A Wilder Rose: A Novel (15 page)

CHAPTER TEN

Let the Hurricane Roar
: 1932

My mother always joked that she could never get used to knocking on her own kitchen door, the one she had used for decades. So when I came into the kitchen that March morning and found her making tea, I wasn’t surprised.

“I’ve brought something for you,” she said, gesturing to the package on the table. It was addressed to her and had been opened. “Miss Kirkus’s letter says that these are the copyedited pages for
Little House
. I have two weeks to correct them.” She sat down at the kitchen table, frowning anxiously. “But I don’t know what to do. There are all these strange little marks in the margins, squiggles and things.” She pulled out a page to show me. “What do these
mean,
Rose?”

I sighed. I could tell her to look in the front of the dictionary, where she would find a page of proofreader’s marks, and then I could stand by to answer her many questions. Or I could—

“If you want, I’ll do it,” I said. “I’m used to working with copy editors.”

And that’s how I added my mother’s book to my already long to-do list for the first few months of 1932.

I was already working on two books for Lowell Thomas, both of which were a struggle. Getting Thomas to pay up proved to be a struggle, too, an ongoing one. I vowed not to write for him again unless my parents and I were starving—and since we had the garden, the chickens, and the cows, that wasn’t likely to happen. I had also managed to write three stories. George Bye sold two fairly quickly, one to the
Saturday Evening Post
, my first sale there
.
I was disappointed in the price, only seven hundred and fifty dollars, when I was expecting a thousand dollars.

“Skinflints,” I complained to George about the
Post
. But he replied that seven hundred and fifty dollars was the best he could do, under the circumstances. “This is an awfully dark hour,” he lamented. “Everybody’s feeling it.”

An awfully dark hour—and dark days, dark weeks, dark months.

I followed the international news with alarm. Early in the year, Japan invaded China and took control of Manchuria, and Lowell Thomas let me know that the Singapore trip he had proposed was cancelled. I had been in Berlin during the doomed days of the Weimar Republic and witnessed the flood of inflated currency that drowned that government. Now, in Germany, six million were unemployed and the Nazi Party controlled the Reichstag. I was in Albania when Mussolini took aim at that defenseless country. Now, he was raising his Fascist fist everywhere, and no one—not even the pope—dared oppose him.

The national news was grim, too. On the first of March, Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s baby was kidnapped from his crib, and although Colonel Lindbergh paid a ransom, the child—chubby and winsome, another lost little boy—was found dead two months later. Heartsick, I followed the tragic story in the newspapers, but it was only one of a rash of kidnappings-for-ransom and robberies. Everywhere, armed gangs robbed banks at will. Even the local Bank of Mansfield had been hit. The lone bandit forced five employees into the bank vault at gunpoint and made off with as much cash as he could carry in his hat. Although the
Mirror
didn’t specify what kind of hat he was wearing, my father said it likely didn’t hold more than a couple of hundred dollars. Now, the townspeople bolted their doors and scrutinized every stranger walking down the street—especially, Papa joked, those with hats.

And then, in the late spring and early summer, the newspapers were full of the Bonus Army. Twenty thousand destitute former soldiers and their families converged on Washington to demand the bonuses that Congress had already promised them for their military service. They were violently evicted by federal troops under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, Major George S. Patton, and Major Dwight D. Eisenhower. MacArthur dispatched troops to Anacostia Flats, where they fired tear gas on the occupiers. Their makeshift Hooverville of combustible shacks, tents, and cardboard-box dwellings caught fire—some said that MacArthur had ordered it torched. Two babies died, and the hospitals were filled with casualties. All over the country, the people’s hearts were with the veterans, most of whom were unemployed. Herbert Hoover’s hopes for a second term, if he had any, went up in flames with the veterans’ Hooverville.

And to make a bad year much worse, the weather was simply unendurable. After the warmest U.S. winter on record, spring tornadoes raked the South, killing hundreds, injuring thousands. In the Midwest—and at Rocky Ridge—the warm spring turned into a summer of record-breaking heat and heartbreaking drought. Weeks of hundred-degree days dried up the crops that the grasshoppers didn’t get, and dust storms began to boil across the sky. The ruthless, implacable weather accentuated people’s sense of utter powerlessness against iron-fisted dictators, lawless thugs, a ruthless military—and nature.

But George Bye was thinking about the publishing business when he made that remark about a dark hour. I heard from my writer friends that the publishing houses had cut their lists by half, the magazines simply weren’t buying, and even the best writers were in trouble. William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell took jobs as scriptwriters in Hollywood. Mary Margaret wrote that she had found some work as what she cheerfully called a “demi-ghost”: she received byline credit for “as-told-to” articles about people like Prince Christopher of Greece and philanthropist Marion Tully. The work, when she was able to get it, paid good money. But her roommate Stella lost her job as a publicist, and they had to give up their beautiful apartment and move into a hotel.

I replied, commiserating, and added that I had five stories out, as good as anything else I had published, and not a sale in sight. “I try to put on a brave front,” I wrote. “I am my blithe, gay self—on the outside. But I will confess to you (because you’re a freelance writer and will understand) that down in my gut I am scared. Really, truly scared.”

“Of course you’re scared. We’re all scared,” Mary Margaret replied. “New York is a kind of Jericho for journalists and writers these day.” And with the wry humor that would make her a famous radio-show host by the end of the decade, she added, “All we have to do, you know, is remain invincible.”

I muttered that to myself in the darkest hours. If I’d had a Spencerian copybook, I would have written it more than a hundred times, two hundred, three hundred.
All we have to do is remain invincible
—which assumed, of course, that we had been invincible in the first place. Which I was beginning to doubt.

But here at the farm, we were lucky. We had food and roofs over our heads when many had neither. But the news that was reported morning and evening on the radio was a funereal litany, one doom after another. So I played dance records on the Victrola and worked on jigsaw puzzles to convince myself that I was in control of
something
. The large farmhouse was empty and resoundingly silent without Troub, whose gay chatter had always filled the days with a distracting but comforting music and whose casual constancy had made a place for itself in my heart. She wrote cheerfully that she missed me but that she had found a good-paying job as a private-duty nurse, and asked me to mail her nurse’s cape. A few days later, she sent a box of oranges, grapefruit, kumquats, and tangerines, with her love. The fruit arrived prepaid express, and a good thing, too. I had just paid the monthly bills and wired money to Rexh for his Cambridge expenses and didn’t have a penny.

I shared the fruit with my mother, who had gotten in the habit of dropping in three or four times a week, for breakfast, tea, or supper (with my father), or for the evening. I liked the evening visits best, and when summer came, the three of us sat out on the screened porch in the long twilight, sharing remembered stories, enjoying the darting fireflies and the evening birds. The morning and afternoon visits interrupted my work, but I knew she was lonely. She made no secret of the fact that she felt Rocky Ridge was more enjoyable now that Troub was gone, and she came, eagerly, laden with local gossip and scraps of her writing to read aloud.

But as time went on, someone else joined us. Lucille Murphy began dropping in to play chess with me or work jigsaw puzzles. She sometimes stayed overnight, too, especially when her husband, Eddie (quite a loudmouthed boor, I thought, and felt sorry for her), went foxhunting with his friends. Mama Bess had managed to tolerate Troub, but something about Lucille—perhaps it was her gusto—seemed to offend her sense of decorum.

Lucille was a plump, pretty blonde, earthy and robust, with the common-sense manner of someone who has grown up around working people. She had initially been Troub’s friend more than mine, and she and Troub had often gone riding together. But I quickly came to enjoy her easy company, her lack of pretension, her scorn for pretenders and stuffed shirts, and her appreciation of the absurdities of small-town morality. She’d had a year at the University of Missouri and liked to read. I shared my newspapers and magazines with her, and she was always ready to discuss current affairs and politics.

But best of all, Lucille pulled me out of my unhappy stewing about things and made me laugh. She was far more willing than Troub to pitch in when there were peas to pick or floors to be swept, and she genuinely liked to cook. She enjoyed needlework, too, and we started a hooked rug for the living room, working on it together whenever she came over.

It was a spring and summer of illnesses. One morning, Mama Bess phoned me in a sheer panic, crying that there was a fire and the barns were burning. I ran straight over to the Rock House, yes, ran all the way. But there were no barns and no fires anywhere—hallucinations, Dr. Fuson told me in confidence, although he couldn’t say what caused them. Around the same time, Papa caught a bad cold and was in bed for days, and his crippled foot became extraordinarily painful. Mrs. Capper still came in to cook and clean five days a week, but she was always limping around and muttering about her bad leg, which would one day be one leg, the next day the other. I wanted to let her go, but I felt sorry for her, and when she begged to stay on I gave in, although I couldn’t really afford the expense of her salary.

And then sweet Mr. Bunting—whom I couldn’t keep at home, short of shutting him in the house—came down with the mange. It made the poor little dog miserable and whiny and required multiple visits from the local vet. As for myself, I was miserable and whiny, too. I had the flu, my teeth were in awful shape, and I was suffering from an off-and-on depression.

But despite everything, I managed to sit down at the typewriter almost every day. I was working concurrently on the two ghostwriting jobs, switching from one to the other as Lowell Thomas mailed me material. Then, one gray afternoon when I was wearily slogging through yet another bewildering chapter, my mother brought me her second book,
Farmer Boy
.

It was cold that day, only twenty degrees above zero, too cold to work on the upstairs porch. Swathed in sweaters, with an afghan over my knees, I had brought my typewriter to the dining room, where the oil burner kept the floor warm enough so my feet didn’t freeze. My mother took off her hat and coat, put the stack of orange-covered tablets at one end of the table, and went to get teacups out of the cupboard. After pouring hot water over the tea in the cups, she turned to me.

“I am sure I’ve improved an awful lot since I wrote ‘Pioneer Girl,
’”
she said casually, “so I don’t think you’ll have to do anything much to this book. Of course, I’d be glad if you would fix up my spelling and punctuation where you see a mistake. But I just want you to type it, that’s all. Please, no other changes.”

I stirred sugar into my tea. “I’m sure you’ve improved a great deal, Mama Bess,” I said cautiously, “but I do hope you’ll let me use my—”

“No.” She sat down at the table. “Please just type it, Rose. I want you to get back to your own work. Your writing will earn much more money than mine, and the time you spend on my stuff will only slow you down. I don’t want to be a burden.”

I started to protest. But she raised her hand.

“Let’s don’t argue about this, dear. I don’t want to have to depend on you.” Her voice was sweet, but very firm. “I want to stand on my own as a writer. I want
Farmer Boy
to be my book.”

We were teetering on the brink of that old conflict, and I stepped warily away. I was too weary and dispirited to engage in another battle of wills, and I genuinely didn’t want to upset her. And she could be excused for feeling confident about
Farmer Boy
. Just a few days before, bubbling with excitement, she had called to tell me that she had just received a check for $315 from the Junior Literary Guild. It was a sizeable amount, and she saw the money as an affirmation of her skill as a writer. I couldn’t bear to bring her down to earth. And if I tried, she simply wouldn’t believe me. I was still her little girl. She was my mother. And Mother always knew best.

But when I began to work on her manuscript, I saw how serious the problems were. We had talked about setting the book within the four seasons of the farm year, and she had done that. But there was too much extraneous material, often delivered in indigestible chunks of expository prose. Instead of advancing the action or defining the characters, the anecdotes stopped any forward movement and had nothing at all to do with characterization. Some of the material—a schoolmaster beating a boy with a buggy whip—wasn’t appropriate for children. And the settings—well, they just didn’t seem
real.
I understood why: my father had no great powers of description and my mother had never visited upper New York State. She grew up on a treeless prairie. She had no idea what the Wilder farm and its surrounding landscapes looked like, still less how they had looked some sixty years ago.
Farmer Boy
was supposed to be a book about a boy growing up on a farm, but it lacked any real sense of the land.

Whenever she came over for breakfast or tea, I tried to show her the problems, but each time she refused to listen. I tried on the telephone, too. Once I even got as far as saying, “Mama Bess, I really like the stories you’ve put into
Farmer Boy
and the loving way you depict the Wilder family. But this story at the very beginning, about the schoolmaster—”