A Wilder Rose: A Novel (4 page)

So when Troub advanced the opinion that I was afflicted with an immoderate sense of obligation (“You are your mother’s little
slavey
,” she said), I defended myself. I invited her to think back to the world as it was when I’d left home, already inoculated with the idea that adult daughters are responsible for the care of their aging parents. If mine had been able to support themselves (like Troub’s father, who was a prosperous dentist), it would have been a different story.

In the monthly articles she wrote for
Missouri Ruralist
, my mother liked to present the Wilder farm as a great success. But she and Papa and I knew that it had never been more than marginally productive. Rocky Ridge may have been one of the larger farms in the county (in a word, my parents were land-poor), but it was too hilly and the stony soil was too thin to support much more than her chickens, his cows, and the apple trees that were now long past bearing. Papa and Mama Bess grew most of their food, so they weren’t in danger of starving. They earned a few dollars selling milk and butter and eggs in town, my mother made a little money as secretary-treasurer of the local farm loan association, and there was the five-hundred-dollar “subsidy” (the word I chose for this annual payment) that I had been sending them since 1920. Mama Bess, whose mantra was
save save save
, had even managed to piece together a cash reserve out of those few crazy-quilt scraps of income.

But she told me that she still dreamed of walking down a long, dark road with wintry trees closing in on either side, knowing with a bone-chilling fear that it was the road to the county poorhouse. Now they needed me. I had to go home.

Troub gave me a searching look. “I have the feeling that your mother, and even your old hometown, are a kind of safe haven for you, Rose, a refuge. You head for home when the big wide world gets too scary. But I hope you remember how you felt the last time you were there alone, with your parents—and even when we were there together. You hated it.”

A safe haven? A refuge? I doubted that. But the other part was certainly true. I hated the isolation, the feeling of being exiled. I was irritated by the parochial pettiness of the townspeople and loathed the unrelenting drudgery of the farm and household work, which my mother liked to romanticize. In one of her
Ruralist
columns she wrote, “Work is a tonic and an inspiration and reward unto itself. For the sweetness of life lies in usefulness like honey deep in the heart of a clover bloom.”

I’ve always admired my brave and energetic mother for the amount of work she performed in a single day, but I can guarantee you that it wasn’t “honey deep in the heart of a clover bloom.” In an article I wrote for
Harper’s Magazine
, I listed the chores that had to be done at Rocky Ridge. There was the firewood to fetch, the stoves to feed, the ashes to shovel. The floors to sweep and scrub, the lamps to clean and fill and light, the beds to make, the clothes to wash (in a tub, with a washboard and hand-turned wringer) and iron. The potatoes to peel and biscuits to bake, three meals a day to cook and serve and wash up after. The milk to strain and skim, the cream to churn, the chickens to feed, the pigs to slop, the garden to plant and weed and harvest, and all of it mindlessly, continuously, endlessly.

I didn’t intend to go back to that drudgery. This time, I had money,
cash cash cash.
And a plan.

Troub, seeing the handwriting on the wall, gave a resigned sigh. “How long are you thinking of staying?”

“Only as long as I have to,” I said. “Will you come with me?” Troub and I were close, as close as two friends could be, and closer. I didn’t like to think of going back to the farm without her.

“I’d come in a minute if it weren’t for your mother,” Troub said. “I’m pretty easygoing, Rose, but the farmhouse is crowded with four of us, and there’s no place to escape. She’s always begging us to sit down and have a cup of tea, or go to a club meeting with her so she can show us off, or drive her to town. And all in the sweetest way, of course, which makes it impossible to refuse.” She made a face. “And then there’s the bickering.”

I sighed. What Troub was saying was perfectly true. A few years before, I had bought my parents a car—a 1923 blue Buick they named Isabel—and my mother could drive just as well as my father. But she preferred to be driven and, in a smooth-as-cream voice, would ask us to drop what we were doing and take her into town. For her regular Wednesday trip to the grocery, she would put on her best hat and gloves and call out instructions for every stop and turn, as if the driver—my father or me or Troub—were her chauffeur.

As for their bickering—well, Troub was right again. My father was a lamb. I adored him, and I’m sure my mother did, too. But my parents argued endlessly about the farm: whether they should hold on to a piece of it or sell it to a neighbor; whether my mother should give up her chickens or my father should sell his cows or both; whether they could afford to buy another heifer or perhaps a pig. Eventually, my father would escape to the workshop or the barn, but in the meantime, the voices from downstairs (Troub and I usually worked or read upstairs on the sleeping porch) would be vehement. And loud, because Papa was hard of hearing.

“You have a point,” I agreed. “But I have a plan.”

Troub snickered.

“No, seriously
,
” I said. “The first order of business is to hire somebody to help my father with the farmwork. That means building a tenant house, something simple that can be put up in a few weeks. About the crowding and my mother—” I glanced at her. “That part of my plan will take a little longer, but it will be the answer to everything.”

“Oh, really?” Troub wrinkled her freckled nose, interested but skeptical.

“Yes, really.” I made myself sound more confident than I felt. I wasn’t sure that my mother would go for my scheme. “I’m going to build them a modern cottage with electricity and central heating and hot water and an indoor bathroom, all on one floor, so Mama Bess doesn’t have to climb the stairs and Papa doesn’t have to haul coal in and ashes out. Just the other day, I saw an ad for a Sears kit house in a magazine, an English-style bungalow that would be just about perfect. There are plenty of pretty places to build it on the farm. All my mother has to do is pick the spot. They could be moved in by October, snug and ready for winter.”

“A new house.” Troub, who had plumbed the depths of my passion for houses, eyed me doubtfully. “Won’t that be expensive?”

“The price for the house I saw was around twenty-two hundred dollars, so even with the extras I have in mind, it’s not likely to be more than four thousand dollars. And the Palmer account just keeps growing—I can afford it.”

Troub cocked her head. “What about the old farmhouse?”

“That’s where the real fun comes in.” I was beginning to get excited, the way I always do when I am about to be seduced by a house. “I could fix it up for
us
, Troub—do some painting, wire it for electricity, install a furnace, and get rid of those awful stoves. It will be our place to stay in, to travel from. When we’re there, we can hire somebody to cook and clean for us, and I can write. And we can invite friends from New York—Genevieve, Catharine, Mary Margaret. I’m sure they’ll jump at the chance to spend a few weeks at a writing retreat in the country.”

Inviting friends had been one of the thorny issues the last time Troub and I had stayed at the farm together. Mama Bess complained that we sat up too late and made too much noise, and Papa was annoyed when he found the outhouse occupied. (“Every time a fellow wants to use the privy, there’s some hen on the roost,” he’d grumbled.) I couldn’t blame them, actually. The farmhouse looked large, but the rooms were small, and there were only the two extra bedrooms upstairs. If four was a crowd, five or six was even more so—and a serious disruption in my parents’ daily routines. But if Mama Bess and Papa had their own house on the other side of the ridge, our visitors wouldn’t bother them.

“A writing retreat.” Troub sat up straight, catching my enthusiasm. “We could have our friends, and parties, and
both
of us could write.”

A couple of years before, Troub had showed me her war diary. She was trained as a nurse and had volunteered in France in the last years of the war, where she’d specialized as an anesthesiologist and been promoted to captain. When I saw what a splendid piece of writing she had done, I mailed it off posthaste to the editor of the
Atlantic Monthly
, who quite naturally snapped it up. We polished it a bit, and it ran as a serial in the magazine and would shortly be published as a book,
Sister
. Troub could be a fine writer if she settled down to it. But she had inherited a little money, enough so that she could choose to write or not to.

I’ve never had the luxury of
choosing
to write. For me, writing has always been a financial necessity. Now, that would be more true than ever, given my ambitious plan for the farm. But I could manage it. All I needed was a thousand words a day, a dozen short stories a year, another book-length serial for the
Country Gentleman
or the
Saturday Evening Post
, which paid better. By 1930, if I buckled down to work, my parents would be provided for and I would have a solid, secure fifty thousand dollars invested in the market. I could divide my time between New York and the farm. I could live where I chose and write what I liked, without having to depend on magazine fiction for a living.

Fifty thousand dollars. Now, looking back, fifty thousand dollars seems like a maniac’s hallucination. But it wasn’t, then. Then, we were all caught up in the rah-rah-rah of the euphoric days before the crash. The stock market was on its way to the moon and the future had no horizons. There was plenty of everything and more to be dreamed of and reached for. More, more, more. Fifty thousand dollars was a goal to be grasped, not a joke to be laughed at.

“Yes, friends and parties,” I replied. “We can both write. And spend time together, doing just as we like. What do you say?” I wanted her to come, but I couldn’t insist. Our commitment to each other had always been for the moment. We made no promises and imposed no obligations, other than to respond to each other in the truest of ways. When it came time to look ahead, I always felt the temporariness of our relationship. Sometimes, that served. Right now, it didn’t, quite.

Troub considered, scratched her freckled nose, frowned. After a moment, she said, “Guess I don’t have anything better to do. Sure, Rose. I’ll come.” That was pure Troub: easy come, easy go, with no plans of her own except to enjoy whatever she was doing, and no designs on a particular future. She added, with a shrug, “For a while, anyway. For as long as it suits both of us.”

I nodded. “Good,” I said. “I’m
glad
.”

“I’d enjoy being out in the country again,” she went on, as if she hadn’t heard my emphasis. “Do you think your father would mind if I bought a horse and kept it in his barn? I could ride in the afternoons.”

“He wouldn’t mind a bit,” I said. “Papa likes you.”

It was true. Mama Bess regarded Troub with more than a little jealousy and was always wondering, half-aloud and nervously, what others thought when they saw us so much together, and what they said about me behind her back, and what they said about
her
when they were talking about me. But Papa, who never cared a bean for what anybody thought, found Troub clever and fun loving and admired her tomboy energies.

“And he’s a horseman,” I added. “I’m sure he would be glad to help you find the perfect horse.” A Morgan, probably. Papa loved Morgan horses.

Troub nodded. “Tell you what, then. I’ll go home to New Hampshire and visit my father for a few weeks, then I’ll join you at the farm.” She flung both arms around me and kissed me. “Come on, Rose, smile. Another adventure, together.”

So we packed our bags and boxes. I made arrangements to sublease the Tirana house and cabled Mama Bess that we would book passage as soon as we could. In February, we took Mr. Bunting, the white Maltese terrier we had bought in Budapest the year before, and sailed on the Italian liner
Saturnia
for New York—a gay sailing, with good weather and lighthearted company. Somewhere off the coast of Spain, I settled down with my journal, making plans for the new year, for the next three years. I was looking forward to the fresh, sunny, open-air life of the farm, a busy life, active, energetic. I would content myself with magazine work, paying work, and free myself from the smoldering discontents about writing something authentic. As I looked out across the fog-veiled Azores, I thought how good it would be to live on an island, and filed it away, another possible dream, in another possible life.

Disembarking in New York on February 16, we paid an unexpected $4.50 in customs duties for Mr. Bunting, checked into the new and luxurious Berkshire Hotel, and dashed out onto Madison Avenue. Around us, the city was booming. It was splendid and lively and invigorating and above all
exciting
, reminding me how much I loved the streets and shops and noise and energetic bustle and hurry, loved seeing my agent and stockbroker and editors and, most of all, my friends, all of whom were writers—Mary Margaret McBride and Catharine Brody and Genevieve Parkhurst and Berta Hader. Like starving survivors rescued from a desert island, Troub and I indulged in giddy rounds of restaurants and shopping and the theater and parties and talk-talk-talking about ideas and books and politics and people.

And I saw Guy Moyston. We sat together in the bus-terminal cafeteria until past one a.m. on a cold February morning, over cups of hot coffee, holding hands across a stained wooden table and saying (but not quite
saying it
) a final good-bye. Tall, thin, thinner than he was when I had seen him last, glasses sliding to the end of his nose, he was dear to me, in a way. But not in the way he wanted.

Guy and I had met in the wild San Francisco days during the Great War. He was an Associated Press correspondent with an inquiring mind and a strong desire to push past the fences. He lent me his publishing-house connections and helped me find publishers for my books about Henry Ford and Charlie Chaplin. “You’re off to a swell start, Rose,” he had said. “I’ll be watching to see what you do—and expecting good things. See that you don’t disappoint me.”