A Wilder Rose: A Novel (25 page)

I was startled. Giving up my freedom? I hadn’t thought of it that way at all. But from one point of view, it was true. The magazine market was loosening up, and
Hurricane
was doing much better. I could count on selling my work. I could leave the farm. I could move back to New York. I could—

But I couldn’t. Not yet. I understood why it might seem to Dawn as if I were yielding my freedom to provide a home for John. But I wasn’t, not really. I was choosing,
freely
, to commit my time, my work, my attention, my life-energy to the boy. In choosing, I was exercising my freedom. I was not obligated or compelled by any force outside myself to accept responsibility for John. And in some ways, at that moment, realizing that I had freely chosen him made him even more precious to me.

“He
is
my son,” I said, thinking of what the boy had said in the hotel room in Havana. “In all the ways that matter.”

There was a long pause. “I had a child,” Dawn said, so softly that I could scarcely hear her. “A baby girl, last year. She was born when we were in England. She died.”

My heart opened to her. “I’m so sorry, Dawn. I lost a child, too. A little boy, at birth. He would have been twenty-four this year.”

Another pause. “Do you . . . do you ever get over it?”

I could hear the hurt. “No, never. But you learn to live with the loss. And even to welcome the flicker of pain, when it comes. You feel it—you know what it is. The pain makes you real, somehow.”

She nodded doubtfully. “I suppose that’s why the boy. John, I mean.”

I thought of a dark-haired youngster with bright eyes and a dirty red fez. “Two boys,” I said. “Two sons. My oldest is Albanian. He graduated from Cambridge two years ago and is back home in Tirana. I worry about him, with Mussolini just over his horizon.”

“Cambridge,” she said in surprise. “Did you do that?”

I smiled. “He’s very bright.
He
did it. I only helped.”

“Mussolini,” Dawn mused. “I can see why you’re worried.” She smiled pensively. “Two sons. Two adopted sons. Lucky boys.”

Talbot came to the door of the cottage with a glass in his hand. “Bar’s open,” he called. “Either of you ladies want something to drink?”

“Gin and tonic, please, dear,” Dawn said, and pushed herself out of the hammock.

Two sons. I didn’t know it yet, but by the end of the year, there would be three.

The weather had already changed when I got back to Missouri. It was the end of August and cooler, and that week a long, soaking rain broke the drought. I got a letter from George Bye, letting me know that George Lorimer, at the
Post
, had liked “Object Matrimony” so much that he had decided to raise my rates. Bye’s letter enclosed a check for an additional two hundred and seventy dollars, bringing the full payment for the story to twelve hundred dollars. I was now among the
Post
’s best-paid writers. I spent the extra money, along with a trade-in of the Willys-Knight, on a secondhand Nash.

School was starting, and the last four months of 1934 were busy, mostly with family. Lucille proposed that she and Eddie—who was still managing the laundry in town—let their apartment go and stay at the farm. In return for their board and room, she could do the cooking and cleaning and Eddie, who was handy with tools, could lend a hand with outdoor work on weekends. That way, they might even be able to save a little money, so that when things got better, they could buy their own place. I didn’t much like the idea of having Eddie around all the time. But he
was
good with tools and a paintbrush. I could see advantages on both sides, so I said yes—although, as it turned out, Eddie wasn’t a very willing worker.

John, now a sophomore, had made the Mansfield High basketball squad, so we were scheduling supper around practice and games. He had been with me for a full year now, and we were getting along reasonably well, although he still bridled when I spoke to him about his carelessness with money and clothes and the English language. I had hired Jess to build a new garage to replace the one that had burned—at sixty dollars, it was a bargain. John was sleeping out there, and his brother, Al, was coming up from Ava on weekends. The garage became “the bunkhouse,” a place where the boys could make all the noise they liked.

Late in October, we planned a Halloween costume party for John. Al was invited, and Lucille and I contrived ghost costumes for the two boys. The day after the party, Al came into the kitchen, alone, to talk to me. He was a gangly boy, not quite a year older than John but also a sophomore, with brown hair and eyes and a heavy smattering of freckles.

He came straight to the point. “Mrs. Lane, I’d like to come here and live.” Then, as an afterthought, he added, “Please.”

I was rolling out a crust for a cherry pie. I stared at him in some surprise. “I thought you liked living with your uncle. And you’re doing well at Ava High, aren’t you?”

He nodded diffidently. “It’s just . . . well, I like being with John. And Mansfield is a bigger town—there’s more to do here. And my uncle’s wife—” He swallowed and dropped his eyes. “Well, that’s the big thing, I guess. It’s been better since John left, but she’s never much liked me, either. She’d be glad to see me gone. And my uncle, too. I’m kind of like a burr under her saddle, and he’s the one who gets all the complaints.” He raised his brown eyes to mine and I could see the hurt in them. “I feel like . . . well, sort of pushy, asking you this, and I’ll understand if you say no. But I’d be really grateful if you could manage to make room for me here.”

For the first time, I looked closely at the boy. His hair was badly cut; his bony wrists were sticking out of his too-short sleeves; the knees of his pants were patched; his shoes were worn. It occurred to me that his uncle wasn’t making a very substantial investment in him—say what you will, clothes are important to youngsters. I ought to know: when I was a child, the other girls judged me (and I judged myself) by their satin-trimmed dresses and patent-leather shoes.

“I’ll be glad to work for my board and room,” he added earnestly. “I can do a lot to help around here, Mrs. Lane—stuff like cutting the grass, doing the milking, working in the garden, scrubbing the floors. I could go over to the Rock House and help your folks out, too.” He gave me a lopsided grin. “And what do you want to bet that I could keep John at his chores? All that kid needs most times is a little shove in the right direction. Why, with the two of us, you won’t have to pay Jess to do stuff.”

My first impulse was to say yes. I liked Al, and I felt he would be a settling influence for John. But I hesitated. It was hard enough to find the money for John. I didn’t think I could afford to feed two teenaged boys and keep them in clothes and allowances, no matter how much work they did around the place.

I picked up the rolling pin. “I understand why you’re asking, Al, and I’d like to do it if I could.” It was best to be honest with him. “But money is a problem. I’ll have to think about it.” I went back to my piecrust. “I’ll discuss it with your uncle. He might not be as willing as you think.”

He gave me a hopeful look. “Thanks,” he said. “It would be really swell if we could work it out.”

Perhaps for his own reasons, John wasn’t enthusiastic. “I don’t understand why you want to do this,” he said darkly. “You don’t know anything about Al. You don’t know much about me, either.”

I thought of the many small secrets that sixteen-year-olds hold in their hearts and nodded. “I’m sure I don’t,” I said.

My mother was even less enthusiastic. “You’ve already got your hands full with the one boy, Rose.” She frowned. “I don’t see why in the world you would want to take on his brother. It’s not as if you have any obligation.”

Why? Because I thought Al could use a little help, that’s why. Because even a little boost might make a big difference in his life. But money was still an issue. And then George Bye sent me another royalty check from
Hurricane
,
and that decided me. I discussed the details with the boys’ uncle Jerry, agreeing to support Al until he finished high school. Then I told the boys that I would be glad to have Al live with us, and early in November, he moved in. My third son.

In one way, Al’s coming made things easier, for John liked having his brother with him. With their books and guitars and Victrola records and the radio they were building from a kit, the two boys were good company for one another. Al was even-tempered and easier to get along with than John, did his chores willingly and promptly, and made good grades in school. Lucille and the boys liked one another—she was the understanding “big sister” to whom they could take their troubles—and she was usually available to help. The boys had big appetites, and between the two of us, Lucille and I baked dozens of pies and numerous batches of cookies and gingerbread, and washed thousands of dishes. I was elbow-deep in domesticity.

And at the same time, there were encouraging possibilities for my work. Crane Wilbur, a noted playwright and film director, wrote to me about the dramatic rights to “Hired Girl.” The story had been a winning short-short in the 1933 O. Henry Award competition, and he thought it would make a “bang-up” play. It was agreed that the play would be staged by the West Coast Theater Guild—although it wasn’t, in the end, because the funding fell through. George Bye was attempting to negotiate a deal with 20th Century Fox for the movie rights to
Hurricane
, but he kept running into snags. The grasshopper plague, for instance, which seemed somehow difficult for the producers to imagine on-screen.

“Oh, come, now,” I wrote sarcastically to George. “I can’t believe that the Grand Masters of Illusion are incapable of creating a fake cloud of winged insects—or of hiring actors who can register sufficient terror and trepidation to convince an audience that they are being overrun by grasshoppers.” If that was beyond their competence, I added, they could film the damn thing as a musical.

And by the end of 1934, I was daring to be hopeful. A year before, I wouldn’t have imagined that the house would be full-to-bursting with family, my life measured by the needs and demands of two adolescent boys, my mother’s books doing surprisingly well in the juvenile market, my own work moving back toward the place where it had been before the crash.

And I was thinking of another book. A couple of years before, I had suggested to Talbot Mundy that he collect his novellas into a longer novel. Now I began to plan the same thing. I would gather eight or nine of the published short stories I had written over the past few years and add a preface that would establish a context for the linked stories. The stories I chose had a recurring cast of characters and were set in a typical small town around the turn of the century. I was calling it “Old Home Town
.
” I didn’t give the town itself a name: I meant it to be everyone’s hometown. It was certainly mine.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Escape and
Old Home Town
: 1935

The year 1935 was like a jigsaw puzzle. Everything I had put together flew apart, the way a puzzle does when you drop it. When it was reassembled, the picture looked very different.

To put it another way: in 1935, I left the farm and my mother and stepped forward into the rest of my life.

The gloomy dark of winter always seems to send my spirits plummeting, and I find myself longing for sunshine and warm breezes. That year, winter dragged on and on, with bitter winds and leaden gray skies roofing a world of frozen mud and brittle trees. There was almost no snow, but we were hit by several ice storms that knocked the power out. Even with the furnace, it was hard to keep the old farmhouse warm, especially upstairs, where I was working. Downstairs, the pipes froze and burst.

The winter was too cold for the boys to sleep in the garage, so they were both sleeping in the upstairs room that had been Troub’s. Lucille and Eddie were staying at Rocky Ridge, too, in the downstairs bedroom, so the house was crowded—and even more crowded when Catharine turned up again. I began to think of building a new bunkhouse for John and Al—a heated place where they could sleep and entertain their friends.

From one point of view, this was not the most practical idea in the world. Even as I was sketching plans (there’s nothing I like better in this world than lavishing attention on a house, even if it is only a bunkhouse), I was thinking how good it would be for me to get away from Rocky Ridge. The boys’ high-school graduation was two years away, however, and in the meantime, I thought life on the farm would be more pleasant for everyone if the boys had a place of their own. Obviously, this meant
cash cash cash.
I had to settle down to writing.

But while I had a strong idea for a book—“Old Home Town”—I was having trouble getting enough quiet time to pull it all together. The crowded, noisy house was mostly my own fault, I had to admit, because I had invited all these people to live with me. And each one filled a certain place in my life, so why was I complaining?

Contemplating these contradictory necessities and urgencies, I remembered a scrap of insight I had once jotted into my journal. The problem, I wrote, is my own disorderly mind: I never want things or people or ideas in any logical way but haphazardly, helter-skelter, all at once. And when that commotion of greedy wanting collides with the ordinary commotion of living, the result is a messy confusion. That’s what I had now in my life: a chaotic, competitive confusion of the boys, the household, my mother, my work.

Al was solid, dependable, and unfailingly courteous, and I never once regretted inviting him to live at Rocky Ridge. But even though I loved John—he had become my son, in all ways—his behavior was often simply impossible. At school, he was rude to his teachers and his report card was disgraceful. At home, he flared into ugly, combative arguments with me and with Al and Lucille, whom he saw as my allies. Lucille did her best to keep the household running smoothly, but John’s ongoing, escalating ruckus—always worse at mealtime and chore time—made it difficult for me to work.

And there was my mother, who seemed to have become more demanding, perhaps because she feared that the boys were pulling me away from her. The telephone calls became more frequent, and she came over more often during the day, bringing her notes for “Plum Creek” so that we could discuss them. In early February, she brought the proofs of
Little House on the Prairie
for me to correct. The proofs went back to Harper and also to
St. Nicholas Magazine,
which wanted to publish an excerpt, as they had with
Farmer Boy
.

Mama Bess also asked me to rewrite a chapter from her new book that would appear, under her name, in
Child Life.
That was something I thought she might do herself, but she insisted that I do it, and I eventually agreed. If we were going to maintain the fiction that she was the sole author of the books, all of her published material would have to be stylistically consistent. I could see the dilemma I had created by making her dependent on me
as her coauthor, and had I been given the gift of foresight, I’m not sure I would have continued. But we were committed, and all I knew how to do was carry on as we had. It was as simple as that.

Mama Bess and I talked about things other than her books, of course. We both read the newspapers and listened to the radio and had firm opinions about the state of affairs in Washington. Locally, Roosevelt had won by a small margin in the 1932 presidential race, but it hadn’t taken long for the Republicans to regroup, and in the 1934 midterm election, Democrat Harry S. Truman was sent to the U.S. Senate to represent Missouri with only 33 percent of Mansfield’s vote. Most people voted a straight ticket, so our district returned Republican Dewey Short to Congress, where he spoke out vehemently against Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, echoing the sentiments of the folks back home.
Strong
sentiments. Nobody in Mansfield liked the New Deal.

There was no denying that the programs created jobs, mostly in highway and dam construction. The the Civilian Conservation Corps alone employed some four thousand men in building Missouri parks, and the Works Progress Administration was paying women to work in sewing rooms and canning factories around the county. Locally, there was hope for a new grade-school building, funded by the government. These jobs meant food on the table and shoes on children’s feet, and while people hated to be beholden to the government for work, they did what they had to do to keep their families going. If government work was all there was, people would do it.

But at the same time, resentment festered. The self-reliant individualists in Wright County and across Missouri hated the idea of the government giving handouts to people who didn’t work. Even worse, they hated federal agencies that tried to tell them how to do their business. And the Agricultural Adjustment Administration—the AAA—was the most hated of all.

My father was a good example. There wasn’t much arable land at Rocky Ridge, but Papa always planted what he could in oats for his horses and millet for my mother’s chickens, as well as a little popcorn for those long winter nights by the fire. He and Buck—his thirty-year-old Morgan—were out one afternoon plowing the bottomland along the creek when a young AAA agent in a business suit, white shirt, bow tie, and brown fedora parked his coupe beside the road and sauntered into the field. He wanted to warn my father that the new federal regulations prohibited him from planting more than two acres of oats. He cast an eye across the field, took out a notebook, and began writing something.

“Looks to me like you got three, maybe four acres here,” he said. “That about right?” Without waiting for an answer, he pointed with his pencil. “I’d say you oughta stop plowing when you get to that maple tree over there. No point in planting unless you just want to burn, come harvest.”

My father stared at him with narrowed eyes. “I’d say you oughta get the hell off my land and do it right now,” he said in a steely voice. “No point in standing there unless you want to get the seat of them fancy britches speckled with buckshot.”

The AAA agent didn’t linger to see if my father meant what he said. The boys at the pool hall, where Papa enjoyed his regular Saturday afternoon game and a big cigar, laughed over the story for a long time.

The weather was always on our minds. Everywhere in the midsection of the country, the winter and early spring had been exceptionally dry—so dry, in fact, that my father was hesitant to plant potatoes, wondering if they would make a crop. Farmers who were depending on pasture for their dairy cows were forced to cull their herds.

To the west of us, where the drought was still deepening, the situation was worse. I read that a quarter of the winter wheat crop in Oklahoma had failed, half the crop in Kansas, and all of it in Nebraska—something like five million acres utterly devastated by drought. By the end of March, the southern Plains had already been hit with two solid weeks of dust storms boiling in huge clouds across the naked land. A few weeks later, I would read in the newspaper about Black Sunday, the nightmare storm that hit the Oklahoma Panhandle and swept like a black avalanche down into Texas. “We thought it was our judgment, we thought it was our doom,” Woody Guthrie wrote later, and many people did indeed die. Everyone’s nerves were raw in those months, and minor disagreements flared into sullen words that hung like ominous clouds in the air. I decided that if I was going to get any writing done, I would simply have to get away.

And in April, I managed to do it. I couldn’t have without Lucille, of course—and I wouldn’t have tried, if she hadn’t been so willing. “You don’t have to worry about a thing,” she said reassuringly. “You go and do whatever you have to do, Rose. Eddie and me will handle the boys. And you’ll be close enough in case there’s an emergency.”

It was true. I wasn’t going far, only seventy-some miles, to the small town of Hollister, where I checked into the English Inn. It was a small, inexpensive hotel with decent food, and I had a large room with a table beside the window for my typewriter. It was pleasant, for a change, to look down onto a street where people were coming and going, exchanging hellos, and leaning close together and lowering their voices to share the latest Hollister gossip about the latest affair, the latest divorce, the latest unwed mother.

I didn’t fool myself that Hollister was any different from Mansfield in that regard, or from any of the myriad other small towns across the country. And, after all, that’s what I was writing about in the stories of “Old Home Town”: the life of a small town in all its relentless cruelties, both conscious and unconscious, directed toward those who are condemned to live their lives on the outskirts of the close-knit society.

This was something I remembered vividly from my childhood. Before Mama Bess and Papa and I moved into town, we were country folks, outsiders, strangers—and we were still outsiders for years afterward, in the eyes of the town. I had been able to leave; I could come and go. But my mother had to stay. It had taken her decades to become a full-fledged member of the Mansfield flock, which was why, I supposed, she cared so deeply about the opinions of other members of the flock.

There was some quiet social life in Hollister—I met people at the hotel and was introduced around town and invited to a few dinners and teas.
A great many people had read “Hurricane” in the
Saturday Evening Post
and wanted to tell me how much they liked it. I was also (and inevitably) critiqued and censured, and one of the local Mrs. Grundys, at a dinner party, made it a special point to inform me that I was pitied: I had no “Christian faith”—another reminder that I was likely to be an outsider wherever I went.

But most of all, this was a productive time, and exactly the change I needed. The stories I planned to include in the book—already linked by setting and characters—offered the kind of cozy glimpse into sentimental, small-town life that appealed to readers. But I had a larger ambition for the stories as a group than I’d had as I wrote each of them individually. For the collection, I arranged them in a sequence that I hoped would give them both a cumulative weight and a moral coherence, and I wrote a preface that framed them historically. They were, after all, about small-town life at the turn of the century, thirty years before, not about small-town life today—except that they were both, of course—about
then
and about
now
.
Some things, and some people, never change.

The stories were told from the point of view of a young girl, Ernestine. In each story, Ernestine is older and more experienced than in the previous one, growing toward the day when she will leave her hometown. She sees the town’s cruelties with a clearer and clearer eye, witnessing the struggles of its hapless victims—widows, spinsters, hired girls, unhappily married women—as they attempt to free themselves from the clutches of the town’s oppressive rules and unforgiving rule makers.

But Ernestine also witnesses occasional escapes, both successful and unsuccessful. In the first story, “Hired Girl,” Almantha escapes being “talked about” by killing herself. Mrs. Sims, in “Immoral Woman,” escapes to millinery school in St. Louis and eventually to a career as a successful dress designer in New York and Paris. Leila Barbrook climbs into Ab Whitty’s buggy and escapes into a freer future.

And in the end, Ernestine also escapes, as I had, by becoming a writer, the creator of the tales in
Old Home Town
. In the last story, “Nice Old Lady,” a grown-up, unmarried Ernestine is living in faraway Albania. In a bazaar there, she happens to meet old Mrs. Sherwood, the “nice old lady” who had once loaned her
Quo Vadis
and
The Conquest of Peru
, books that had whetted her desire to see the world—and my own, when I was a young Ernestine, borrowing those very books from a neighbor. Mr. Sherwood was a homebody who denied his wife’s wish to travel and see the world, refusing even to take her to Niagara Falls on their honeymoon. Mrs. Sherwood—realizing that marriage is the ultimate prison—had told the young girl, with an unforgettable ferocity, “Whatever you do, Ernestine, don’t you get married! Don’t do it!” Now, encountering the widowed Mrs. Sherwood climbing on a horse in a street in far-off Albania, Ernestine understands that even a “nice old lady,” once she has escaped the bonds of marriage, can flee the old hometown, at last a free woman, a world traveler.