But I had come up with an idea. The previous October, when I was in New York, Thomas Costain, the fiction editor of the Saturday Evening Post, had rejected my mother’s “Pioneer Girl.” But he had told me that he would like to see my father’s story.
“I don’t necessarily mean your father,” he had said thoughtfully, filling his pipe with tobacco. “But a man’s story. Pioneer life, the farming life—it must have been hard. Had to be a test of a man’s courage, his endurance, his physical stamina. I’d like to see what you’d do with that, Mrs. Lane.”
I had once told Troub that I had heard pioneer stories all my life, and while I readily admitted their admirable qualities, they didn’t particularly interest me. But a writer who ignores an editor’s expressed preference for a particular kind of story is missing a chance. And working with my mother’s material had made our family’s pioneer experience much more real and compelling to me. It had given me something to think about.
The next day, October 7, I walked over to the Rock House for tea and told my mother I was thinking of using some of the elements from “Pioneer Girl” as the basis for a magazine serial. A newly married young couple homesteading in the Dakotas, the grasshoppers eating the wheat crop, the young husband walking back East to find work, the young wife staying on the claim with their baby through a long, hard winter, like the winter of 1881. Would she object?
“Why should I?” she replied. “Those are family stories—you’ve heard them all your life. And, of course, you’ll change everything up so much that all the truth will be cut out of it.”
Then she changed the subject, telling me at length what people were saying about a friend’s daughter who had been seen smoking in public on a Mansfield street.
“It makes a girl seem tough,” she remarked regretfully, taking great care not to look at my cigarette. I finished my tea and left, contemplating what I might become in twice ten years if I stayed in this place.
When I got home, I sat down at the typewriter, lit another cigarette, and typed the word “Courage” at the top of the page. My new story. I gave the characters the names of my Ingalls grandparents, Charles and Caroline. Using their names was a way to honor their bravery and to anchor my fiction in their reality. I was glad to be working again.
The cooler autumn weather had come, which was a relief. Troub was more content. My mother was still celebrating the sale of her book, and I was delighted when George Bye placed two of my stories with Good Housekeeping and Ladies’ Home Journal. What’s more, I had succeeded in wringing another five hundred dollars out of Lowell Thomas.
But our rejoicing was abruptly cut short in early November. I was hanging the new living-room draperies I had made—I had chosen a neutral beige because we had other lively colors in the room—when the mail arrived. Among the bills was a handwritten letter to me from Marion Fiery.
I dropped what I was doing and sat down to read, with mounting consternation. Knopf had been pinched by a drop in bookstore sales. It was closing its children’s department and letting Marion go. Her work would be done by a secretary, which meant that my mother’s book would be published on the adult list with no editor to watch over it. Marion wrote that she was heartbroken. But luckily, my mother hadn’t yet signed the contract. Marion suggested that Mama Bess hold off and ask George Bye to offer the book elsewhere.
Offer the book elsewhere? But where? Every publisher was in the same leaky boat, in danger of sinking. Rereading the letter, I felt that the bottom had just dropped out of everything.
I wrote my thanks to Marion and wished her well in her job search. Then, to gain time, I wired Knopf in Mama Bess’s name, saying that the contract was unsatisfactory and that she wouldn’t be signing it. Then I telephoned my mother to give her the news.
She was utterly distraught at what I had done. “But I want to sign the contract!” she wailed. “I’d rather see Knopf publish the book than not to have it published at all. I don’t care about the royalties.”
“You don’t want your book published without an editor to look after it,” I said firmly. “I hate to ask George Bye to send it around—it’s more work for him, and he has no connections in the juvenile market. I’ve asked Marion Fiery whether she knows another children’s editor who might be interested in it.” I’d had to phrase that very carefully in my letter since it’s terribly improper for an editor at one house to slip a book to an editor at another house, especially a book on which a contract has already been written.
“And while we’re shilly-shallying, Knopf may decide they don’t want it,” my mother said frostily and put down the receiver, hard. Before I hung up, I heard a dry cough on the line. Mrs. Moore, two houses down the road toward town, was listening in again. I wondered what she made of the conversation—and how long it would take her to begin spreading the news that Mrs. Wilder and her daughter were having an argument about Mrs. Wilder’s book (which Mrs. Lane was trying to keep from being published) and that Mrs. Wilder had hung up on Mrs. Lane. Five minutes, maybe?
Then one chilly, rainy afternoon not long after, Troub brought in the mail. I had a pot of bean soup on the stove, and Lucille and I were playing chess in front of the fire. In the stack of mail—mostly bills and second notices of payments due—was a letter from George Palmer addressed to Troub. She opened it, read it, then handed it to me and went to sit on the sofa, white-faced and dumbstruck.
I took the letter from her and scanned it. Palmer had somehow managed to keep his stock brokerage firm afloat since the crash, promising his clients that their losses could still be recouped when the market recovered. Now, he was writing to announce that he was bankrupt. Everything, all the stock that Troub and I owned, even Troub’s small inheritance—every cent was gone.
“It’s over,” Troub whispered. She bent over, clasping her arms around her knees, and rocked back and forth. “It’s all over, Rose. There’s no hope.”
It had been over for a long time, but Troub, always looking on the bright side, hadn’t wanted to confront the truth. Now she had to. I went to her, but there was nothing to say. I could only hold her until she had stopped shaking.
Hoping we’d tell her what was going on, Lucille stayed for a soup-and-sandwich supper and two more games of chess, while Troub and I tried to pretend that nothing had happened. Finally, she gave up and left, and we took our cups of evening hot chocolate and sat down in front of the fire, Sparkle and Mr. Bunting asleep on the rug at our feet.
I reread the letter. It seemed that Mama Bess’s money might still be safe—part of it, anyway—but both my account and Troub’s were definitely gone.
By this time, Troub had recovered enough from the initial shock of the news to be gloomily matter-of-fact. “I don’t have a penny to my name,” she said. “I need to make some money, fast. I could stay here and write. If I kept at it, I’m sure I could sell enough short fiction to pay my share of the bills. Or I could go back East and look for a nursing job. I could stay with Dad for a while, I guess.” She paused, tilting her head and wrinkling her nose the way she always did. “What do you think, Rose?”
I already knew what I had to say. Troub had been trying to settle down to writing for months and hadn’t produced more than a dozen pages. Ironically, her inheritance had kept her from being a writer. Now that it was gone and she had to take her writing seriously, she might make a success of it. There was no way to know.
But while we had partly repaired our frayed relationship, I knew it was time to let each other go. It was as if we were both in the water, floundering, and each of us had grabbed hold of one end of a rope—the same rope. Neither of us had the strength to offer the other help.
Still, Troub was Troub: she wanted me to tell her what to do.
“I think you’d be in greater demand as a nurse than as a writer,” I said, speaking as honestly as I could. “At least, right away. You should probably take the Buick and go back East while I still have the
money to buy the gas. If you want to sell the car, you can apply my share of whatever you get to what I still owe you for the house loan.” It was about twenty-eight hundred dollars, I thought. I softened my voice. “You can always come back, you know, when things get better. And they will.”
I didn’t believe that, somehow—that things would get better. Or that she would come back. But I had to say it.
She stared into the fire, where a log shifted and sparks flared up the chimney. After a moment, she turned back to me with a smile that trembled at the corners of her mouth.
“Of course I’ll come back,” she said brightly, blinking back the tears. “Whenever I can. And when you come East, Rose, you can stay with me. By that time, I’ll have a job and an apartment. We can do the shows together—it’ll be great fun.” She paused, watching me. “And maybe you will decide to stay. Just . . . stay with me.”
“That will be grand,” I said, around the lump in my throat. “Let’s do plan on it, Troub.”
But we both knew we wouldn’t. We’d had nearly seven years together, most of them good years, interesting, exciting years. We had shared experiences, expenses, travels. We had cared for one another in all the ways we knew how, in all the ways that mattered. But we had never laid any claim to one another, we hadn’t clung, we hadn’t clutched. We had prided ourselves on enjoying each other, without obligation. And now that we had reached the end, neither of us gave way to tears—not then, anyway.
The uncertain situation with my mother’s book was resolved in another week in a much more satisfactory way. Mama Bess (citing the “bird in the hand” adage) was still angry with me for canceling her arrangement with Knopf. But on Thanksgiving Day, in the midst of our first big snowstorm of the season, she and Papa joined Troub and me at Rocky Ridge for a holiday dinner—roast turkey and stuffing, baked sweet potatoes, home-canned green beans, pumpkin pie, and cider.
We were just sitting down to eat when Mr. Roper, who delivered for Western Union, drove up the snowy hill from town, bringing a telegram addressed to Mama Bess from Marion Fiery. I took it from him at the door and opened it, feeling that it must be bad news and I needed to know it first, so I could soften the blow. But when I had read it, I closed it again and took it to Mama Bess. She tore it open, read it, and burst into tears.
Virginia Kirkus, the children’s editor at Harper & Brothers, had agreed to take my mother’s book.
“Thank God,” I breathed.
“That’s grand!” Troub exulted, with a grin that nearly split her face. She raised her glass of cider to Mama Bess and to me. “Congratulations, you two!”
I raised my own glass. “Congratulations, Mama Bess.”
And even Papa joined in. “Good job, Bessie,” he said heartily. “Didn’t think for a while there that it was going to happen.”
“All’s well that ends well,” my mother sighed, and wiped her eyes.
We learned later that this happy turn of events was the work of Marion Fiery herself. In an unusual move, she had asked Virginia Kirkus to tea at the Biltmore on a Friday afternoon. She gave her the manuscript and the weekend—just two days—to decide whether she wanted it. On Monday, Miss Kirkus let Marion know that she would recommend the book—which would be retitled Little House in the Big Woods—for the spring list at Harper. Two weeks later, Mama Bess received Miss Kirkus’s letter of acceptance and the contract, which included the two-book option. Ten days after that, another letter came, announcing that the Junior Literary Guild had chosen Little House as its April selection and announcing a prize of $315. I was surprised and enormously cheered. Mama Bess was thrilled by this unexpected recognition. We could breathe easily again.
Troub left one gray, chilly morning in early December. Bunty and I stood on the porch and watched her drive away with Sparkle on the front seat beside her, the Buick crammed with her belongings. Shivering, bereft, I picked up Bunting and held him tight against me, then went into the empty house, where the silence rang in my ears. In two days, it would be my birthday. I had been thirty-eight when Troub and I had begun our journey together. Now I was forty-five. The roads had diverged again. She had taken one of them, going on without me. I had stayed behind.
I got a wire from Troub four days later, letting me know that she had arrived safely and that the Palmer account in which my mother had invested—on my advice—had indeed been closed. I told Mama Bess on the way to the bridge club meeting at Mrs. Kerry’s that evening.
“I’m truly sorry,” I said as we got out of the car. “It’s all my fault, every bit of it. If I hadn’t encouraged you to invest with Palmer, you’d still have the money.”
“Well, of course, it’s too bad,” she said in a philosophical tone as we walked to the Kerrys’ house. Snowflakes had been falling all evening and the path was icy. She took my arm. “But it’s not your fault, you know, Rose. And it doesn’t do to cry over spilt milk. Least said, soonest mended, you know.” She lifted her chin. “Anyway, there will be some royalties coming from my Little House, don’t you think?”
Hearing her, seeing how brave she was, I felt as I had when I was not yet three years old, watching our little prairie house burn to the ground, knowing that I had caused the fire.
PART THREE
CHAPTER NINE
King Street: April 1939
“But you hadn’t really caused it, had you?” Norma Lee asked. “The fire, I mean.” She pulled the hoe toward her, making a shallow furrow in the freshly turned earth of the garden, along the length of string that marked the thirty-foot row. From the house came the sound of Russell’s handsaw. He was upstairs this morning, working on Mrs. Lane’s bookshelves. “You were so young when it happened,” she added. “Surely such a young child could not possibly remember—”
“I have an excellent memory,” Mrs. Lane broke in sharply. She bent over the furrow, dropping the dry, wrinkled seeds of the peas at two-inch intervals.
“I’m sorry,” Norma Lee said hastily. “I didn’t mean—”
“Of course you did.” Mrs. Lane straightened, pushing up the sleeves of her old green sweater, bulky over the blue cotton housedress and rickrack-trimmed apron she was wearing. Her voice softened. “I can remember far back into my childhood. You’ve seen the picture of me on the walnut dresser upstairs? It was taken when I was very young. I remember that the photographer kept putting my right hand on top of my left, and I kept putting my left hand back because I was wearing my carnelian ring. Aunt Grace gave it to me. I wanted to show it off.” She dropped the last pea, slipped the seed packet into the pocket of her apron, and straightened up. “There. You cover that row and I’ll mark the next.”
Norma Lee plied the hoe, pulling the soil over the seeds. “Another battle of wills. You defeated that photographer, I noticed.” She chuckled. “I saw the ring in the picture. It’s pretty.”
“Yes, I defeated him.” Mrs. Lane pulled up the stick that was fastened to one end of the string and moved it a foot to the left to mark the new row. “I remember how good that little victory felt, too. But that’s not my point, Norma Lee. The point is that I remember the day that photograph was taken. The fire was just a few months later. I remember that, too, very well. And I remember making it happen. I opened the stove door and shoved in too much slough hay. It flamed up and fell on the floor and we lost our house and all that we owned.” Her voice dropped. “Because of me. My fault.”
“But it was an accident,” Norma Lee protested. “And you were a little child. You didn’t mean—”
“No, I didn’t. But actions—intentional or not—have consequences, and we have to live with them.” Mrs. Lane walked to the other end of the row and moved the second stick, pulling the string taut. “It was not long after my baby brother died, and my mother was still in bed that morning. I intended to help her. Instead, I burned down our house. We lived in my father’s shanty for a while after that, but for my parents, it was the last straw.”
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br /> Norma Lee stared at her for a moment, thinking that—whether Mrs. Lane’s story was based on actual fact or was the product of a child’s dramatic and troubled imagination—she had just learned the motive behind the building of the Rock House, and behind the books, too, perhaps.
“I am so sorry,” she said softly. “Calamity upon calamity.”
“Those were hard times,” Mrs. Lane agreed in a matter-of-fact way. “I was just a small child, but I remember how my parents suffered. There were prairie fires and drought and the crops failed and my baby brother died. Hard times.” She pointed at the stick that marked the end of the new row. “You start there with the hoe, Norma Lee, and I’ll plant behind you.”
Norma Lee began making a furrow. “And then?” she prompted.
“It was hard, but we came through. People do, you know, if they have heart. If they have courage. ‘One man with courage makes a majority,’ Thomas Jefferson said. I had to write that over and over in my penmanship book in Miss Barrows’s class in De Smet, along with ‘Sweet are the uses of adversity.’ Both of them are engraved on my spirit.”
Norma Lee thought of her own childhood. In spite of the Depression, her father had steady work on the railroad, which allowed her mother to hire a girl who came in every day to scrub the floors and do the wash and another to cook the meals, so that she and her sister had never had to do any sort of housework. There had not been much adversity. Did that mean that she—and her mother and father—possessed less courage? There was a stretch of silence as she finished opening the furrow and Mrs. Lane began dropping in the seeds.
“I’ve never been captured by the myth that the prairie was somehow the Garden of Eden,” Mrs. Lane went on. “You know, Emerson and Thoreau’s idea that the wilderness was the book of God. I suppose there’s some virtue in the idea that fallen man can redeem himself and the wilderness through his hard labor. But it’s also a hellish project, and the government made it worse with the Homestead Act. I saw that early in my life, when my parents were trying to survive on three hundred and twenty acres of so-called free land, struggling against the weather to make a crop.”
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