But there were no such memorable doings at Rocky Ridge, where this last comfortable year slipped by in an agreeably mind-numbing swirl of small-town activities. I was well aware of the paradox of this, for such things enshrined the narrowly domestic lives of small-town women. And yet, some domesticities—women’s needlework and cooking—seem to me to rise to the level of a folk art and have always attracted and intrigued me. At least once a week, Troub and I went with my mother to her club meetings—the Bridge Club, the Embroidery Club, the Interesting Hour Club, the Athenians, and the Justamere Club (which was exactly what it sounds like: just a mere club)—where the local hierarchy was on display and in fine feather. Mama Bess invited the clubs to her new home, where she served her famous gingerbread and I contributed French pastries. Mama’s friends were open-mouthed at the luxury of central heat, the indulgence of electric refrigeration, and the distinctive textures and Mediterranean colors of the rough-plastered walls, which were nothing at all like the faded pink cabbage roses of their parlor wallpaper.
Although I had grown up in Mansfield, I was always an observer rather than a participant in these gatherings, and the conversations gave me plenty of story material. Books were seldom discussed and politics rarely, unless a local politician or prominent church member had somehow disgraced himself and was being “talked about.” But there were always conversations about children, needlework, recipes, flowers, and friends, observations about the latter often couched in snide but unoriginal asides. I once heard Mrs. Stevens tell one of her friends, “If you can’t say something nice about her, dear, come sit over here by me and whisper it.”
And there was Mildred Hill, who frequently remarked in a tone of vague tolerance (as if all my present sins were rooted in our shared past), “Oh, I remember our wild Rose when she still grew in our little garden,” and went on to wonder, with a critical click of her tongue, “I just can’t imagine how a body can make as much money as she does by simply putting words on paper.” Click click. And in a lower voice, dark with discontent, “Don’t seem right, someway.” Click.
Or Hazel Thomas, who gazed over her drugstore spectacles at Catharine (lighting a cigarette) and shrilled, “Why, I never saw a lady smoke before.” And Troub responded, with innocent astonishment, “Mrs. Thomas, I am amazed. I’m wondering just where you might have traveled. Not to a city of any size, I imagine.”
Mrs. Thomas had been all her life in Mansfield, of course, where only men and chimneys smoked, ladies never. But then everyone knew that Catharine Brody wrote books about S-E-X, so she was clearly no lady. And I wrote books about people like Charlie Chaplin and Jack London and President Hoover and lived in Greenwich Village and went to Communist rallies and traveled with men (foreign men, with guns!) in the remotest mountains of Eastern Europe, so I was no lady, either. No wonder that, for Mildred Hill and the rest of my mother’s friends, I was a wild Rose—a divorced Rose, a Rose without a husband, a Rose who refused to plant herself in a Mansfield garden and produce baby Roses. I’m sure this was remarked upon behind my back. No one dared do it to my face, for I was known to have a sharp tongue: a Rose with thorns.
But the world was intruding into Mansfield’s isolation. Radios brought in the news from Chicago and New York and San Francisco. The livery stable and the blacksmith had been replaced by an automobile repair shop. The Bonny Theater showed talkies and put up posters of cigarette-smoking flappers on the wall out front. The town band played dance music at the bandstand on the square, and the young people (except for the Baptists) defiantly danced the Charleston and the infamous “Baltimore Buzz”:
First you take your babe and gently hold her,
Then you lay your head upon her shoulder.
Next you walk just like your legs are breaking.
Do a fango like a tango,
Then you start the shimmie to shaking.
The Mansfield Grays played other area teams on the town baseball field, and Mr. Pierson, who ran the pool hall, made surreptitious book on the games. Under the influence of the world-famous golfer Bobby Jones, the men who could afford it (like Mr. Kerry of the bank) had gone golf crazy, and there was a new golf club and golf course, north of town on newly paved Highway 5.
The paving of the local roads, however much ballyhooed, led not to the hoped-for prosperity but to a disappointing decline. Instead of shopping in Mansfield (population 870), people hopped into their Fords and Buicks and Oldsmobiles and drove to Mountain Grove for groceries or to Springfield for clothes and tools and a fancy restaurant dinner. Not even the Mansfield Mirror’s repeated exhortations to “buy from your local merchant to keep him in business” could stem the enthusiastic tide of outward-bound commerce. And it wasn’t just shopping trips. Everybody who had a car (and there wasn’t any excuse for not having one, with credit so easy to get) spent Sundays sightseeing, to the point where the pastors of the town’s churches felt they had to preach against the sin of skipping church just to go pleasure driving.
There were a few hot days in July, but the weather was fine for most of that last easy summer, and we whiled away the time with simple pleasures. Troub and I took the parents driving and ate dinner and supper with them at the Rock House or invited them to Rocky Ridge. We picnicked at the Gasconade River, where Sparkle and Mr. Bunting chased birds and lizards and Troub and I took off our shoes and danced barefoot in the shallows and giggled when the minnows nibbled our toes. We braved the bee-laden bushes to pick blackberries and raspberries for jam and bought peaches for canning from the Erb Orchard at Cedar Gap. In August, my new Mansfield friend Lucille Murphy and I drove to St. Louis for shopping and then west across the state to Kansas City before heading back home. In September, I canned corn relish, and Troub and I went to the Springfield Dahlia Show and to the Wright County Fair and Stock Show, where a man lit his clothes on fire and jumped into a flaming tank, while awed spectators gasped and trembled at the foolhardiness of the deed.
Troub and my father had gone to Mexico, Missouri (which called itself the “Saddle Horse Capital of the World”), where Troub bought a Morgan gelding. She named the horse Governor, after Governor of Orleans, a Morgan my father had once had at the farm. Troub’s Governor was a big horse and almost too much for her. I was concerned, but she bravely persevered and rode him nearly every day. She also bought a little black mare named Molly and a pony named Topsy. Our guests were encouraged to bring trousers so they could ride with Troub along the country lanes and woodland paths.
We had plenty of guests in that easygoing year. Genevieve came for several short visits, to work on her book. Catharine Brody arrived in March and stayed for two months, then returned later in the fall. Her first novel, Babe Evanson, had come out in 1928 to mixed reviews; her 1932 novel, Nobody Starves, would be a bestseller, and she would be hailed as one of the “new realists.”
Catharine made news in Mansfield, but not for her books. She was a small woman with brown hair and thick glasses, who “looked Jewish.” This latter observation was passed along to me by my mother, who made sure that I was informed about the reception my friends enjoyed (or otherwise) among her friends.
Troub was writing, too, so for a while, there were four typewriters clattering away at Rocky Ridge. We enclosed the upstairs sleeping porch against the rain, and there was plenty of space to work—a pleasant space, too. The porch overlooked green trees and a grassy slope and caught the breeze. In the evenings, there was chess, jigsaw puzzles, books read aloud, stories shared, and conversation—real conversation, stimulating conversation, about politics, culture, books, films. Since we were the liveliest group in town, acquaintances from Mansfield sometimes joined us, although only one—Lucille Murphy—had a mind that was broader than a bridge plank. Lucille, who with her husband, Eddie, ran the Mansfield laundry, was pretty and full of fun and serious questions about life and love, and she enjoyed playing chess. As the year went on, Troub and I saw more and more of Lucille and less and less of Eddie.
/> Oh, there were dark moments. There were times when I told Troub that I would give anything to hear a real idea come out of somebody’s mouth, and that if I had to listen to yet another bit of trivial tittle-tattle I would go crazy.
“If you’re unhappy, let’s leave,” she would say sensibly.
“I can’t,” I would say and throw up my hands. “I’m working.”
And I was. Happy or unhappy, I was producing, and selling, my usual magazine fiction. I worked most of the summer on a serial, “An Albanian Romance,” and was disappointed when Carl Brandt wrote that he couldn’t sell it anywhere. While there was plenty in the Palmer account, I continued to write because I was, as usual, in constant need of money (cash cash cash). There was the electric bill and the rent to pay to my mother every month, and salaries for Jess (Papa’s hired man) and our cook-housekeeper, Mrs. Capper, whom Troub had found through a work-wanted ad. Mrs. Capper stayed all week (she slept downstairs in the room that had been my parents’) and took the bus back to Springfield on weekends.
And we weren’t quite finished with our remodeling and landscaping. In June, we installed an electric water heater so we could have hot baths without carrying water; in September, a new lawn; in October, an automatic steam-heating system with an oil burner that was supposed to keep the whole house warm. My mother and I both needed expensive dental work, which required several train trips to St. Louis. And I was planning to go to New York in December, where I would stay with Genevieve and see Carl Brandt and my editors and friends, and shop, of course. Cash cash cash. At the end of August, I withdrew ten thousand dollars from my Palmer account—not because I was worried about the security of the market but because I wanted to catch up on my obligations.
Ten thousand dollars—oh, if I had only had the wisdom to withdraw all of the money and close the account right then and there, things would have been very different. I could have paid all my bills and tucked the rest under the mattress.
But I didn’t. None of us were wise where the market was concerned. We might have heard a few uncomfortable warnings in the newspapers or on the radio, if we had known how to look and listen. But we continued to crest the wave of national exuberance and, like everyone else in America, didn’t pause to look beneath its surface. The minor breaks in the market—in August and September—didn’t worry us: they were explained as “technical adjustments,” like the other little ups and downs and zigs and zags we were used to. There were disquieting moments, like the minicrash in March, when people who had bought on margin got panicky. And there were a few like Roger Babson, who published a respected investment newsletter and uttered the gloomy prediction, with the Dow at its all-time September high of 381: “Sooner or later a crash is coming, and it may be terrific.”
But the philosophy of the twenties held that “later” was a long time away. Babson’s pessimism was countered by the optimism of other economists like Irving Fisher, who helpfully explained that stock prices had reached a “permanently high plateau” and that the “ever-ascending curve of American prosperity” was sturdy enough to survive whatever small breaks might interrupt it. On September 11, the Wall Street Journal published its thought for the day, Mark Twain’s wry wisdom: “Don’t part with your illusions; when they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.” We held on to our illusions until the end of October, scarcely knowing that they were just that.
On Tuesday, October 22, Carl telegraphed that Redbook had bought my short story “Village Maid” for a thousand dollars, a new high in their payment for my work. To celebrate, Troub and I drove to Springfield on Wednesday, and I bought a splendid blue velvet dress and stylish suede pumps for my trip to New York. On Thursday, October 24, I wore the dress and pumps to the Embroidery Club meeting at Mrs. Hooper’s house. They were envied by Becky and Josey, the town girls who had worn those beautiful dresses and patent-leather shoes in school back when I, a country girl, was wearing calico and going barefoot.
That was Black Thursday. That night, listening to the radio news announcer reporting the day’s heavy losses, I said to Troub, knowing it but not quite believing it: “This is the end, you know.” I was matter-of-fact. How else to be when Vesuvius erupts, when the Titanic begins to sink, when the planet is ripped out of its orbit?
Troub, who was reading and eating an apple, looked up from her book. “The end of what?” she asked, blinking.
I threw up my hands. “Easy money,” I said. “Easy magazine sales. It’s the end of the good life.” I don’t know how I knew this. I just knew it, and I cursed myself for not having known it in September, when the Dow crested and I could have told Mr. Palmer to sell off my stocks. It was too late to sell now, too late to do anything but watch the markets sail off a precipice and into a void.
Troub took a bite out of her apple and went back to her book. “Don’t be an idiot, Rose,” she said with her mouth full. “You know how it goes, up and down, up and down and sideways. This is just another little bump in the road.”
But it wasn’t. On Black Monday, the Dow dropped by another 13 percent. On Black Tuesday, the pace accelerated. In those two days alone, the market lost more than thirty billion dollars.
When Troub read this news aloud at the supper table later that week, I said again, “It really is the end, Troub. Palmer is finished—or he will be, soon. Our accounts are gone.”
This time, she didn’t argue. Silently, she folded the paper and began to eat her soup.
In New York for three weeks, I stayed with Genevieve, then went back to Rocky Ridge in time for Christmas. Troub was at the depot to meet me, with her car and Mr. Bunting. I had wanted her to come to New York with me, but Catharine was there for a visit and we didn’t quite trust her to manage the old farmhouse by herself in the wintertime.
I had spent my last dollar on a pair of Bonwit Teller blue silk pajamas for Troub and presents for the parents. I’d spent an afternoon with Lydia Gibson, whom I knew from the San Francisco days, and she gave me the big portrait she had painted of me in 1917—that was Mama Bess’s Christmas present. I also brought home a big box of New York pastries and some cans of pâté de foie gras and nuts and marzipan for our Christmas Eve party, which included our hired man and his family, and Lucille and Eddie, and Mama and Papa. Troub had cut and decorated a shapely green juniper from the woods, and Catharine had brought in armloads of boughs. Carols were playing on the radio, and Troub had lit candles everywhere, so the old house was festive when we opened our presents.
After Mama Bess and Papa had gone home and Catharine had gone up to bed, Troub and I poured another glass of eggnog and settled in front of the fireplace. We hadn’t had a chance to talk, and she was full of questions.
“How was it?” she asked. “It’s been nearly two months since the bottom dropped out. What are people doing?”
“They’re trying to pretend that this is just a downturn,” I said. Among my friends, those who had any inkling of what it meant were deeply dismayed and apprehensive. But most were simply dispirited by the loss of their money—even though the money wasn’t real. That is, it was just numbers in their brokerage statements, not actual bills snatched out of their pockets. “And everybody is determined to be terribly brave and gay while they wait it out.” That was what had touched me so deeply: the bravery of people, trying to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary had happened, that the world hadn’t suddenly shifted under their feet.
Troub sipped her eggnog. “Did you see Mr. Palmer? What did he say about our stocks?”
“Of course I saw him,” I said. I had called him as soon as I arrived in the city. “He took me to the Waldorf for an expensive lunch and gave me a New York Times article with the headline ‘Bankers Believe Liquidation Has Now Run Its Course and Advise Purchases.’” I laughed shortly. “He advised me to snap up a few bargains.”
“Did you?”
I shook my head. “I might have. But when I went to his broke
rage office, I saw that he’d laid off his secretary. So I spent my money on clothes and shoes instead. And shampoos and manicures. After all, I had to look presentable when I visited the magazines.” I had made the usual rounds—Carl Brandt, the magazine editors, a couple of the publishers that had done my earlier books—and couldn’t see much of a change, even though I’d heard that advertising sales were way down.
“The theater?” Troub asked. “I suppose you saw lots of shows.”
“Mary Margaret and Stella and I saw The Silver Swan. It flopped, but I rather liked it. We saw Many Waters and Berkeley Square. And parties, of course. Stella gave a big dinner party for me, and Genevieve invited sixty people to her apartment one afternoon for tea. They were spending money as if they would always have bushels of it, even though Genevieve told me she was worried about losing her editorial job.” That thought had frightened me, and I didn’t want to be frightened, so I had put it out of my mind. “One weekend, I went to Croton to stay with Floyd and Marie Dell. His play, Little Accident, is going to be made into a movie, with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Another weekend, I went to Nyack, to visit Berta and Elmer Hader.”
A Wilder Rose: A Novel Page 7