A Wilder Rose: A Novel (13 page)

When my parents returned from their free-and-easy vacation with a banal “East, west, home is best,” I thought with a bitter irony of the utter complacency of that threadbare old adage. East, west, anywhere, everywhere seemed better to me than Rocky Ridge. One night I dreamed of telling the parents that Troub and I were leaving the very next day. I was escaping. They could do whatever the hell they liked with the damned houses.

But it was only a dream, and when I woke, I said nothing. I did nothing but plod in place, through the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that.

Marion Fiery’s letter arrived on a September day. It came addressed to me, with an apology for the summer-long delay. The book business was teetering, but Knopf had accepted the revision of
Little House in the Woods.
I felt a huge flush of relief and, since I was on the way to the Rock House for tea, took the letter with me.

We had tea in the living room, which was bright and pretty. The house had been an enormous project, and I was glad it was done, but I knew it was easier for my parents—especially Papa, who now had much less work to do. He wasn’t idle, of course. He was out in the garage, tinkering.

Mama Bess gave a cry of delight when she read Marion’s letter. “Oh, I’m so glad!” she said, as relieved as I. “When will it be out, do you think? Next month? By the end of the year, surely.”

I shook my head. “Books take time, and there’ll be more work to do on it. We don’t even have a contract yet.” I picked up the teapot and poured us each another cup. “Troub and I want to celebrate. How about dinner on Sunday?”

When George Bye forwarded the contract, there was a surprise, for it covered not one but
three
books: the first one
and options on two more. I had not expected this, given the tenuous economic situation. When I explained what an option was, Mama Bess was astonished, pleased, and apprehensive.

“
Another
book?” she asked faintly. “But what in the world shall I write about?”

Another book.
Two
other books. Did I think about what this would require from
me
, what kind of difficulties we might run into in a continuing collaboration? I didn’t. I only thought how happy I was that my mother was able to see herself as a successful author, that the family stories would be out there in the world for children to read. The idea that she might have her name on the cover of two or perhaps even three was beyond anything I’d dreamed of for her. And with three books, surely there would be some royalty income. Not much, perhaps, but a little.

“You could expand some of the material from ‘Pioneer Girl,
’”
I suggested. “How about the Indian Territory episode in Kansas?”

She shook her head firmly. “I wasn’t three years old yet, much too young to remember anything but the stories Pa and Ma told about it. I put everything I know about that time in ‘Pioneer Girl,’ which wasn’t much. To fill a book, I’d have to make up a lot. It would be more like fiction, and you know I don’t want to do that.”

That’s where we left it—until a few days later when she telephoned to tell me what she had decided. “
Little House in the Woods
is all about me,” she said. “I don’t want your father to feel left out. My next book is going to be all about him—about his life on his father’s farm in New York State. I’m going to call it
Farmer Boy.
”

I was pleased. I had heard Papa’s stories often and loved them: they were as real to me, and as charming, as Grandpa Ingalls’s tales were to my mother. “You could follow the same scheme we used in
Little House,
”
I said.
“Begin with winter and then cover the seasons, spring, summer, and fall. I’m sure Papa will be able to provide plenty of descriptions of the things he remembers.
If
you can pry them out of him.”

We shared a knowing chuckle. My mother sometimes called my father “the Oyster.” He only talked when he felt like it; the rest of the time he was shut up tight, perhaps the consequence of living with two very talkative women.

“I’ll try,” Mama Bess said. There was a silence on the line. When she spoke again, her voice was determined. “Now, Rose, I need to tell you something, and I don’t want you to argue with me. I liked what you did with my first book
.
But this time, I mean to do all the writing myself. I’m glad for the help you gave me, but I know I’ve improved a great deal and I don’t want to take any more of your time than necessary. I’ll bring you the pages when I’m finished. All you have to do is type them.”

I knew that wasn’t going to work, but I didn’t argue—not then, anyway. She was eager to get started and I was just as eager to see her writing, if only because it kept her from dropping in for endless gossip and cups of tea. I wrote to George Bye to thank him for taking the time to work with the Knopf contract. I didn’t expect his ten percent of the royalties to amount to much—hardly enough, I was afraid, to offset the bookkeeping cost. He had stopped sending out “Pioneer Girl.” That project, it seemed, was dead.

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?”