistic, especially the ending. Too optimistic. That’s what a Kansas wheat farmer told me, anyway.”

  Norma Lee was going on. “I went straight home from school and read it for myself—gobbled it down, as a matter of fact, and then went back and read it again. After that, I couldn’t wait for the next week’s installment. I thought it was marvelous, and everybody in our family thought so, too. All over town, people were talking about it. There was even a piece in the Trenton Republican-Times, saying how good it was. I would love to hear how you came to write it.” She put the cups on the table. “And what about your mother’s book—the second one, Farmer Boy? You haven’t told me yet how that was written.”

  “My dear child,” Mrs. Lane said, with a rueful laugh. “Has anyone ever told you that you are persistent?”

  “I intend to be a reporter. I’m practicing on you.” There was more to it than that. Norma Lee was already seeing that this was a story worth remembering—and retelling, some distant day in the future. But perhaps Mrs. Lane and Mrs. Wilder didn’t want the truth told—about Mrs. Wilder’s books, anyway.

  Chuckling, Mrs. Lane opened a cupboard and took out what was left of the cinnamon rolls they’d had for breakfast. She put two on small dishes and set them on the table. “Let me tell you, Norma Lee. Writing Hurricane, and Farmer Boy, too, was the nearest thing to hell you can possibly imagine.”

  “I want to hear it,” Norma Lee said urgently. “Please.”

  “Well, then,” Mrs. Lane said with a small sigh, and began again.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Let the Hurricane Roar: 1932

  My mother always joked that she could never get used to knocking on her own kitchen door, the one she had used for decades. So when I came into the kitchen that March morning and found her making tea, I wasn’t surprised.

  “I’ve brought something for you,” she said, gesturing to the package on the table. It was addressed to her and had been opened. “Miss Kirkus’s letter says that these are the copyedited pages for Little House. I have two weeks to correct them.” She sat down at the kitchen table, frowning anxiously. “But I don’t know what to do. There are all these strange little marks in the margins, squiggles and things.” She pulled out a page to show me. “What do these mean, Rose?”

  I sighed. I could tell her to look in the front of the dictionary, where she would find a page of proofreader’s marks, and then I could stand by to answer her many questions. Or I could—

  “If you want, I’ll do it,” I said. “I’m used to working with copy editors.”

  And that’s how I added my mother’s book to my already long to-do list for the first few months of 1932.

  I was already working on two books for Lowell Thomas, both of which were a struggle. Getting Thomas to pay up proved to be a struggle, too, an ongoing one. I vowed not to write for him again unless my parents and I were starving—and since we had the garden, the chickens, and the cows, that wasn’t likely to happen. I had also managed to write three stories. George Bye sold two fairly quickly, one to the Saturday Evening Post, my first sale there. I was disappointed in the price, only seven hundred and fifty dollars, when I was expecting a thousand dollars.

  “Skinflints,” I complained to George about the Post. But he replied that seven hundred and fifty dollars was the best he could do, under the circumstances. “This is an awfully dark hour,” he lamented. “Everybody’s feeling it.”

  An awfully dark hour—and dark days, dark weeks, dark months.

  I followed the international news with alarm. Early in the year, Japan invaded China and took control of Manchuria, and Lowell Thomas let me know that the Singapore trip he had proposed was cancelled. I had been in Berlin during the doomed days of the Weimar Republic and witnessed the flood of inflated currency that drowned that government. Now, in Germany, six million were unemployed and the Nazi Party controlled the Reichstag. I was in Albania when Mussolini took aim at that defenseless country. Now, he was raising his Fascist fist everywhere, and no one—not even the pope—dared oppose him.

  The national news was grim, too. On the first of March, Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s baby was kidnapped from his crib, and
although Colonel Lindbergh paid a ransom, the child—chubby and winsome, another lost little boy—was found dead two months later. Heartsick, I followed the tragic story in the newspapers, but it was only one of a rash of kidnappings-for-ransom and robberies. Everywhere, armed gangs robbed banks at will. Even the local Bank of Mansfield had been hit. The lone bandit forced five employees into the bank vault at gunpoint and made off with as much cash as he could carry in his hat. Although the Mirror didn’t specify what kind of hat he was wearing, my father said it likely didn’t hold more than a couple of hundred dollars. Now, the townspeople bolted their doors and scrutinized every stranger walking down the street—especially, Papa joked, those with hats.

  And then, in the late spring and early summer, the newspapers were full of the Bonus Army. Twenty thousand destitute former soldiers and their families converged on Washington to demand the bonuses that Congress had already promised them for their military service. They were violently evicted by federal troops under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, Major George S. Patton, and Major Dwight D. Eisenhower. MacArthur dispatched troops to Anacostia Flats, where they fired tear gas on the occupiers. Their makeshift Hooverville of combustible shacks, tents, and cardboard-box dwellings caught fire—some said that MacArthur had ordered it torched. Two babies died, and the hospitals were filled with casualties. All over the country, the people’s hearts were with the veterans, most of whom were unemployed. Herbert Hoover’s hopes for a second term, if he had any, went up in flames with the veterans’ Hooverville.

  And to make a bad year much worse, the weather was simply unendurable. After the warmest U.S. winter on record, spring tornadoes raked the South, killing hundreds, injuring thousands. In the Midwest—and at Rocky Ridge—the warm spring turned into a summer of record-breaking heat and heartbreaking drought. Weeks of hundred-degree days dried up the crops that the grasshoppers didn’t get, and dust storms began to boil across the sky. The ruthless, implacable weather accentuated people’s sense of utter powerlessness against iron-fisted dictators, lawless thugs, a ruthless military—and nature.

  But George Bye was thinking about the publishing business when he made that remark about a dark hour. I heard from my writer friends that the publishing houses had cut their lists by half, the magazines simply weren’t buying, and even the best writers were in trouble. William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell took jobs as scriptwriters in Hollywood. Mary Margaret wrote that she had found some work as what she cheerfully called a “demi-ghost”: she received byline credit for “as-told-to” articles about people like Prince Christopher of Greece and philanthropist Marion Tully. The work, when she was able to get it, paid good money. But her roommate Stella lost her job as a publicist, and they had to give up their beautiful apartment and move into a hotel.

  I replied, commiserating, and added that I had five stories out, as good as anything else I had published, and not a sale in sight. “I try to put on a brave front,” I wrote. “I am my blithe, gay self—on the outside. But I will confess to you (because you’re a freelance writer and will understand) that down in my gut I am scared. Really, truly scared.”

  “Of course you’re scared. We’re all scared,” Mary Margaret replied. “New York is a kind of Jericho for journalists and writers these day.” And with the wry humor that would make her a famous radio-show host by the end of the decade, she added, “All we have to do, you know, is remain invincible.”

  I muttered that to myself in the darkest hours. If I’d had a Spencerian copybook, I would have written it more than a hundred times, two hundred, three hundred. All we have to do is remain invincible—which assumed, of course, that we had been invincible in the first place. Which I was beginning to doubt.

  But here at the farm, we were lucky. We had food and roofs over our heads when many had neither. But the news that was reported morning and evening on the radio was a funereal litany, one doom after another. So I played dance records on the Victrola and worked on jigsaw puzzles to convince myself that I was in control of something. The large farmhouse was empty and resoundingly silent without Troub, whose gay chatter had always filled the days with a distracting but comforting music and whose casual constancy had made a place for itself in my heart. She wrote cheerfully that she missed me but that she had found a good-paying job as a private-duty nurse, and asked me to mail her nurse’s cape. A few days later, she sent a box of oranges, grapefruit, kumquats, and tangerines, with her love. The fruit arrived prepaid express, and a good thing, too. I had just paid the monthly bills and wired money to Rexh for his Cambridge expenses and didn’t have a penny.

  I shared the fruit with my mother, who had gotten in the habit of dropping in three or four times a week, for breakfast, tea, or supper (with my father), or for the evening. I liked the evening visits best, and when summer came, the three of us sat out on the screened porch in the long twilight, sharing remembered stories, enjoying the darting fireflies and the evening birds. The morning and afternoon visits interrupted my work, but I knew she was lonely. She made no secret of the fact that she felt Rocky Ridge was more enjoyable now that Troub was gone, and she came, eagerly, laden with local gossip and scraps of her writing to read aloud.

  But as time went on, someone else joined us. Lucille Murphy began dropping in to play chess with me or work jigsaw puzzles. She sometimes stayed overnight, too, especially when her husband, Eddie (quite a loudmouthed boor, I thought, and felt sorry for her), went foxhunting with his friends. Mama Bess had managed to tolerate Troub, but something about Lucille—perhaps it was her gusto—seemed to offend her sense of decorum.

  Lucille was a plump, pretty blonde, earthy and robust, with the common-sense manner of someone who has grown up around working people. She had initially been Troub’s friend more than mine, and she and Troub had often gone riding together. But I quickly came to enjoy her easy company, her lack of pretension, her scorn for pretenders and stuffed shirts, and her appreciation of the absurdities of small-town morality. She’d had a year at the University of Missouri and liked to read. I shared my newspapers and magazines with her, and she was always ready to discuss current affairs and politics.

  But best of all, Lucille pulled me out of my unhappy stewing about things and made me laugh. She was far more willing than Troub to pitch in when there were peas to pick or floors to be swept, and she genuinely liked to cook. She enjoyed needlework, too, and we started a hooked rug for the living room, working on it together whenever she came over.

  It was a spring and summer of illnesses. One morning, Mama Bess phoned me in a sheer panic, crying that there was a fire and the barns were burning. I ran straight over to the Rock House, yes, ran all the way. But there were no barns and no fires anywhere—hallucinations, Dr. Fuson told me in confidence, although he couldn’t say what caused them. Around the same time, Papa caught a bad cold and was in bed for days, and his crippled foot became extraordinarily painful. Mrs. Capper still came in to cook and clean five days a week, but she was always limping around and muttering about her bad leg, which would one day be one leg, the next day the other. I wanted to let her go, but I felt sorry for her, and when she begged to stay on I gave in, although I couldn’t really afford the expense of her salary.

  And then sweet Mr. Bunting—whom I couldn’t keep at home, short of shutting him in the house—came down with the mange. It made the poor little dog miserable and whiny and required multiple visits from the local vet. As for myself, I was miserable and whiny, too. I had the flu, my teeth were in awful shape, and I was suffering from an off-and-on depression.

  But despite everything, I managed to sit down at the typewriter almost every day. I was working concurrently on the two ghostwriting jobs, switching from one to the other as Lowell Thomas mailed me material. Then, one gray afternoon when I was wearily slogging through yet another bewildering chapter, my mother brought me her second book, Farmer Boy.

  It was cold that day, only twenty degrees above zero, too cold to work o
n the upstairs porch. Swathed in sweaters, with an afghan over my knees, I had brought my typewriter to the dining room, where the oil burner kept the floor warm enough so my feet didn’t freeze. My mother took off her hat and coat, put the stack of orange-covered tablets at one end of the table, and went to get teacups out of the cupboard. After pouring hot water over the tea in the cups, she turned to me.

  “I am sure I’ve improved an awful lot since I wrote ‘Pioneer Girl,’” she said casually, “so I don’t think you’ll have to do anything much to this book. Of course, I’d be glad if you would fix up my spelling and punctuation where you see a mistake. But I just want you to type it, that’s all. Please, no other changes.”

  I stirred sugar into my tea. “I’m sure you’ve improved a great deal, Mama Bess,” I said cautiously, “but I do hope you’ll let me use my—”

  “No.” She sat down at the table. “Please just type it, Rose. I want you to get back to your own work. Your writing will earn much more money than mine, and the time you spend on my stuff will only slow you down. I don’t want to be a burden.”

  I started to protest. But she raised her hand.

  “Let’s don’t argue about this, dear. I don’t want to have to depend on you.” Her voice was sweet, but very firm. “I want to stand on my own as a writer. I want Farmer Boy to be my book.”

  We were teetering on the brink of that old conflict, and I stepped warily away. I was too weary and dispirited to engage in another battle of wills, and I genuinely didn’t want to upset her. And she could be excused for feeling confident about Farmer Boy. Just a few days before, bubbling with excitement, she had called to tell me that she had just received a check for $315 from the Junior Literary Guild. It was a sizeable amount, and she saw the money as an affirmation of her skill as a writer. I couldn’t bear to bring her down to earth. And if I tried, she simply wouldn’t believe me. I was still her little girl. She was my mother. And Mother always knew best.