A Wilder Rose: A Novel (3 page)

Norma Lee shook her head stubbornly. “I still want to hear it. It’ll go no further, I swear. Whatever it is, it’s just between you and me. We could do it this weekend.”

Rose paused. There were mysteries that simple tales, like her mother’s stories for children, could scarcely convey. Even the most artful story ultimately failed, for the deepest feelings—the urgency that drove desire, the desire that compelled choice—were hidden in the secret places between the words. Why bother, when the effort was bound to fail? Or (and here was a thought that caught her, like a vine snaking around her ankles) why take the risk, when she might succeed too well, tell too much? Was this why she no longer was able to indulge herself in fictions?

But perhaps there was something she
could
tell, something that might at least satisfy the girl’s curiosity. And if she could give voice to even the simplest narrative of all that had happened, there might be something in it that would help her understand how she had come to the place where she was now, where she had no more stories of her own to tell, and no more mysteries.

“I’ll think about it,” she said.

And in the end, because Norma Lee didn’t give up easily, and because there
was
a story to tell, and because Rose herself wanted to understand, she did.

CHAPTER TWO

From Albania to Missouri: 1928

Come home
, she cabled, and I went.

Troub—Helen Boylston—always complained that I was at my mother’s beck and call. She was right, of course. Still, the situation was desperate. My father was sick. My mother was sick. They had to have help. Who else could they turn to but me?

But the matter was more complicated than that. It was time to leave Albania, and both Troub and I knew it. We had gone to Tirana in 1926 because we wanted to get away from the madness of American commercial life and back to a time where life was slower and sweeter, where both of us (Troub was a writer, too) could write and read and soak in the primitive world around us. I suppose in some ways we were joining the great exodus of American writers who sought refuge in Europe in the twenties—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, all of whom, and others, were in Paris when Troub and I were there.

The two of us had met on a train to Poland in 1920, I a writer for the Red Cross, Troub a Red Cross nurse on her way from an assignment in Albania. We had been instantly, easily drawn together and had made plans to meet in Paris and later in New York. Later still, in 1924, she joined me at Rocky Ridge. We drove around southern Missouri, where I gathered material for the Ozark stories I was writing for the
Country Gentleman
. We took a longer driving trip, too, to San Francisco with Mama Bess, who never stopped fretting about being so far and so long away from home. And when we got back, we decided to go even farther—to Albania, a land where life was simple and the struggles of our century were very far away. Was I fleeing the farm, and my mother? Troub said so. I think now that she was right.

In Tirana, we rented a lovely two-story villa, cool and dignified in its blue-gray whitewash, with a narrow front court and an archway that led into a lush walled garden. The house had been previously occupied by American diplomats, and people were still accustomed to dropping in to talk. So we held afternoon teas for the foreign-service community—Germans, French, British, Americans, Greek, but
not
, of course, the Italians.

Ah, those lovely days. The air in that house was fragrant with the aroma of Turkish tobacco, and electric with international intrigue in four or five languages. We drank tea and wine and, yes, sometimes French champagne; nibbled on whimsical Albanian pastries contrived by Yvonne, our French cook; danced to the latest records on Troub’s Victrola: “Whose Who Are You?” and “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” and “Tea for Two.” Troub and I—two American women, reasonably attractive, well traveled, well read, and lively—were much in demand. From the wide windows, our guests could admire the view of Mount Dajti, stretched out like some lazy prehistoric beast against the bluest sky. On moonlit nights, they could spill out onto the balcony and into the garden, where old Ibraim, our Albanian gardener (who could not read the labels on seed packets but knew every Albanian proverb ever conjured) had planted a formal bed of chrysanthemums edged with an unlikely lace of green lettuce. Ibraim had come to Tirana as a refugee. He told me that he had finally scraped together enough
qindarka
to buy four oranges, which, in a moment of entrepreneurial inspiration, he had displayed on a white handkerchief on the sidewalk, thereby launching his career as a fruit-stand man, from which vantage point he had promoted himself to salaried gardener.

Ibraim’s garden was gorgeous. The house was a fabulous delight. Tirana, with its white minarets rising out of the hot white dust of medieval streets, was a cabinet of treasures. Those two years there, I led in many ways an ideal life: strange and unfamiliar surroundings, Troub for companionship and conversation and sweet sustenance, and servants who cooked and took care of the household so I could have all day to write. I had the idea of writing something that was true and real and
satisfying
, something I was passionate about, not just the magazine stuff I had been writing for a living during the last decade. Something that would express
me
, if I could ever manage to understand who I was.

But I was too many things, and wanted too many things, and could never decide which ones might (if I would pay them the proper attention) be most important. There were distractions in Albania, and sights to see, and things to do. At home, there was Lazar, our all-purpose
kavass
who considered himself the boss of the household, telling stories with Yvonne and Ibraim around the great stove in the stone-walled kitchen. Out in the dirt streets there were the daily calls to prayer and the joyful singing of wedding parties and the silvery tinkling of bells on the pack camels and donkeys. And in the villages, the lovely peasant costumes and the melodious chattering of children and the glorious smell of
tavë kosi
, baked lamb with yogurt
.
But all these distractions made it easy to lose focus, to scatter my energies—perhaps (and this was the hard part) because I lacked the sense of purpose that would bind all the loose pieces of myself together.

And in the end, I didn’t find the time or the energy to write anything more than the magazine stuff that paid the bills. I was supporting two households even then: our household in Tirana and Mama Bess and Papa on their Missouri farm, some two hundred acres of hardscrabble Ozark mountainside that produced nothing but apples, milk, and eggs, and not enough of any of them for a decent living.

So I did what I had been doing ever since I’d left the
San Francisco Bulletin
at the end of the war. I rattled off a dozen or so magazine pieces and a serial,
Cindy: An Ozark Romance
. Carl Brandt, my agent, sold the serial to the
Country Gentleman
for ten thousand dollars, which mostly went to pay household expenses and repay debts. I managed to send some of it to George Q. Palmer in New York, for my brokerage account, which was keeping pace with the bull market in that go-go year. My mother had invested some of her own saved pennies with Mr. Palmer, and I wrote to tell her that stocks were leaping around like corn in a popper and we couldn’t lose. Now, post-1929, I think of that with some irony. Then, I more often thought of the lines from the
Panchatantra
:
Money will get anything, get it in a flash. Therefore let the prudent get cash, cash, cash.

Ah, yes.
Cash cash cash
: my mantra. I told myself that I longed to write something of my own, something significant that emerged from who I was. Something like “Innocence,” my best story, which had won second prize in the O. Henry Awards for 1922. I would be happy to write another story like that, or one about Albania and the ragged street boys with the baskets in the bazaar and the minarets in the clear light of dawn and the haunting call to prayer.

But I was, in the end, relentlessly practical: my haunting call was always for
cash cash cash—
no surprise, I suppose, given the long, grueling poverty of my childhood and my parents’ often desperate need of support. Money meant freedom, the freedom to live where and how I chose, and with whom—although I understood too well the irony of this: the price of freedom was hours and days and weeks at the typewriter. So I settled for writing what the magazine editors wanted. I put what I could into the Palmer brokerage account and spent the rest.

And there were plenty of places to spend it—the Tirana house, for instance. For me, houses are a vice. No, it’s worse than that: they are a seductive, enthralling, soul-stirring
joy
. My life is littered with the bones of houses that have enchanted me, on which I have lavished time and money—a curse and I know it, but there it is. So Troub and I happily painted and plastered and tore down walls and built new ones in our rented house and dreamed and drew sketches of the even-larger villa we would build on the green hills above Tirana.

We had thought when we went to Albania, Troub and I, that we would stay forever. I had first gone there for the Red Cross, and I went back later that same year—1921—to the northern mountains, to collect material for a series of travel articles. But the medieval Albania I had seen and loved was now being transformed into a misbegotten by-blow of European culture. Italian officers in full military regalia strutted on the streets, and youngsters in the villages paraded in Westerners’ cast-off clothing. Automobiles darted here and there, horns blaring at intransigent camels. Electricity came to the city, bare bulbs replacing the yellow glow of lamp and candle light. Witnessing that transformation was like tasting the bitter truth at the end of a dying love affair. Then came the earthquakes, tremors that opened cracks in the city’s mud walls and shook our house so badly that we slept in our clothes, with our shoes under our pillows. And the political earthquakes—that
damned
Mussolini, who even then coveted Albania’s strategic location on the Adriatic and was poised to possess the country the minute the fragile young government collapsed. He wasn’t above helping it toward that goal, either, by stoking the fires of rebels and turning any economic thumbscrew he could reach.

There were practical considerations, too. I needed to see my agent and talk to my magazine editors and my stockbroker. I absolutely
had
to get something done about my teeth, and not in Albania, where dentistry was a blood sport. Troub had tired of writing and spent hours every day reading American newspapers and mentioning this play and that movie and a new book that was already old by the time it reached us. Altogether, our days seemed to be darkened by needs we couldn’t fulfill and a kind of subterranean discontent we couldn’t quite bring to the surface. It wasn’t long before the question of how long we might stay became how soon we would leave.

So it was almost a relief (not quite, but almost) when Mama Bess cabled:
Come home
.
Yes, it would have been nice if she had said “please,” but international cables are priced by the word. My mother pinched every single penny she took out of her little leather purse, then (when she had to) as now (when she doesn’t). “Please” would have cost too much.

Troub agreed that it was time to leave but wasn’t crazy about the idea of going back to the farm. “It’s February now,” she pointed out. “It will be spring by the time you get to Missouri, and your mother won’t need you anymore. Anyway, she just wants to know that she can still make you do what she says. She has you under her thumb.” Troub was a slim, athletic woman, younger than I by some nine years, intelligent, perceptive. She looked good in trousers, which shocked the Europeans and amazed the Albanians. “Your mother may seem like a sweet little old lady, with her white hair and blue eyes. But she is the most overbearing woman I have ever known. The way she bosses your sweet, long-suffering father, the dog, the cat, the cows, you.” She quirked an eyebrow. “It’s no secret. Ask your mother’s neighbors. They’ll tell you who wears the pants in the Wilder family.”

I laughed at that, but ruefully, for it was true. My mother looked like everyone’s ideal grandmother: diminutive and pretty, her hair going white now and her eyes a dark, deep blue. When she went into town to shop or to a club meeting, she always wore her best dress, a pert little hat, spotless gloves, and a sweet smile.

But her father had always said that she was as strong as a little French horse, and there was a firm set to her mouth that belied any softness in her face. The two of us had been fighting a battle of wills since I was old enough to realize how
good
it felt to be willful, if not willfully
bad
. She was afraid of what I would come to if she let me go, and I was afraid of what I would come to if she held on.

Finally, at seventeen, I taught myself Morse code. My friend Ethel Burney’s father was the agent at the Frisco depot and had a telegraph key at home that Ethel and I learned how to operate. Then I took the train from Mansfield to Kansas City, where I got a job as a telegrapher with Western Union and wrote little articles for the newspaper. I worked for the company there and in Mount Vernon, Indiana, until 1908, when, not yet twenty-two, I followed Gillette Lane to San Francisco, and life began all over again.

Yes, I left home to earn money (
cash cash cash
), some of which I sent back to Mama Bess. But mostly, I left to escape her instructions on how to behave, her small-town moralizing, her worries about what people would think if I did this or said that. And to escape the parochial quicksand of Mansfield, which, if I had stayed, would have swallowed me, heart and soul and every original and rebellious thought in my head. Another year there and I might have married George Cooley and settled down to washing and starching his shirts and ironing them with a flatiron heated on the coal-fired cookstove, and having his babies, and baking gingerbread for meetings of the Justamere Club—all to my mother’s very great pleasure.

In the twenty-some years after I left Mansfield, I went back occasionally and kept in dutiful touch by letter. But mostly I was on the move, onward, outward. I married Gillette Lane in 1909 in San Francisco and divorced him nine years later; in the interim, in Salt Lake City I lost a baby boy and buried with him a piece of my heart. I went to the East Coast, then to the West Coast, to the East Coast again, then abroad. I was a wife, a real-estate salesperson, a newspaper reporter, a feature writer, a freelance writer.

“There’s all the world, all the world, outside, waiting for me!” I wrote that in 1919, at the end of
Diverging Roads
, my first novel, the disguised and fictionalized story of my young life. There’s all the world, all the world, waiting—but I was still my parents’ only child, with an only child’s obligations, which fell heavier on me now that they couldn’t manage the farm.

In 1928, when I got the cable, Papa—lame since he had suffered a stroke or maybe contracted polio when I was still a baby—was past seventy. Mama was sixty and (though we didn’t know it at the time) diabetic. They adamantly refused to sell the farm and move to town (which I would have much preferred), so I was duty-bound to see that they were taken care of. I once read that the sociologist Jane Addams called this burden the “family claim,” two words that explain it well enough: a bond—no, a bondage, braided of strands of guilt, duty, and affection. I understood, for I had felt its tug when I left the farm in 1903: a powerful bond that held daughters (especially only daughters) to parents in the days before the Great War, before the 1920s roared and girls bobbed their hair, hiked their skirts above their knees, painted a red cupid’s bow on their lips, and kissed their mothers good-bye.