A Wilder Rose: A Novel (7 page)

Mama Bess said nothing, and she was very quiet for the rest of the day. After that, I caught her paying surreptitious attention to Papa, watching him as if she wondered whether he was going to drop another armload of wood or fall over on the floor right in front of her. But she didn’t mention the cottage once—then or over the next few weeks—and I decided to let the matter drop for a while.

In June, Troub arrived, driving a Buick she had named Janet, with Mr. Bunting, our Maltese terrier, in the front seat beside her. I was overjoyed to see Troub and made quite a fool of myself in front of my mother, who looked away from the sight of two grown women crying with delight in each other’s arms. She was distracted when little Bunty, fierce for his size, picked a fight with Nero, who was four times his weight. It didn’t take long to see that the two dogs couldn’t be trusted in the same room, and we had to adopt strenuous measures to keep them apart.

Three weeks later, in early July, my friend Genevieve Parkhurst, an editor at
Pictorial Review
, came to stay for a week on her way to the West Coast. The farm was an attraction and a pastoral novelty to New York women who rarely had a chance to get out of the city. And Mansfield, while it might seem a great distance from the East Coast, was on the railroad line from New York to San Francisco. Anybody going coast to coast could easily stop off and spend a few days enjoying the lovely Ozark landscape, the “quaint” little town of Mansfield, quiet nights, and farm cooking. And, of course, conversation about books and the New York publishing scene, for which I was always eager. Anybody who aimed to write for the magazine market needed to know what was going on.

We put Genevieve in Troub’s room, and we all sat up late every night on the sleeping porch, talking and smoking and playing dance music on the battery-operated Radiola I had ordered from the Ward’s catalogue a few weeks before.

After Genevieve got on the train, Mama Bess decreed that there would be no more smoking in her house, whereupon Troub remarked to me that she loved me, but she hated to be
bossed.
Perhaps it was time for her to leave, too.

The tension was so electric it crackled, and I was in the middle, between their two poles. In fact, I might have left. But Mama’s cough was no better, and I was helping out in the house and the garden and keeping an eye on the new hired man—and still hoping that my mother would agree to the new house. I was writing, too, and I didn’t want to interrupt the work.

To ease the situation, I ordered a big green tent, and when it arrived, Troub and I pitched it at the edge of the ravine, where there was a breeze. She could read and write there, and we could smoke and listen to the radio and indulge in our Albanian coffee ritual, and all of it as late as we pleased. We could even sleep out there if we liked, and we did.

That didn’t suit, either. The tent was a “reproach” to her, Mama Bess grumbled, especially because people might see it as they drove by and think that she had banished Troub and me from the house. We would all be (gasp!) “talked about.” But Papa said he was glad to have the living room to himself again in the evenings, without a flock of hens clucking nineteen to a dozen all around him.

“When’s the next one aimin’ to come?” he asked. When I said that Catharine Brody planned to visit as soon as she could get away from New York, he retreated behind his newspaper, and Mama Bess turned her head away. She didn’t like Catharine, whom she considered flighty and fast and who seemed likely to write books that had S-E-X in them. (She hadn’t read past the first few pages of my Jack London novel for that reason. Jack London had S-E-X.)

And then, a week after we pitched the tent on the hillside, Mama Bess changed her mind about the retirement cottage. It might have been the combination of Troub and Genevieve, or of Mr. Bunting and Nero, added to her recognition that Catharine and Mary Margaret and who-knows-how-many other East Coast women were likely to step off the train at any moment, singly or in noisy combinations, giving Mansfield an endless source of gossip about what was going on in the Wilder house, right in front of poor Mrs. Wilder’s eyes—unless she tried not to look, in which case it would go on behind her back.

Or maybe it was Papa, who had found a building site he liked over the hill on the Newell Forty, where there was an easy slope and a wide view over green bottomland. He liked the picture of the house I showed him, too, although he thought it would be better to build from scratch, rather than take whatever quality of building materials Messieurs Sears and Roebuck felt like shipping us, and I agreed. (I would have agreed to anything he wanted, just to move the project along.) He suggested using local fieldstone for the exterior walls, too, instead of wood shingles.

“A whole house made out of the gol-durned rock ought to make her happy,” he muttered. I wondered if he was thinking of the stone fireplace she had wept over.

Or maybe it was Mama herself, imagining life in a brand-new, distinctively styled house with electricity and central heat and hot water—and no cigarettes or late-night dance music or who-knows-what hanky-panky going on upstairs. I had left the drawing of the house on the table where she could see it. Perhaps she studied it and thought of how her friends from Mansfield and Hartville would admire it and envy her, with all her new furnishings, an electric stove, even an electric refrigerator. The Wilders would be “talked about”—and written up in the Mansfield newspaper—in the very best way. And Papa’s workload would be much, much lighter.

At any rate, one Tuesday afternoon at the end of July she suggested—in a casual, offhand way, exactly as if it had been her idea all along—that she and Papa go to live on the Newell Forty. I joined the pretense that this marvelous notion was hers and proposed that we go straight over there and see if we couldn’t find just the right spot for a house. It was an easy walk along a pleasant footpath, bordered with buttercups and Queen Anne’s lace and lively with dragonflies. From the top of the ridge, the valley below was green and gold, dappled with purple cloud shadows. My mother admired the view and pronounced herself satisfied, and on Thursday, she and Papa picked out the spot for the house. So a week later, I hired an architect and a contractor, both from Springfield, and didn’t waste a moment getting the project under way.

Mama Bess declared that she wanted to be surprised, so she wouldn’t take part in the construction—her way, I thought, of disowning any construction mistakes, or perhaps a kind of passive resistance to what was now Papa’s and my project. But her withdrawal allowed Papa to choose the materials and oversee the workmanship and gave me a free hand, which perhaps was not a good thing. Where houses are concerned, I am my own very worst enemy. As I wrote to my longtime friend Dorothy Thompson (recently married to Sinclair Lewis): “Without houses, who knows? I might have been a writer.”

I’m afraid it was true. All spring and most of the summer I had been working steadily—short stories that were snapped up as soon as I sent them off to my agent
.
Carl Brandt sold “One Thing in Common” to the
Journal
for a thousand dollars, my best price yet from that magazine. And I had the proofs of
Cindy
to correct
,
which Harper & Brothers was putting out as a book in September. Altogether, it was a productive few months that produced a steady and steadily rising income. And, of course, the stock market was going great guns.

But after the work began on the house—the Rock House, Papa and I were calling it—I managed to get only one more story written. The house lured me away from the typewriter, and instead of producing stories, my creative energy went into conjuring walls and floors and windows and shingles and, yes, electricity. It turned out that we could get electricity and a telephone out to the new house, but only if I would agree to pay for the power poles and lines, which of course I did because I also wanted to wire the Rocky Ridge farmhouse, where Troub and I would live.

And the construction brought dissatisfactions. I wasn’t entirely pleased with the stonework, which looked too much like a crazy quilt to suit me. But Papa declared that he liked it, and what was done couldn’t be easily undone. The chimney seemed out of plumb to me, although Mr. Johnson (the architect) and the chimney man both pronounced it straight. Papa hated the rough texture of the plaster; I didn’t awfully like it, either, and the plasterers didn’t even try to get the color right until I made a fuss. I altered Mr. Johnson’s plan for the bathroom, which made the plumber scowl. The flooring was the wrong width and had to be returned—and when the right flooring was laid, the wrong finish was applied. Five men worked an extra four days, sanding and refinishing the floors. And Missouri Power and Electric dragged their feet about the power lines until I threatened to sic a lawyer on them. The electricity finally came on at four thirty on the afternoon of the day before Mama Bess and Papa moved in.

And all this while, of course, the bills kept piling up. Sears and Roebuck would gladly have sold us the plans
and
the building materials for twenty-two hundred dollars. I originally expected to get it built for four thousand dollars—which would make barely a dent in my Palmer account. Mr. Johnson squinted at the plans and said he reckoned it would cost around six thousand dollars, to which of course his fee would be added, tacking on another thousand or more—and then there was the contractor’s fee on top of that. I had promised to furnish the house and splurged wildly on furniture, draperies, appliances, and an Electrola-Radiola, so Mama Bess could play her records and listen to the radio. By the time I paid the last bill, the total had come to something like eleven thousand dollars.

But money wasn’t important—not then. The Palmer account had more than doubled that year, and I didn’t want to draw on it. I had told Troub that every dollar in the account would be worth at least two by the end of 1929. So to avoid pulling feathers from the goose that was laying the golden eggs, I borrowed some money from her and took out a loan at the Mansfield bank. The house was finally finished and ready to move into on the Saturday before Christmas—my present for the parents and an expensive I’m-sorry for the claim shanty I had burned down all those years before.

My father was touchingly pleased to have his own bedroom, a comfortable chair beside the living-room fire, a hot bath to stretch out in, and the new furnace, which made the whole house toasty with a fraction of the work. My mother, who burst into tears when Mr. Johnson presented her with a bouquet of fresh flowers as she stepped in the door, declared herself delighted and grateful. I was, too. The house was beautiful and just right for them. And I felt a great relief, knowing that Mama Bess would have no stairs to climb and Papa wouldn’t be hauling firewood and ashes.

Our own Christmas, Troub’s and mine, was sumptuous. She drove to Seymour to get a part for our water pump and came home with a new 1929 Buick sedan. She gave me a globe for my December-fifth birthday—“So you can start planning our next global excursion”—and for Christmas, she gave me a barometer. We couldn’t make out how to read it, but we hung it in the living room and studied it frequently. I gave her a Scottish terrier pup I purchased by phone from the Ewing kennel in Webster Groves. Named Sparkle, the puppy arrived on the morning train on December 18. Troub’s ecstatic yelps warmed my heart.

It was a golden time, perhaps the best in our years together. Now that the parents were comfortably settled in their new house, Troub and I could sit by the fire in the evenings with our feet on the furniture, dance music on the radio, sipping cups of hot Postum and smoking our cigarettes while Sparkle napped on Troub’s lap and Mr. Bunting, no longer challenged by Nero, went gaily in and out, his little white tail a triumphant flag. We felt liberated from my mother’s censorious glances and her cautions about “talk.” We were glad to be alone.

But there was work to be done, too. That week, we embarked on a furious orgy of housecleaning, furniture arranging, floor scrubbing, window washing, and painting of walls and ceilings that took us into every single crack and cranny of the house. But no matter how hard we scrubbed, there was something of my mother left behind—the scent of lavender, an aura, perhaps, or a shadow, a ghost in the house reminding me that she had dreamed this place and built it and lived in it, and it wasn’t
mine
.

Still, I was happy. Troub and I had our place in the country. My parents were settled, and my father had a hired man. I had accomplished my plan.

After several exhausting but exhilarating days, we collapsed in front of the fire for another weary late-night supper of sandwiches and canned soup. I was absently eyeing my mother’s old draperies and wondering whether the new ones ought to be green or red (to pick up a color from the Albanian rug we had laid on the floor) or perhaps gold (to match the new chair I intended to buy) or a neutral beige against which the other colors in the room would not compete. I was also thinking happily of our new electric refrigerator and range in the kitchen. No more trips to the spring, no more splitting and hauling wood, managing the fire, taking out the ashes. We would have ice cubes for our drinks. And making soup would be a snap. It seemed quite magical.

Troub was listening to the radio while she ate her soup. She suddenly looked up.

“My gosh, Rose,” she said, awed, “just listen to that. It’s Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians. They’re playing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ at the Roosevelt, in Manhattan. It’s New Year’s Eve—and we nearly missed it!”

When the year had turned over into 1928, Troub and I had been in Albania, uncertain and unsettled. Now we were
here,
in our own home with Mr. Bunting and Sparkle and good work to do and good times ahead.

I raised my cup of Postum in a toast. “To 1929,” I said.

“To 1929,” Troub echoed happily and blew me a kiss. “All in all, 1928 was swell. But 1929 will be better.”

“Yes,” I said, believing it. “Nineteen twenty-nine will be the
best
.”