A Wilder Rose: A Novel

by Susan Wittig Albert

  But I found the farm and the church and a few people who still remembered us. I wrote to my mother with a message from Mrs. Landers, who (with a good-natured laugh) directed me to tell Mama Bess to send back the pie tin she had borrowed, full of gingerbread, when we left there in 1891.

  “She don’t need to bother with the gingerbread,” Mrs. Landers said. “Just the tin’ll do.” My mother, chagrined at having borrowed something so very long ago and failed to return it, immediately sent a pie tin from her own kitchen, with a note and a pair of crocheted doilies as an apology.

  The trip was rather like a vacation. Lucille was lively and gay, and for the first time in too long, I could relax and be cheerful—and why not? The air was crisp and the autumn trees flamed like crimson and gold torches against a very blue sky as we drove across the upper Midwest, then through Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York. The check from the Post and the advance from Longmans, Green on the publication of Hurricane in book form meant that I was free from urgent financial worry for the moment, and we could treat ourselves to nice hotels and good meals.

  It was a time for conversation, too. One or two nights into the trip, sitting late over apple pie and coffee at a candlelit table in a hotel dining room, Lucille said, “You know, Rose, I don’t think I love Eddie anymore. Not the way I used to, anyway.” She looked away. “And I feel guilty about it.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, not because she no longer loved him—I thought she had probably outgrown him, or outgrown her need for him, both of which were quite natural, although tragic in their way. I was sorry that she felt guilty. But that was natural, too.

  She sat still for a moment, her gray eyes sober, her soft blonde hair haloed around her face. She seemed very young, or I felt very old, or both.

  “Has that ever happened to you?” she asked, almost timidly. “That you fell out of love with someone?”

  “More than once.” Gillette, I thought. And Guy. And Troub, whom I thought of quite often and sometimes even missed.

  “Or perhaps it wasn’t that I fell out of love,” I amended. “Perhaps I simply understood that I hadn’t loved in the first place. That I had only loved my image of the other person, which was made out of myself, out of the best that was in me at the time.”

  Lucille frowned, understanding, but not quite. She picked up her coffee cup in both hands, her elbows propped on the table, the fabric of her dress falling away from her arms, plump and pale in the candlelight.

  “Well,” she said in a practical voice, “I don’t much think that Eddie is the best of me.” Her grin was lopsided. “The worst, maybe. Could that be?”

  “But remember back to when you first loved him,” I prodded. “Who were you then? And who was he?”

  “Who was I?” She looked away, silent, musing. “I see,” she said, after a moment. “Yes, I see. I was a kid then. I needed somebody brash and cocky, somebody I could belong to, who would tell me what to do. I’m . . . different, now. But he’s still brash and cocky. And thinks I belong to him, and he can tell me what to do.” She put her cup down, chuckling ruefully. “Funny, isn’t it?”

  “I wish it were,” I replied, not smiling. “We marry to get what we think we want and need, and after a while we don’t. But there’s still the marriage to deal with.”

  Somewhere a tray rattled and a waiter dropped a handful of silver. Lucille picked up her white napkin and began to pleat it in her fingers. “You were married once, Troub told me. What was he like?”

  I thought of Gillette, his superficial culture, his energy and drive, his push to get ahead, his skills as a promoter, as a self-promoter. “He was a traveling salesman with an impressive line of goods,” I said, as if that explained everything. Not quite, perhaps, but close enough. “And I was a foolish girl and lonely and very tired of working and eager to be impressed. And eager for a life that was something other than being on the job every minute. Both of us thought marriage was something it wasn’t. We were made for each other, you might say.”

  “When did you know—” She stopped, looked away, looked inside herself. “That you didn’t want to be married any longer?”

  I heard the question behind the question and said what I thought would help her. “When I knew he didn’t have anything left to teach me. When I understood that there was nothing more I wanted to learn from him. When I could find myself in myself, and not in him. When I saw how many things I wanted, and wanted all of them at the same time, and knew that none of them could come from him.”

  “Ah,” she said very quietly. I could see her mentally tabulating what I had said, considering it in relation to herself and the husband she no longer loved. “Was it hard . . . to get the divorce?”

  “The divorce itself wasn’t hard. But first I had to cut myself free from the clinging.” I thought of something I had once written to Dorothy Thompson. “We’re not born to be ruthless, we women. But that’s what it takes to hit the hands on the gunwale with an oar until they let go.” I remembered something Gillette had wailed at me—“Oh, why can’t you, just once, Rose, be human!” when what I had wanted, all I had wanted, was the most fundamental of human desires: to be free to live my own life.

  She shivered. “I’m not sure I can be that ruthless. That heartless.”

  “I wasn’t sure,” I said. “You won’t be sure, either, until you are, suddenly.” I remembered myself at her age, facing her dilemma. “The thing to remember is that something will come to take its place. Something different, of course. But something better. Because whatever is ahead will be better than what you have now.”

  She gave me a skeptical look. “Do you really believe that?”

  I laughed. “I believed it once. I wrote it, once, in a book. Perhaps I can believe it again, in the right circumstance.”

  “Well, then.” Lucille picked up her water glass and tipped the edge of it to mine in a mock toast. “Here’s to the right circumstance.”

  A few days later, we reached the small town of Malone, New York, fifteen miles south of the St. Lawrence River and five miles or so from the village of Burke, where the Wilder farm was located. I sent my father a postcard view of a grand hotel that, in a rather curious fashion, had been built around the Methodist chapel he had attended as a boy. We got a room at the hotel, had lunch, then drove out to Burke.

  We found the old farm easily from Papa’s directions. I was glad to see that the house was still standing and in decent repair. There were two large maple trees nearby, which might have been there when Papa was a boy. The weathered split-rail fence along the road—that might have been there then, as well. When I told the owner that my father had grown up in the house and that my mother was writing a book about the farm, she invited me to come inside and look around, and I did, breathlessly.

  There had been some alterations, but the rooms seemed to be pretty much as they had been when my father lived there. It didn’t take much imagination to see him, going on ten, taking his bath in front of the kitchen fire or rocking the big barrel churn in the whitewashed cellar or blacking the stove—and throwing the blacking brush so hard at his sister Alice that it hit the parlor wall and left a big inky smear on the wallpaper. I looked, but there was no sign of that smear. And no sign, either, of Aunt E.J.’s repair, so perfect that Grandma Wilder had never even noticed. But that had been nearly sixty years ago. The wallpaper had likely been replaced many times since then.

  Most of the barns still existed as they had in those early years, matching the sketch my father had made for my mother. I took detailed notes about them and about the surrounding pastures where the cows had grazed, and the fields my father had harrowed with the work team of big, gentle brown mares, Bess and Beauty. The schoolhouse the Wilder children attended was still standing, too, down a narrow dirt lane to the bridge on the Trout River, not far from the spot where Papa had said the sheep were washed before shearing, then along a path through a wood. Now that I had se
en the place, I knew I could sharpen the vague descriptions and prompt my father into more detailed recollections.

  Lucille stayed for a few days in New York, then left me there and drove back to Mansfield—and Eddie—alone, still unsure of what she intended to do. I stayed with Genevieve, and we made the old, gay rounds of people and places. But the city had a bleak, almost Dickensian feel to it; there were encampments of homeless people in empty lots and along the riverbank in Morningside Heights, with men, women, and children huddled around campfires, trying to keep warm. I spent several weeks seeing friends (but not Troub, who was on a nursing assignment in Florida), talking with George Bye about the current writing market, discussing Hurricane’s book publication in the United States and England with Maxwell Aley, and dropping in on editors. Everyone had read the serial in the Post, and I was heartened by their congratulations.

  “I told you so,” Floyd Dell said. “Entirely worthy of you, Rose.”

  Berta Hader put her arms around me and whispered, “Elmer and I loved it. We can’t wait for your next one.”

  “A stunning piece of work,” Mary Margaret burbled. “And a perfect ending. So good to read something optimistic when everybody is so down in the mouth!”

  I was in New York on Election Day. Franklin Delano Roosevelt won in a landslide, carrying forty-two out of forty-eight states, the first Democrat since Franklin Pierce to win a majority of the popular vote. People were understandably nervous about Roosevelt’s vague policy positions (What was a “New Deal”? What would he do about the banking situation?) and his health (Could the man really walk? Could he stand up to the demands of the office?).

  But they were ready to vote for anyone but Hoover. The president had become the scapegoat who bore the blame for the Depression, the butt of everyone’s bad jokes—and worse. When his campaign train pulled into Detroit, the crowd was waiting with eggs and rotten tomatoes, chanting, “Hang Hoover! Hang Hoover!” Even staunchly Republican Mansfield would turn against him, giving Roosevelt 362 votes to Hoover’s 303.

  Roosevelt was at the Biltmore on election night, and newspaper reporters were camped in the hotel lobby, anxious to hear the election returns as they came in. When Genevieve and I went out to supper, the streets in her neighborhood were filled with the swingy sound of “Happy Days Are Here Again,” blaring from hundreds of radios in hundreds of windows. And it wasn’t the New York Times that scooped the announcement of Roosevelt’s win. Shortly after eleven p.m., Americans heard the news on their radios, everyone everywhere, all at the same time. For this former newspaper reporter who had a lifelong reverence for print, the radio broadcast seemed to mark the end of an era. We were living in a brave new world. I wasn’t sure I was going to like it.

  I took the train back to Mansfield, then collapsed into bed with a bad case of the flu. On Christmas Eve, family and a few friends gathered around the tree at Rocky Ridge and exchanged ten-cent presents. For Christmas dinner, Lucille baked a turkey with all the trimmings, and Mama Bess brought a mincemeat pie.

  When the party was over, I went back to bed for the rest of the year.

  It was late January when my mother gave me her new version of Farmer Boy. It had been raining for several days. The creek was up, the roads were muddy, and the sky was an unrelieved leaden gray. Catharine, who had come after Christmas to stay for several months, was in her room upstairs, having an afternoon nap. I was in the living room beside the fire, doing a pen revision of “Vengeance,” which the Country Gentleman had rejected as “too grim” and which I wanted to send out again. I had brought in a tea tray and set it on the low table, thinking that Catharine might be coming down soon.

  I laid my work aside when my mother came into the room. She put a stack of orange-covered notebooks on the table beside my chair. “I’m happy to tell you that I got a check from George Bye for five hundred sixty-two dollars and sixty-nine cents,” she said. “Royalties for Little House.”

  I was stunned. I had never imagined that the book would see that large a sale. “That’s wonderful, Mama Bess!” I exclaimed, delighted. “Congratulations! You must feel just grand.”

  “I do,” she said modestly. “And I just this morning finished rewriting Farmer Boy. It’s ready for you to work on.”

  “Good,” I said. “I hope the rewrite wasn’t too difficult.” I got up and poured a cup of tea for her. There were cinnamon rolls on the tea tray, but she shook her head when I offered one.

  “Well, I took out those things that Miss Raymond didn’t like,” she said, sitting down on the sofa. “And I used the notes from your trip to expand the descriptions of the farm and the buildings and such.” She stirred sugar into her cup, not looking at me. “I’ve done the best I could, but it’ll likely need a lot of fixing. I want you to do what you have to do so that Miss Raymond will take it, Rose.”

  I looked directly at her and asked, “You’re sure?”

  She nodded. “I’ll come over every couple of days and you can show me what you’ve changed and tell me why you did it.” She pursed her lips. “A person is never too old to learn, as Ma used to say.” I murmured something and she added, “And, of course, I want to learn as much as I can from you. I’m hoping I’ll improve so much that all you have to do with the next one is type it.”

  I poured myself another cup of tea. The Harper contract specified three books, so she felt she was obligated to write a third. At least, she felt obligated—Harper wouldn’t. There was no guarantee that they would accept a third book if the sales of Farmer Boy didn’t meet expectations. Come to that, there was no guarantee that they would accept a rewritten Farmer Boy, especially given the economic uncertainty. It would be very easy for them to reject it and cancel the contract. I doubted that my mother was thinking of this, and it wasn’t a good idea to say anything that might undercut her confidence as she began work on her third—and perhaps her last—book.

  “While you’re doing that, I need to start working,” she went on. “It takes me so long to write anything because I never know where I’m going. I just have to let the story wander around until it begins to lead somewhere.”

  I stirred the fire and the coals blazed up. “I’m glad to hear that you’re ready to get started. Have you figured out what you’re going to write about?” We had talked about this before. If she went on writing, it would be easiest for her to use the story material in “Pioneer Girl” as a kind of outline.

  “I suppose it should be the Indian Territory story.” She sounded uncertain. “But the books will be out of order. I don’t quite know how to handle that.”

  “Out of order?” I added another oak log to the fire and sat down with my cup of tea.

  “Well, I didn’t start ‘Pioneer Girl’ in Wisconsin because I wasn’t old enough to remember the first time we lived there, and I didn’t include the time we spent in Missouri. I started ‘Pioneer Girl’ in Indian Territory, which I don’t exactly remember either, except through Ma and Pa’s stories.” She added sugar to her tea and stirred. “I was only a year and a half when we went there. And three and a half when we started back to the Big Woods.”

  The Ingalls family itinerary was complicated. My mother was born in northwestern Wisconsin. When she was still a toddler, her father and mother packed up their family (my mother and her older sister, Mary) and headed for Indian Territory, for what my grandfather thought would soon be free land, opened up for settlement. He wanted to get a jump on the others who would be flocking to stake their claims. They lived there for a year and a half—that’s where my mother’s sister Carrie was born. Then they traveled back to my mother’s birthplace in Wisconsin, where they lived for another three years.

  Mama Bess put her spoon in the saucer. “But you see, that’s not the way it seems in Little House in the Big Woods. In that book, I’m already four, and it seems like we’ve lived in Wisconsin ever since I was born. And Carrie is a baby. So writing about Indian Territory, where Carrie i
s born, is going backward.”

  I nodded, seeing her dilemma. “Just ignore the issue,” I said. “Pretend that the second stay in Wisconsin was the first and go on with the story in Indian Territory.”

  “But I can’t pretend,” she protested, frowning. “That’s fiction, Rose. That’s what you write. I want my books to be the truth.” Her frown deepened. “But it’s awkward. I just don’t know what to do about Carrie.”

  “I’m sure you’ll come up with something that feels right,” I said. Time enough to discuss it later, when she had produced her manuscript.

  I heard footsteps overhead. Catharine was getting up. My mother glanced toward the stairs, then drained her teacup and set it down. “I probably shouldn’t tell you this,” she began in a low voice, “but—”

  “If it’s about Catharine, please don’t.”

  Another frown. “But I really think you should know that she is being talked about, Rose. She was seen exchanging pleasantries with one of the traveling salesmen in front of the pool hall.”

  Uh-oh, I thought. Growing up in Mansfield, I had been told that traveling men were bold and bad. Nice girls weren’t supposed to speak to them, and if a girl did, well, she wasn’t nice. Since the crash, the number of salesmen had dramatically decreased, but they still occasionally came through town. The Mrs. Grundys of Mansfield might go to the movies and listen to the radio, but their view of traveling men was apparently unchanged. And while the Catharine I knew was friendly but hardly flirtatious, even a polite hello-it’s-a-lovely-day would be enough to set them off.

  My mother leaned forward, very serious. “You know I don’t make moral judgments. But other people do, and their opinions of Catharine rub off on our family. On you, Rose. On me.”