And Troub, dear Troub, dearest Troub.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Little House in the Big Woods: 1931
“It’s so good to have you back, Rose.” Troub was sitting cross-legged on my bed, watching me unpack. “I’ve missed you.”
“I missed you, too, dear,” I said, meaning it. “It feels like I’ve been gone a year.”
“Half a year, actually,” she said, making a face. “I’m glad you were able to help Dorothy, and that you found work—and a new agent. But it was too long. I was feeling . . . abandoned.”
“Next time, we’ll go together,” I said firmly, taking a large pack of letters out of my suitcase.
Troub glanced curiously at the letters. “What’s that?”
“My letters to Guy Moyston.” I put them on the shelf. “He got married last month.”
The news hadn’t been a shock, exactly, or even much of a jolt: Guy and I had said our half-sad, half-relieved good-byes three years before, when I had told him that, while I cherished our time together, I didn’t want to be married. I had said the same thing to Gillette, when we ended our marriage, and to Arthur Griggs. And now, in the Ozark spring of 1931, all three of these lovers had found and married other lovers, and I had taken a different road.
What was this road? It was a question I asked myself as I sat down that evening with my letters. I reread them with a kind of wistful longing, not at all for Guy or even for the person to whom I had written (these two were perhaps not the same). I was longing, instead, for the feelings I’d had when I first met him, wishing I could love with that sweetly giddy, self-forgetting exhilaration just once more in my life and knowing, somehow, that I wouldn’t. I was, I think, longing for my younger self, full of optimism and joy and impatient for life, for adventure, for risk.
But there wasn’t time to linger over the past, over paths untaken. After several weeks of daily, fingers-to-the-typewriter-keys work, I finished my third ghostwritten book for Lowell Thomas and sent it. Unfortunately, it turned out that the Great Adventurer was as hard up for cash as the rest of us, and I had to write several times for payment—and then wait a while longer, since he would pay me in postdated checks.
In the meantime, George Bye wrote that he wasn’t “warmed” by my mother’s “Pioneer Girl,” which he described as a mild tale told chronologically, without any art, by a fine old lady in her rocking chair. I knew he was right: the material was flat and clumsy. It needed the real-life dramatic tension of fiction. But when I talked this over with Mama Bess (who had settled down to produce another fifteen thousand words for Marion Fiery), she was adamant.
“I want to tell the true story,” she said firmly. Her blue eyes darkened and her mouth set in that hard, stubborn line that I knew so well. “I’m sorry if it’s not exciting enough to suit those editors in New York, but I’m not going to make up lies to make it more exciting.”
“Nobody’s suggesting that you tell lies,” I replied cautiously. “But sometimes we need to use fiction to tell the truth. Sometimes fiction tells a truer story than facts.”
She wasn’t listening—and even if she had listened, I’m not sure she could have made the distinction. Not then, anyway.
“Lies,” she said now, sniffing as if she smelled something unsavory. “I may not tell all of the truth, but I am not going to tell any lies.” And that was that.
The Ozark spring was its usual frolicking, abandoned self, with an abundance of dandelions to be dug out of the lawn, an exuberance of apple blossom, an enthusiasm of birdsong—all very lovely, if you have the heart for it. I planted nasturtiums; moved the tulips, grape hyacinths, jonquils, and Madonna lilies to the iris bed; and transplanted wildflowers and ferns to the rock garden. Troub and I took the parents on Sunday afternoon drives to Ava and Mountain Grove and Bagnell Dam, which was still under construction. We went to a fiddlers’ contest, saw movies, and told stories in the dark. Mrs. Capper was still cooking for us, and Mama Bess and Papa and Lucille and her husband, Eddie, came for a Sunday leg of lamb or Saturday corned beef and cabbage. I played chess with Troub and bridge with Lucille; had a brief contretemps with my mother and a neighbor, Mrs. Moore, about eavesdropping on my telephone conversations on our party line; attended club meetings; and renewed the note at the bank, paying $108 interest. I worked on a short story, thought about money, and asked myself if this was going to be my life from now on, day after day, year after year, just this. Perhaps, if I could have looked into the future, I might have been glad to have so much.
One dreary afternoon, I walked out through the mud to the mailbox and was heartened to find another of Rexh’s affectionate “Dear Mother” letters. The day seemed suddenly brighter. Still in school at Cambridge, he thanked me for the money I had sent and wrote enthusiastically of his studies and his plans and hopes and dreams. His letter reminded me of how we had found one another on that wild Albanian mountain, back in 1921, and I thought back wistfully to that grand adventure.
In April, in the northern Albania city of Scutari, I had met two American women, Betsy Cleveland and Margaret Alexander. They were going into the mountains to look for locations for new schools. I jumped at their invitation to go along and we set off, across mountains that were meant to be looked at, not walked or ridden on. Our company was made up of two gendarmes armed with Mausers, an interpreter, a pack train of sure-footed donkeys (they had to be, to cross those impassable peaks), and four guides in colorful turbans and sashes. And Rexh, a bright-eyed, capable Moslem boy who wore striped Western pajamas and a red fez and was only a little older than my own son would have been, had he lived.
We traveled for days through a drenching rain. I was wet to the skin, I hadn’t eaten well, and we’d been sleeping in unheated barns. By the time we reached the mountain village of Shala, I was seriously ill. Pneumonia, I thought—I’d had it before. I needed to go back to Scutari. A Shala man was found to guide me, and Rexh volunteered to go along. After a day’s travel on impossibly narrow trails in the rain, Rexh learned that the Shala man was deliberately taking us into dangerous territory, where a Western woman would be an excellent prize for kidnappers. He took charge of the situation, found another, more trustworthy guide and a safer route, and got me safely to Scutari, where he located a doctor for me and a warm, dry bed. His fearless insouciance in the face of dangerous circumstances laid immediate claim to my heart, and over the years he had become a surrogate son, the child I had lost and found again in the blue, snow-crested Dinaric Alps.
I thought now with a shaft of intense longing of those brave, adventuresome days in that wild landscape, the distance measured not in miles but by the time it took to cross the mountain passes and by our meetings with the gentle people who lived as uncounted generations before them had lived, in villages built before men began to remember, two hundred miles and twenty centuries from any life we knew.
“How did you come here?” the villagers would inquire politely. It was a ritual greeting, asked of any traveler.
“Slowly, slowly,” we would answer, which was literally true since we had come over the mountains, where anything faster than a crawl might result in a fatal tumble. “Slowly, slowly, and little by little.”
“Glory to your lips,” they would reply with a deep bow, as if we had said a very wise thing. “It is so.”
The diverging road, the road taken. How had I come here, over what mountains, to Rocky Ridge?
Slowly, slowly. Little by little.
And where I would go from here, I couldn’t know.
Mama Bess had been working on the additions to her book: descriptions of smoking the venison, butchering the pig, and making bullets, as well as spring, summer, and autumn material. The writing was relatively easy for her and pleasant, for she remembered her parents’ work with a nostalgic fondness. We discussed the additions when we were together or by telephone, and she sometimes gave me short sections to read. The first week of May, s
he came over for tea with her material for the last seven chapters of what we now called “Little House in the Woods.”
My rewrite of “Little House” took just a week. The language was simple, the descriptions straightforward, and there was virtually no character development—nothing much for Mama Bess and me to disagree over. I added dialogue and action, smoothed out the sentences and paragraphs, and carved chapters out of her continuous story. She came over twice to read my revisions, and then I packaged the typescript for her to mail to Marion Fiery and typed a cover letter for her to sign.
I wrote a separate note to Marion, letting her know that George Bye had agreed to handle the business details, if the book was acceptable. If the manuscript needed more work, I asked her to write directly to me, since my mother and father were leaving for a long motor trip. I skirted the issue of my involvement with the vague comment that my mother “naturally” had “consulted” me about her writing, and invited her to drop in for a visit if she came out this way.
“We’re only a morning’s ride from St. Louis by train,” I added. “If you come, we’ll go hunting. You’ll be astonished, Marion. There’s nothing like our Ozark foxhunts anywhere on earth.”
My parents’ motor trip was a three-week summer vacation expedition, with Papa driving, Mama Bess navigating, and Nero riding on the Buick’s running board. My mother had taken the train to Dakota when Grandpa Ingalls died in 1902 and to San Francisco in 1915, but this was the first time that she and Papa had gotten away together since they’d settled in Missouri. (It’s hard to leave when there are chickens to feed and cows to milk. Now, of course, they had Jess, the hired man, and the garden and what was left of the chicken flock were both under my charge.) They planned to go to De Smet, then on to the Black Hills to visit my mother’s sister Carrie.
While they were gone, I had the fourth Thomas ghostwriting job to do. Between that job and everything else, it was a difficult month. Mr. Bunting (who ran gaily away every chance he got) developed a terrible eye infection and I took him—on the bus—to a vet in Springfield. Peter, the mongrel pup Troub had adopted, had a canker in his ear. For the second summer in a row, the heat was unrelenting, with the temperature climbing past a hundred, and no rain. The springs dried to a trickle and the garden began to wither for want of water.
The garden wasn’t the only thing that was withering: things weren’t going well between Troub and me. Her income, like mine, had almost completely evaporated. She had been trying to write an adventure story, but she was never diligent for very long and she was making no progress. She was spending most of her day on horseback with Lucille or at the movies with Julia or swimming with Linda, three of her Mansfield friends. I couldn’t go with them because I was working long hours on the Thomas book. I suppose I was jealous of her freedom, and perhaps of her friends. I know I was tired to death and out of patience, and I snapped at her when she went off for the day and left her share of the housework to me.
It’s hard to know now which of us was at fault. Likely both, and it’s certainly true that the searing heat ignited our tempers and made each of us flare up. One evening when I nagged her for coming home late after an outing with Lucille, she announced that I was the only reason she had come to Rocky Ridge and the only reason she stayed. If I didn’t care for her anymore, she intended to leave and go back East.
“But I believe there’s still a chance for us, Rose,” she added, very seriously. “It’s this place that’s turning us inward, making us crazy, both of us. It’s too isolated. We’re too far away from the rest of the world. I want to get out of here. And you have to come with me.”
Troub was right. It was the place that was making us crazy. But while she was free to leave, I wasn’t. If she wanted to get away, all she had to do was get in the car and go. I couldn’t.
It’s hard now to understand why I felt so paralyzed. At the time, I explained it to myself in terms of money, but that couldn’t have been all of it. My parents’ health was relatively stable then. I might have rented out the farmhouse—or let the parents move back to Rocky Ridge and rented out the Rock House. Troub and I might have gone to New York, where we could have rented a cold-water flat and lived very cheaply. I could have finished ghosting the Thomas books and found other work. I could have . . .
But the actual details of our escape somehow evaded me. I couldn’t imagine leaving. I think I must have been simply overwhelmed—by the unforgiving heat, by the worsening economy, by my own deepening depression, by sheer bafflement.
“I can’t,” I said. “I can’t leave.”
“I suppose not,” Troub said sadly. She didn’t leave, either. Not then, anyway. That night, we held one another and cried and went to sit on the garage roof with our cigarettes, watching the fireflies dance across the meadow and listening to the melancholy music of the baying hounds as they ranged the moonlit Ozark hills long into the night in pursuit of their elusive fox. Neither of us spoke again about leaving—not then.
When my parents returned from their free-and-easy vacation with a banal “East, west, home is best,” I thought with a bitter irony of the utter complacency of that threadbare old adage. East, west, anywhere, everywhere seemed better to me than Rocky Ridge. One night I dreamed of telling the parents that Troub and I were leaving the very next day. I was escaping. They could do whatever the hell they liked with the damned houses.
But it was only a dream, and when I woke, I said nothing. I did nothing but plod in place, through the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that.
Marion Fiery’s letter arrived on a September day. It came addressed to me, with an apology for the summer-long delay. The book business was teetering, but Knopf had accepted the revision of Little House in the Woods. I felt a huge flush of relief and, since I was on the way to the Rock House for tea, took the letter with me.
We had tea in the living room, which was bright and pretty. The house had been an enormous project, and I was glad it was done, but I knew it was easier for my parents—especially Papa, who now had much less work to do. He wasn’t idle, of course. He was out in the garage, tinkering.
Mama Bess gave a cry of delight when she read Marion’s letter. “Oh, I’m so glad!” she said, as relieved as I. “When will it be out, do you think? Next month? By the end of the year, surely.”
I shook my head. “Books take time, and there’ll be more work to do on it. We don’t even have a contract yet.” I picked up the teapot and poured us each another cup. “Troub and I want to celebrate. How about dinner on Sunday?”
When George Bye forwarded the contract, there was a surprise, for it covered not one but three books: the first one and options on two more. I had not expected this, given the tenuous economic situation. When I explained what an option was, Mama Bess was astonished, pleased, and apprehensive.
“Another book?” she asked faintly. “But what in the world shall I write about?”
Another book. Two other books. Did I think about what this would require from me, what kind of difficulties we might run into in a continuing collaboration? I didn’t. I only thought how happy I was that my mother was able to see herself as a successful author, that the family stories would be out there in the world for children to read. The idea that she might have her name on the cover of two or perhaps even three was beyond anything I’d dreamed of for her. And with three books, surely there would be some royalty income. Not much, perhaps, but a little.
“You could expand some of the material from ‘Pioneer Girl,’” I suggested. “How about the Indian Territory episode in Kansas?”
She shook her head firmly. “I wasn’t three years old yet, much too young to remember anything but the stories Pa and Ma told about it. I put everything I know about that time in ‘Pioneer Girl,’ which wasn’t much. To fill a book, I’d have to make up a lot. It would be more like fiction, and you know I don’t want to do that.”
That’s where we left
it—until a few days later when she telephoned to tell me what she had decided. “Little House in the Woods is all about me,” she said. “I don’t want your father to feel left out. My next book is going to be all about him—about his life on his father’s farm in New York State. I’m going to call it Farmer Boy.”
I was pleased. I had heard Papa’s stories often and loved them: they were as real to me, and as charming, as Grandpa Ingalls’s tales were to my mother. “You could follow the same scheme we used in Little House,” I said. “Begin with winter and then cover the seasons, spring, summer, and fall. I’m sure Papa will be able to provide plenty of descriptions of the things he remembers. If you can pry them out of him.”
We shared a knowing chuckle. My mother sometimes called my father “the Oyster.” He only talked when he felt like it; the rest of the time he was shut up tight, perhaps the consequence of living with two very talkative women.
“I’ll try,” Mama Bess said. There was a silence on the line. When she spoke again, her voice was determined. “Now, Rose, I need to tell you something, and I don’t want you to argue with me. I liked what you did with my first book. But this time, I mean to do all the writing myself. I’m glad for the help you gave me, but I know I’ve improved a great deal and I don’t want to take any more of your time than necessary. I’ll bring you the pages when I’m finished. All you have to do is type them.”
I knew that wasn’t going to work, but I didn’t argue—not then, anyway. She was eager to get started and I was just as eager to see her writing, if only because it kept her from dropping in for endless gossip and cups of tea. I wrote to George Bye to thank him for taking the time to work with the Knopf contract. I didn’t expect his ten percent of the royalties to amount to much—hardly enough, I was afraid, to offset the bookkeeping cost. He had stopped sending out “Pioneer Girl.” That project, it seemed, was dead.
A Wilder Rose: A Novel Page 11