Pioneer Girl (6 page)

As a kid I had loved the chronology of the
Little House
books. Now I saw the narrative arcs, the threads, the foreshadowing. Of course
These Happy Golden Years
, the book I kept returning to for its passage about the gold pin, had to be the payoff to the hardship in the previous books. Here, the Ingallses' farm and garden are thriving and Laura is raking in twenty-five bucks a month as a schoolteacher. She's eighteen, she has beautiful hair, she has a new pink summer dress and a feathered hat, and she has the dashing Almanzo Wilder as her beau. He drives the prettiest, fastest team of horses in town and lets her drive them too. They get engaged, they get married. The book takes us right up to the wedding night: the new couple, sitting outside their new house, under the stars, with what seems like all the world before them.

Yet there's a deep restlessness threading the
Little House
books together. Pa Ingalls is anxious to keep looking for a better homestead, to keep seeking out the treasured West, and Laura too has that “itchy wandering foot.” Perhaps her daughter Rose was able to translate and convey these feelings so well because she had grown up caged in her own desires, if not for westward exploration, then for worldliness, fame, glory, a life beyond the farm and small-town Missouri.

In our own way, Sam and I had felt that restlessness too. That desire to be free of
our
family's choices, even though at the same time we knew how much we owed—our very existence—to them. The fact was, we had grown up Asian American in a mostly white landscape. There were consequences for that: a sense of imbalance, a subconscious avoidance of mirrors. Who wouldn't want to be rid of that, untethered from such fixed identity?

For the first time since Sam had left his number stabbed through with Rose's pin, I felt compelled to make use of it. Sliding out of Alex's bed, I tiptoed over to my bag and took out my phone.
Where are you?
I texted.
I'm in Iowa.

Back under the covers, I waited for a reply. But there was none, of course, and soon I was falling asleep, phone idle beneath my pillow.

—

I
took up Alex's offer. By day three, Ron and I were exchanging small talk about the drive from Iowa City. He saved my table and the papers I requested, told me which sandwich he thought was best at the deli down the road.

I was reading the letters that Rose and Laura had written each other during the years the
Little House
books came to be. I was looking for clues, figuring that if it was true that Rose had cowritten these books, then the gold pin must have been inspired by something real—if not her father's gift to her mother, then perhaps someone else's gift to Rose.

She was eight years old when her parents chose to settle in Mansfield, Missouri. They had done some wandering already, with failed farms and crops in South Dakota, Minnesota, and Florida to show for it. Mansfield, near Ozark country, promised good land and temperate weather. They stuck it out through years of near-poverty, slowly building Rocky Ridge Farm. Though Rose learned how to manage this kind of life, how to sew and save, she longed for the pleasures a city girl might have. She wanted new dresses and shoes, lavish hats, and restaurant food. With her sharp wit and book smarts, she stood out in Mansfield as a loner, a snob, a dreamer, so much so that her parents let her spend her last year of high school in the larger city of Crowley, Louisiana, where Almanzo's sister Eliza lived, in order for Rose to gain a more advanced education. As soon as she could, Rose got away. She was college-girl material but had no money for it, so she went to the nearest metropolis, Kansas City, and learned how to become a telegrapher. There she finally felt free and, even more importantly, financially independent. She could go out to lunches without guilt, have beaus, and keep hours as late as she wished. She started traveling for her job, going where telegraphing skills were needed. Eventually she landed in San Francisco, where she met and married Gillette Lane.

In photographs, young Rose looks more cautious than girlish. She has that early 1900s look of gaiety and verve, with her broad, flower-trimmed hats and rounded cheeks and soft, glimmering eyes. She looks ready to see what the world has to offer. But there's a canniness in her steady focus, the set of her mouth. Part determined, part amused.

Gillette was supposed to be a land developer but turned out not to be skilled at much of anything but charming and socializing. Their precarious finances kept them on the road, searching for work. They were in Missouri in 1910 when their son was born; he died within days. Rose threw herself into real estate work, telegraphy, whatever could be found. The more she did, the less Gillette did. He was constantly thinking up schemes and losing out by them. She was constantly saving his ass. More than once Rose had to sell whatever she had—clothes, housewares—in order to buy groceries for dinner.

By the time they returned to California, their marriage was pretty much over, though I loved how she pretended otherwise in her letters to her mother. Rose was a master of the double life. She humored Gillette too, making another go at real estate ventures with him but really heading out on her own in the farmlands of what are now San Jose and Silicon Valley. She made her own friends too, artists and writers who encouraged her to write and whose connections got her a job at the
San Francisco Bulletin
. Under the guidance of editor Fremont Older, Rose quickly learned to churn out the kind of articles and opinion pieces the public wanted to read.

Back in Mansfield, Laura worried about her daughter's newly glamorous life as a reporter girl and wondered about the state of her daughter's marriage. She resolved to visit during the summer of 1915, just in time for the World's Fair. Laura also had mercenary reasons: Rose and Gillette owed her $250 and she had promised Almanzo that she would get the money back. It was astonishing to read Laura's letters to him from her trip, gathered as they were with Rose's correspondence like some schizophrenic epistolary novel. Laura's effortful descriptions of San Francisco and the fair, her anxious reminders about the chickens and gardens and chores at the farm—these were far from the prose style of the
Little House
books that would make her famous. Her assurances that she had not lost sight of why she was in San Francisco—to collect that debt—dominated her letters with a vigor that reminded me of my own mother, whose whole day could be made by catching a price error at the grocery store checkout.

In truth, most of Rose and Laura's correspondence revolved around the getting, saving, and making of money. For Rose and Laura both, it was the main reason for writing anything at all.

I do not think you will make a great deal of money out of this book
, Rose wrote during the drafting of
Little House in the Big Woods
,
but it should go on for years and years, paying a little all the time.

If you find it easier to write in the first person, write that way. I will change it into the third person, later.

At times, Rose did more than suggest how to shape the stories. It wasn't enough to mention a party Laura had attended in De Smet. Rose instructed her mother to describe how nervous she had been, how she'd braided her hair and wound it around her head—hadn't she?—and brushed and pressed her dress and looked in the mirror. The dress was brown poplin—wasn't it?—with shimmering plaid trim.

If such details really had come from Laura's account of her childhood, how much prodding had Rose done to draw them out?

I couldn't fathom the lengths I would have had to go to in order to get anything more than a yes or a no out of my own mother. Even Ong Hai, who loved telling stories, always stuck to anecdotes, like old Rose in Saigon with her largesse and Americanness, or the customers who had to have their coffees just exactly so, or his pet mice that had such a good sense of direction he could release them half a mile away and they'd return. If I asked him about anything tied to the war he would always manage to veer away from it. He didn't want to talk about his wife—my grandmother—or the relatives he had lost, and I couldn't blame him, couldn't force him. The same went for the nitty-gritty about my father. Sam and I had grown up learning almost nothing about our parents' marriage, much less what our father's life had been like in Vietnam. All we knew about him came from the scraps of our own memories, the few photos we had, and from the stories Ong Hai told about our father's spirit for adventure, his high hopes for the restaurant business. My mother always met my questions with frowning silence, a suspicious counterquestioning:
Why do you want to know?
Eventually I stopped asking.

Maybe if there'd been money in the telling I'd have had better luck.

Instead, this silence became a subject itself, formidable. Sam and I rarely broached it with one another, though once in a great while, in one of those mysterious, unpredictable moments of sibling bonding that could happen out of nowhere and vanish just as quickly, impossible to make or re-create, we would agree on some unifying truth about our family. Like how hopeful our father had been—by now, as Ong Hai often intimated, he might have built an empire. Or like the way our mother would never get free of her first-generation immigrant mentality. Once in flight she was always in flight, glancing uneasily around before pushing on to another vista that promised better prospects. Maybe it kept her feeling safe. She couldn't have known that it would leave Sam and me feeling the opposite—permanently unsettled, unable to know what could be called home.

Look how massively she's controlled our reality
, Sam said once, when we were in high school and discovered what
Forrest Gump
was really about. We had seen the movie as a rental when we were kids and our mother had fast-forwarded through so many parts that we didn't fully realize what had happened in it. Watching it on TV a few years later, Sam and I shared the same reactions:
Jenny was a stripper? Forrest and Jenny had sex scenes?
Our mother had cared for only one of the movie's threads: Forrest striking gold in business over and over again.

Of course, Rose never had a sibling to collude with, to speculate with about her mother's withdrawn nature, or the horizons the Wilders had chased for a better plot of land. Rose, above all, had believed in self-sufficiency.

And now I didn't have much of a sibling either. In the library I pulled out my phone; no text, but the clock display read four o'clock, meaning I had only an hour before the Hoover closed. I'd made it through several years' worth of correspondence, with no sign of a gold pin or a Christmas gift from Almanzo. At the rate I was going, it'd be another Christmas before I was done.

Because the more I delved into the collaboration on the
Little House
books, the more slow-going the search became. So many researchers, or fans, had been here before me, and it was clear that the documents hadn't been reorganized in years. Notes, addresses, and scribbles, some of them not even numbered or indexed in the catalogs, lay out of order within the packets of longhand letters and postcards. I kept getting distracted by the receipts—more evidence of the money fixation Rose shared with her mother. If she was manic-depressive, as critics claimed, her finances were too, jumping between debt and savings. Rose kept track of every cent of commission that went to her agent, and every cent that went to her, and when, and how. Yet she was also a spendthrift, unable to stop herself from purchasing a bit of land here or there, or some new furniture to spruce up a new apartment. On the backs of some of the receipts were more notes: details about architecture, books she wanted to get, ideas for novels. A list of possible titles:
Trundle-bed Tales
.
Long Ago Yesterday
.
Little Girl in the Big Woods
.

One slip of paper caught my eye because, unlike the rest, it was dated 1918, and because it was enjambed like a poem.

She wasn't supposed to know. They told her

not to know. A boy, again,

a gain, would always be wanted on a farm.

Rose's looping cursive seemed almost illegible, as if a larger force were bearing down on the letters.

The note wasn't numbered, didn't correspond to anything in the catalog.

I read the words over and over again, until they took on another meaning. Another light. The third-person perspective.

I looked back through my own notes. Rose's child had been born and buried in 1910. Eight years of discord and separation later, she and Gillette divorced. In her journal Rose noted that she had finally “got rid” of him.

So what happened in 1918?
A boy, again.
Was I misreading, overreading? Was it possible that Rose was writing about herself? Or was it possible this note was written by someone else entirely?

There was nothing else I'd found to sustain the thought, but it persisted: what if Rose had had another child?

—

F
inding everything you need?”

I jumped at Ron's voice right next to me. He was leaning over a rolling cart filled with spiral-bound Hoover papers, idly glancing at my notebook. The room had nearly emptied out, and it was just me, Ron, and one other guy at the copy machine.

“So,” he continued, “where are you on the road to Saint Laura?”

I closed my notebook. “What, you think I'm some sort of hobbyist?”

“Quite the contrary. Only the die-hard scholars follow the trail to the Lane papers. She's the one who kept track of everything, after all. I'd say the serious fans make it as far as the various libraries holding original manuscripts. The amateurs stick to the houses and museums, although it's an industry secret that the museums are the best source of pay dirt.”

I knew that the Ingallses' house in De Smet, South Dakota, where the family had finally settled in 1880, had been turned into a museum. But the main stop was Rocky Ridge Farm, where one could pay homage to Pa's fiddle and Ma's hair combs. Only now, hearing Ron, did it occur to me that if the gold pin in
These Happy Golden Years
was preserved among Laura's effects—if it had nothing to do with that pin now pocketed in my tote bag—then Rocky Ridge would be the place to find out.