A Wilder Rose: A Novel

by Susan Wittig Albert

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Escape and Old Home Town: 1935

  The year 1935 was like a jigsaw puzzle. Everything I had put together flew apart, the way a puzzle does when you drop it. When it was reassembled, the picture looked very different.

  To put it another way: in 1935, I left the farm and my mother and stepped forward into the rest of my life.

  The gloomy dark of winter always seems to send my spirits plummeting, and I find myself longing for sunshine and warm breezes. That year, winter dragged on and on, with bitter winds and leaden gray skies roofing a world of frozen mud and brittle trees. There was almost no snow, but we were hit by several ice storms that knocked the power out. Even with the furnace, it was hard to keep the old farmhouse warm, especially upstairs, where I was working. Downstairs, the pipes froze and burst.

  The winter was too cold for the boys to sleep in the garage, so they were both sleeping in the upstairs room that had been Troub’s. Lucille and Eddie were staying at Rocky Ridge, too, in the downstairs bedroom, so the house was crowded—and even more crowded when Catharine turned up again. I began to think of building a new bunkhouse for John and Al—a heated place where they could sleep and entertain their friends.

  From one point of view, this was not the most practical idea in the world. Even as I was sketching plans (there’s nothing I like better in this world than lavishing attention on a house, even if it is only a bunkhouse), I was thinking how good it would be for me to get away from Rocky Ridge. The boys’ high-school graduation was two years away, however, and in the meantime, I thought life on the farm would be more pleasant for everyone if the boys had a place of their own. Obviously, this meant cash cash cash. I had to settle down to writing.

  But while I had a strong idea for a book—“Old Home Town”—I was having trouble getting enough quiet time to pull it all together. The crowded, noisy house was mostly my own fault, I had to admit, because I had invited all these people to live with me. And each one filled a certain place in my life, so why was I complaining?

  Contemplating these contradictory necessities and urgencies, I remembered a scrap of insight I had once jotted into my journal. The problem, I wrote, is my own disorderly mind: I never want things or people or ideas in any logical way but haphazardly, helter-skelter, all at once. And when that commotion of greedy wanting collides with the ordinary commotion of living, the result is a messy confusion. That’s what I had now in my life: a chaotic, competitive confusion of the boys, the household, my mother, my work.

  Al was solid, dependable, and unfailingly courteous, and I never once regretted inviting him to live at Rocky Ridge. But even though I loved John—he had become my son, in all ways—his behavior was often simply impossible. At school, he was rude to his teachers and his report card was disgraceful. At home, he flared into ugly, combative arguments with me and with Al and Lucille, whom he saw as my allies. Lucille did her best to keep the household running smoothly, but John’s ongoing, escalating ruckus—always worse at mealtime and chore time—made it difficult for me to work.

  And there was my mother, who seemed to have become more demanding, perhaps because she feared that the boys were pulling me away from her. The telephone calls became more frequent, and she came over more often during the day, bringing her notes for “Plum Creek” so that we could discuss them. In early February, she brought the proofs of Little House on the Prairie for me to correct. The proofs went back to Harper and also to St. Nicholas Magazine, which wanted to publish an excerpt, as they had with Farmer Boy.

  Mama Bess also asked me to rewrite a chapter from her new book that would appear, under her name, in Child Life. That was something I thought she might do herself, but she insisted that I do it, and I eventually agreed. If we were going to maintain the fiction that she was the sole author of the books, all of her published material would have to be stylistically consistent. I could see the dilemma I had created by making her dependent on me as her coauthor, and had I been given the gift of foresight, I’m not sure I would have continued. But we were committed, and all I knew how to do was carry on as we had. It was as simple as that.

  Mama Bess and I talked about things other than her books, of course. We both read the newspapers and listened to the radio and had firm opinions about the state of affairs in Washington. Locally, Roosevelt had won by a small margin in the 1932 presidential race, but it hadn’t taken long for the Republicans to regroup, and in the 1934 midterm election, Democrat Harry S. Truman was sent to the U.S. Senate to represent Missouri with only 33 percent of Mansfield’s vote. Most people voted a straight ticket, so our district returned Republican Dewey Short to Congress, where he spoke out vehemently against Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, echoing the sentiments of the folks back home. Strong sentiments. Nobody in Mansfield liked the New Deal.

  There was no denying that the programs created jobs, mostly in highway and dam construction. The the Civilian Conservation Corps alone employed some four thousand men in building Missouri parks, and the Works Progress Administration was paying women to work in sewing rooms and canning factories around the county. Locally, there was hope for a new grade-school building, funded by the government. These jobs meant food on the table and shoes on children’s feet, and while people hated to be beholden to the government for work, they did what they had to do to keep their families going. If government work was all there was, people would do it.

  But at the same time, resentment festered. The self-reliant individualists in Wright County and across Missouri hated the idea of the government giving handouts to people who didn’t work. Even worse, they hated federal agencies that tried to tell them how to do their business. And the Agricultural Adjustment Administration—the AAA—was the most hated of all.

  My father was a good example. There wasn’t much arable land at Rocky Ridge, but Papa always planted what he could in oats for his horses and millet for my mother’s chickens, as well as a little popcorn for those long winter nights by the fire. He and Buck—his thirty-year-old Morgan—were out one afternoon plowing the bottomland along the creek when a young AAA agent in a business suit, white shirt, bow tie, and brown fedora parked his coupe beside the road and sauntered into the field. He wanted to warn my father that the new federal regulations prohibited him from planting more than two acres of oats. He cast an eye across the field, took out a notebook, and began writing something.

  “Looks to me like you got three, maybe four acres here,” he said. “That about right?” Without waiting for an answer, he pointed with his pencil. “I’d say you oughta stop plowing when you get to that maple tree over there. No point in planting unless you just want to burn, come harvest.”

  My father stared at him with narrowed eyes. “I’d say you oughta get the hell off my land and do it right now,” he said in a steely voice. “No point in standing there unless you want to get the seat of them fancy britches speckled with buckshot.”

  The AAA agent didn’t linger to see if my father meant what he said. The boys at the pool hall, where Papa enjoyed his regular Saturday afternoon game and a big cigar, laughed over the story for a long time.

  The weather was always on our minds. Everywhere in the midsection of the country, the winter and early spring had been exceptionally dry—so dry, in fact, that my father was hesitant to plant potatoes, wondering if they would make a crop. Farmers who were depending on pasture for their dairy cows were forced to cull their herds.

  To the west of us, where the drought was still deepening, the situation was worse. I read that a quarter of the winter wheat crop in Oklahoma had failed, half the crop in Kansas, and all of it in Nebraska—something like five million acres utterly devastated by drought. By the end of March, the southern Plains had already been hit with two solid weeks of dust storms boiling in huge clouds across the naked land. A few weeks later, I would read in the newspaper about Black Sunday, the nightmare storm that hit the Oklahoma Panhandle and swept like a black ava
lanche down into Texas. “We thought it was our judgment, we thought it was our doom,” Woody Guthrie wrote later, and many people did indeed die. Everyone’s nerves were raw in those months, and minor disagreements flared into sullen words that hung like ominous clouds in the air. I decided that if I was going to get any writing done, I would simply have to get away.

  And in April, I managed to do it. I couldn’t have without Lucille, of course—and I wouldn’t have tried, if she hadn’t been so willing. “You don’t have to worry about a thing,” she said reassuringly. “You go and do whatever you have to do, Rose. Eddie and me will handle the boys. And you’ll be close enough in case there’s an emergency.”

  It was true. I wasn’t going far, only seventy-some miles, to the small town of Hollister, where I checked into the English Inn. It was a small, inexpensive hotel with decent food, and I had a large room with a table beside the window for my typewriter. It was pleasant, for a change, to look down onto a street where people were coming and going, exchanging hellos, and leaning close together and lowering their voices to share the latest Hollister gossip about the latest affair, the latest divorce, the latest unwed mother.

  I didn’t fool myself that Hollister was any different from Mansfield in that regard, or from any of the myriad other small towns across the country. And, after all, that’s what I was writing about in the stories of “Old Home Town”: the life of a small town in all its relentless cruelties, both conscious and unconscious, directed toward those who are condemned to live their lives on the outskirts of the close-knit society.

  This was something I remembered vividly from my childhood. Before Mama Bess and Papa and I moved into town, we were country folks, outsiders, strangers—and we were still outsiders for years afterward, in the eyes of the town. I had been able to leave; I could come and go. But my mother had to stay. It had taken her decades to become a full-fledged member of the Mansfield flock, which was why, I supposed, she cared so deeply about the opinions of other members of the flock.

  There was some quiet social life in Hollister—I met people at the hotel and was introduced around town and invited to a few dinners and teas. A great many people had read “Hurricane” in the Saturday Evening Post and wanted to tell me how much they liked it. I was also (and inevitably) critiqued and censured, and one of the local Mrs. Grundys, at a dinner party, made it a special point to inform me that I was pitied: I had no “Christian faith”—another reminder that I was likely to be an outsider wherever I went.

  But most of all, this was a productive time, and exactly the change I needed. The stories I planned to include in the book—already linked by setting and characters—offered the kind of cozy glimpse into sentimental, small-town life that appealed to readers. But I had a larger ambition for the stories as a group than I’d had as I wrote each of them individually. For the collection, I arranged them in a sequence that I hoped would give them both a cumulative weight and a moral coherence, and I wrote a preface that framed them historically. They were, after all, about small-town life at the turn of the century, thirty years before, not about small-town life today—except that they were both, of course—about then and about now. Some things, and some people, never change.

  The stories were told from the point of view of a young girl, Ernestine. In each story, Ernestine is older and more experienced than in the previous one, growing toward the day when she will leave her hometown. She sees the town’s cruelties with a clearer and clearer eye, witnessing the struggles of its hapless victims—widows, spinsters, hired girls, unhappily married women—as they attempt to free themselves from the clutches of the town’s oppressive rules and unforgiving rule makers.

  But Ernestine also witnesses occasional escapes, both successful and unsuccessful. In the first story, “Hired Girl,” Almantha escapes being “talked about” by killing herself. Mrs. Sims, in “Immoral Woman,” escapes to millinery school in St. Louis and eventually to a career as a successful dress designer in New York and Paris. Leila Barbrook climbs into Ab Whitty’s buggy and escapes into a freer future.

  And in the end, Ernestine also escapes, as I had, by becoming a writer, the creator of the tales in Old Home Town. In the last story, “Nice Old Lady,” a grown-up, unmarried Ernestine is living in faraway Albania. In a bazaar there, she happens to meet old Mrs. Sherwood, the “nice old lady” who had once loaned her Quo Vadis and The Conquest of Peru, books that had whetted her desire to see the world—and my own, when I was a young Ernestine, borrowing those very books from a neighbor. Mr. Sherwood was a homebody who denied his wife’s wish to travel and see the world, refusing even to take her to Niagara Falls on their honeymoon. Mrs. Sherwood—realizing that marriage is the ultimate prison—had told the young girl, with an unforgettable ferocity, “Whatever you do, Ernestine, don’t you get married! Don’t do it!” Now, encountering the widowed Mrs. Sherwood climbing on a horse in a street in far-off Albania, Ernestine understands that even a “nice old lady,” once she has escaped the bonds of marriage, can flee the old hometown, at last a free woman, a world traveler.

  Later, after the reviews of Old Home Town came out, I found it interesting that while each of them praised the book, not a single one mentioned the central, and deeply ironic, theme of escape. I think no one noticed. Perhaps they read the stories individually and failed to see the linking theme. Or perhaps they weren’t looking for irony in stories that were originally published as magazine fiction.

  Hollister was less than two hours’ drive south of Mansfield. Lucille drove down several times during the three weeks I stayed at the hotel, once with my mother and, for the last weekend, with the boys, who went boating on the nearby Lake Taneycomo. Then we all drove back to Mansfield. Longmans’s contract for Old Home Town was waiting for me.

  And so was another opportunity, one that would—in the end—take me away from Rocky Ridge and from Mansfield altogether, and for all time. Ernestine had escaped from her old hometown. And so, at last, would I.

  “How did you come here?” the Albanians would inquire politely, ritually, of every traveler who reached their mountain village.

  “Slowly, slowly,” the weary traveler would answer. “Slowly, slowly, and little by little.”

  “Glory to your lips,” the villagers would reply, bowing low. “It is so.”

  It is so.

  It was late April when I returned to the farm, and I settled in to wrap up the manuscript of Old Home Town, retype the stories, and ship the thing off to Maxwell Aley at Longmans. The month of May was filled with the end-of-school-year activities: the class play (John had a role, Al worked on the set); graduation exercises (Al sang in the boys’ quartet); the boys’ class picnics (Lucille and I baked multiple jelly rolls); and a party for John’s June birthday.

  And then an unexpected opportunity appeared in the mailbox. George Bye wrote to ask if I would be interested in writing a book on the state of Missouri for a series about the United States planned by Robert M. McBride. McBride had already published several popular travel books about Czechoslovakia and Germany—popular perhaps because most people couldn’t afford to travel, and reading was the next-best thing. To write the book, I would have to do quite a lot of research. But Columbia—the location of the University of Missouri Library and the state’s historical archives—was just a three-hour drive. I could spend the week there, while Lucille and Eddie kept an eye on the boys, and come home on weekends. Quo vadis, I thought. Escape, escape. I jumped at the chance.

  Years earlier, I had thought that Missouri held a great deal of untouched story material. Now, the more I thought about writing a book about “my” state, the more enthusiastic I became. I wanted to do a book that wasn’t just a travel book but a story of the state, for I felt that Missouri had its own special character, its own unique personality. I knew the Ozarks and the Ozark people: I had written about them for years. I could learn about other parts of Missouri and reveal it in the way I would show a character in a stor
y, with the actions, the events, the landscapes, and people, all interacting in a multithreaded plot. It was an ambitious idea, yes, but I saw very clearly how it could be done. All I needed was access to research materials and quiet time to do the writing.

  Therein my escape. I found a comfortable ninth-floor suite in the Tiger Hotel on South Eighth Street in Columbia. I was able to rent the rooms very cheaply since there wasn’t much regular demand for that kind of accommodation. The hotel was only a few blocks from the University of Missouri campus and an enjoyable walk to the library and the state historical archives. I expected the research to take several months, and the writing—some of which could be done back at the farm—another few months, perhaps six altogether. I should have no trouble finishing the manuscript by January, when it was due.

  But my move to Columbia produced something much better than a book: my escape from the farm. And in my escape, I discovered the seductive pleasures of living alone, truly alone, for the first time in my life.

  I was actually astonished when I stopped to think about this. I had left home at seventeen, lived with roommates until my marriage to Gillette, then lived with other roommates after the marriage ended. After that, I traveled abroad with various women, lived with Troub, and moved to Rocky Ridge. Always, in all that time, there was at least one other person in my household, often three or four or five. I had lived a crowded life. I had never been genuinely alone. Now, most of the time, I found myself reveling in the solitude.