A Wilder Rose: A Novel

by Susan Wittig Albert

  “Are they still doing children’s book illustrations?” Troub asked with interest. She liked the Haders, who gave wonderful parties.

  “Yes, and doing very well with it, too. Their new book, Two Funny Clowns, is just out. Berta cooked one of her wonderful dinners, and we told stories about being dead broke in Greenwich Village in 1919, living on split-pea soup and fifty cents a day in that three-story walkup on Jones Street, where we had to wear all the clothes we possessed, all at one time, to keep warm.” I paused. “Everybody asked about you, Troub. I’m sorry you couldn’t be there.”

  “I am too.” Troub sighed, staring into the fire. “Next Christmas, we’ll go together, Rose. And we’ll paint the town.”

  But we didn’t. By the next year, everything had changed.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER FIVE

  King Street: April 1939

  “Was it?” Norma Lee asked, from her seat on the front porch steps. “Was it the end of the good life?”

  Mrs. Lane’s voice had trailed off into the spring evening silence. There was only the creak-creak of the porch swing and the croaking of tree frogs. The light from the living-room window slanted across her face. She seemed startled, as if she had forgotten where she was and that there was someone else with her, someone who wasn’t Troub. She pushed the porch swing with her foot.

  “It was, yes. But we didn’t know it then. Nobody really knew it, until later. After the good life was gone.”

  Mrs. Lane had started her story after supper, after Russell had walked to the lake for an hour’s fishing and while she and Norma were doing the dishes. They had finished the kitchen work and gone to sit on the porch as the sky turned from lemon-and-pink to a platinum gray. Now the darkness was draped like a shadowy curtain over the trees around the house. Russell had cleaned his fish—three nice-sized perch—and gone upstairs. He turned up the volume on the radio, catching Fred Astaire in the middle of “Nice Work If You Can Get It.”

  “I suppose it took a while for the shock to sink in,” Norma Lee said. “Was Mansfield much affected?”

  “Not really,” Mrs. Lane replied. “At least not at first. Crop prices had been terribly low for four or five years, so farm families were already used to getting by without a lot of extra cash. The people who had jobs held on to them for as long as they could. The people who didn’t . . .” She shrugged. “They just kept on as best they could. They got by with help from their families, from their churches. The way everybody does when times are hard.” Her tone changed. “That was before the days of the government handouts, of course.”

  Nice work if you can get it. And if you get it, won’t you tell me how?

  Upstairs, the song ended and Russell carried the jaunty tune on, whistling, the thin treble thread wrapping itself around them, brave in the dark. Norma Lee took her cigarettes out of her skirt pocket and lit one, the match flaring briefly against the night. “Your mother,” she said after a moment. “Did she ever say thank you for the house you built for her? Do you think she enjoyed living there?”

  “My mother is frugal,” Mrs. Lane said with a little laugh. “‘Thank you’ is as costly as ‘please.’ No, she didn’t say it, not in so many words, not then—not ever, really. But she gave every appearance of enjoying the house, even if it was more an emblem of my success as a writer than hers as a farmer’s wife. She certainly liked to show it off to her club friends, and when the housewarming party was written up in the Mansfield Mirror, she bought several copies and cut out the story and sent it to her sisters, to Grace and Carrie. She knew it was better for Papa—less work and more comfortable—and I’m sure that pleased her, especially in the winters.” She paused. “As for anything else, I don’t know. My mother has always been a mystery to me.”

  “And you to her, I imagine,” Norma Lee murmured, thinking how hard it must have been for Mrs. Wilder to understand her daughter, even to imagine where in the world she was, what under the sun she might be doing.

  Mrs. Lane chuckled. “Yes. A daughter who roams the globe, gets herself lost in the Arabian desert, is shot at during a revolution, speaks outlandish languages, reads unintelligible books. A pride, perhaps, an accomplishment of sorts, like being the only woman in her bridge club brave enough to raise a tiger cub. But an eternal uneasiness, too, for it means that her daughter is herself, a separate person. Separated, unlike her. Baffling. Inexplicable.” She looked down at Norma Lee and said playfully, “I suppose you’re a mystery to your mother, too. Are you?”

  Norma Lee wasn’t startled by the question. It was something she had thought about often since she had left home. She had grown up in a comfortable household in Trenton, Missouri. Her father was a conductor on the Rock Island Railroad, so there was money coming in during the Depression—enough money so that her mother, who had no ambition beyond the family, could hire cooking and cleaning help.

  “In some ways, yes, I suppose. I’m not like her at all. Going to college, moving to New York, getting my writing published in magazines that people actually read—my mother never wanted to do those things herself, so it’s hard for her to imagine one of her daughters wanting to do them. But while she might be baffled, she’s always said, quite bravely, that she’s glad I have the freedom to do what I want.” She paused. After a moment she went on, choosing her words carefully, not wanting to imply any criticism. “She doesn’t lean on me. And she’s an affectionate woman, and happy to share her affections with her daughters.”

  “Affection,” Mrs. Lane said in a speculative tone. “Well, I’m sure the women in my mother’s family felt affectionate toward one another, but they didn’t show it. My grandmother, my aunts, my mother—there was always a kind of stern reserve, a holding back. Perhaps it was the fear that giving in even a little bit would lead to a total collapse of all the barriers, and they would be swept away by feeling. My mother reminded me once that a person—she meant herself, of course—couldn’t live at a high pitch of emotion. It was a matter of self-preservation, she said.”

  “So it’s better not to have any feelings at all,” Norma Lee murmured ironically. “Or not to show them. Not even occasionally.”

  Mrs. Lane might not have heard her. “Or perhaps it was the idea that affection somehow ‘spoiled’ a child. That life was real, life was earnest, and too much coddling insulated us from that essential truth, which would shortly be visited on us by cruel experience.” Her sigh was barely audible. “But now that I’m older, I think perhaps that they were just tired, they were exhausted. The lives those women led in that time were hard and narrow. The work they did, it was simply relentless. They almost never sat down, and when they did, their hands were busy and their laps were full—shelling peas, mending shirts, darning socks, knitting mittens. There was no time, no room for a child. And they had so many children. My Ingalls grandmother bore five. My Wilder grandmother bore six.”

  Norma Lee pondered this for a moment, remembering her mother’s capacious lap and her grandmother’s lilac-scented embrace, and feeling that Mrs. Lane had missed something essential when she was growing up.

  Mrs. Lane pulled her knitted sweater tighter around her. “It’s getting chilly. Aren’t you tired of listening to me ramble?”

  “But you still haven’t told me about your mother’s books,” Norma Lee reminded her.

  “No, I haven’t.” Mrs. Lane got to her feet. “But not tonight. It’s time for bed.”

  “We can go on with it tomorrow, though, can’t we?”

  “I suppose. If you really want to. If you don’t think it’s a waste of time.”

  “I do want to go on,” Norma Lee said. “Of course I do.” She got up, too. “Stories are never a waste of time, don’t you think?”

  “Well, then,” Mrs. Lane said, going to the screen door. “In the morning.”

  Upstairs, on Russell’s radio, Astaire was singing, “They Can’t Take That Away from Me.”

  CHAPTER
SIX

  Mother and Daughter: 1930–1931

  I made two New Year’s resolutions for 1930: pay debts and save money.

  Pay debts and save—both resolutions based on a supposition that there would be money coming in. I should have known better, but it took a while for the new reality to show itself in the magazine markets I depended on. In the meantime, Troub and I simply couldn’t believe the worst, and our shared optimism carried us forward in a kind of unthinking momentum through the days. I was still fueled with the energy of my trip to the city, and because I needed money (cash cash cash), I kept on writing at my usual pace: seven short stories in the first half of 1930. In a normal year, all seven would have sold, for a thousand or more each. That year, Carl sold just three. But even that took several months, and paying the monthly bills was a wretched exercise in subtraction.

  I was hunched over my checkbook at the table in the dining room one below-zero February morning. The old Black Forest wooden clock—the one my father gave my mother the December I was born—was ticking loudly on its shelf in the corner. Mrs. Capper, who normally arrived on Mondays on the Springfield bus, had called to cancel because of the bad weather. And no wonder. Sleet was coming down, the third ice storm since the beginning of the year burdening the trees to the breaking point. I felt burdened, too, under the weight of the electric and telephone and fuel-oil bills for two households—as well as an urgent request from Rexh, still at Cambridge, for money for books. I was trying to decide what I had to pay and what could wait another week. When Catharine wandered downstairs in her robe and wondered where breakfast was, I snapped.

  “Eggs and bacon in the fridge,” I said shortly. “I assume you can manage the electric range yourself.”

  Catharine looked at me, hurt, and I was ashamed. “Sorry,” I muttered. “You caught me at a bad moment.”

  But she had been with us since before Christmas, and Troub and I were finding that a little bit of Catharine went a long way. The three of us were cooped up in the farmhouse with nothing to do but read and write and play chess and do jigsaw puzzles.

  A jigsaw-puzzle craze had swept the country that year. The puzzles were more than just an all-absorbing way to fill the empty hours; they offered the fulfilling illusion of work, especially for those who were otherwise unemployed. Putting the pieces together, finding the one piece you needed, seeing the picture emerge out of a chaos of jagged, disconnected pieces—all this offered a fugitive sense of accomplishment, of completing something. The engrossing pastime (it wasn’t really work) reassured people that they could control objects and events and allayed the fear that they were completely at the mercy of forces outside themselves.

  For me, it was not an unfamiliar fear. I had once written to Guy Moyston that the trouble with my life was that it had no strong central storyline—at least, certainly not a conventional one, with love and marriage as its main theme. Just when I thought I’d found something to hold on to, the plot was altered by events I couldn’t control. And as the days wore on and my New York visit shimmered into a half-forgotten mirage on the horizon, the farm felt more and more like a trap, a place of exile. I was in a blue funk.

  Troub and Catharine helped to relieve the sense of isolation, and there were also the letters from friends. The letters were a substitute for the conversation that fed my soul and, at the same time, a distraction from the work I knew I should be doing. I often thought that my truest self was not in my magazine work but in my letters. Those from my New York friends were full of news and notes about their lives and work and the literary scene. With Dorothy Thompson, I discussed men and love and sex and all the things I wanted from life—in the abstract, since getting what I wanted was now beginning to seem utterly impossible. And always, oh yes, always dear Mr. Older, Fremont Older, whose interest in my work went back to the San Francisco Bulletin days, with whom I discussed politics and political philosophies and all the grand ideas that made the world go round. In the letters, I could be funny and eloquent and confident and interesting because the I who wrote was not the I who had to continually deal with money (the need for it, the lack of it), housekeeping, dogs, gardens, chickens, writing, bad teeth, the weather, and my mother. The I of the letters was someone else—or, rather, a multiplicity of someones, a particular persona for each of my correspondents.

  This was something of a hazard, in fact, because anyone reading the letters might suspect that I was pretending, or acting a part, or being untruthful. But that was not it, not at all. It was rather that the personality to whom I was writing brought out a particular personality in me, in the way that a play brings out an aspect of an actor’s self that can emerge only in that context—and then the next play brings out another self, and then another, and so on. The letters connected me to the people who were living active, animated lives—real lives—in the swirling universe of events and ideas. The letters were lifelines, conduits, channels, and the energy that flowed through them invigorated me and reminded me that I might be exiled to Rocky Ridge, but I was still a citizen of a larger world.

  The weather warmed in early March, and Catharine went back to New York. The next week, she wrote that most of our friends were in a blue funk, too. Some had been let go or had their hours drastically reduced, and the rest were wondering if they would have a job at the end of the month. In early April, Genevieve came for a short visit, bearing more dismal news. From her desk at Pictorial Review, she saw what was going on in the magazine world. Advertisers were cancelling their contracts, publishers were reducing the number of pages of editorial content, and editors were using stories and articles they had already bought and stockpiled—or worse (where authors were concerned), reprinting pieces from previous issues. The fiction market was dead as a doorpost. George Q. Palmer was still sending his weekly Wall Street reports, but by mid-April, they sounded positively gloomy. Troub, saying that facts were facts and she had to face them, sold Governor. She got $125 for a horse that was worth four or five times that amount, but it was the best she could do. I think that my father, who loved the big Morgan, felt the loss even more than Troub did.

  In the midst of all this bad news, Mama Bess brought me her autobiography.

  My mother and I have had our differences, but I have always known that she was an extraordinary person, a never-give-up woman who pushed herself beyond the limits that hindered other women of her era. She urged my father to leave the Dakotas and begin a new farm in Missouri. She worked with him to clear the land and farm it, and she did whatever she could to bring in money—selling butter and eggs, cooking meals for traveling salesmen, hosting boarders, writing farm-journal articles that earned her a reputation as a persuasive booster for the family farm. She organized women’s clubs and farm clubs. She managed loans as secretary-treasurer of the Mansfield Farm Loan Association, which operated under the Federal Farm Loan Board.

  My mother came from a family of writing women. Her mother wrote letters, and when she died, Mama Bess inherited her pearl-handled pen, carved in the shape of a quill. Her younger sisters Carrie and Grace wrote for the De Smet News and her older sister Mary—blinded at fourteen by an illness—published poetry and hoped to write a book.

  As far as I know, my mother’s first sustained writing effort was the journal she kept on the six-week trip from South Dakota to Missouri in 1894. I remember her sitting beside the campfire at night, writing with a pencil in a five-cent memorandum book. She sent parts of the journal as a letter to the De Smet News and pasted the clipping in her scrapbook, with the words “First I ever published” penciled in the margin. Years later, she showed me the journal and asked if I thought I could “fix it up” enough so that it could be published.

  But by that time I had begun my own career and didn’t have many extra hours. In 1908, I went to San Francisco and began writing for the weekly Junior section of the San Francisco Call. In 1909, I married Gillette Lane, a reporter for the Call. I was pregnant quickly, but to my deep sorrow,
the baby, a boy born prematurely when we were working in Salt Lake City, didn’t live. It’s not true that time heals: the heart pain is as scalding now as it was the day I lost my child. But you learn, in time, that loss and grief are a part of life, and you get on as best you can with the daily business of living.

  After the baby, while Gillette pursued a number of advertising schemes across the Midwest, I was reporting for the Kansas City Post and the Kansas City Journal. I was learning the trade, covering crimes, accidents, scandals, county fairs, and flower shows—anything, everything I was assigned to. The next year, I went with Gillette to the East Coast, where he contrived more promotion schemes and we lived a hand-to-mouth life one fast jump ahead of the bill collector. Then it was back to San Francisco, where we moved into an apartment on Leavenworth and went to work for Stine and Kendrick, a major real-estate company. California was booming. The old ranches were being subdivided and sold as small farms. Sales were quick, commissions good. But then the European war began and the land boom fizzled, and so did our marriage, although Gillette and I would not be divorced for several more years.

  I went back to writing. A friend, Betty Beatty, was editing the women’s page in the Bulletin, and in early 1915, I began as her assistant for $12.50 a week, plus space-rates for other pieces I wrote. It wasn’t long before Fremont Older, the Bulletin’s legendary editor, took me under his wing. Almost before I knew it, I was getting some very good serial story assignments. One of the early assignments was a story on Art Smith, the young daredevil pilot who was appearing at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. The story ran for four weeks and was published as a book. Through similar assignments—interviews with Charlie Chaplin, Henry Ford, and others—I learned how to spin narratives (“color features,” they were called) at the rate of fifteen hundred or two thousand words a day, keeping the story going for weeks at a time. I learned how to capture and hold readers, keep them turning pages and buying newspapers. Newspaper writing then was much more sensational than it is now, and more entertaining. It was aimed to excite readers’ emotions, and I worked hard to learn the trick of telling a compelling, emotional story with (I must admit) a great deal of fictionalization.