A Wilder Rose: A Novel (8 page)

CHAPTER FOUR

“This Is the End”: 1929

Thinking back, I find it odd that we had so little inkling on that New Year’s Eve of the cataclysm to come. The country was on the cusp of irrevocable change, and no one seemed to suspect a thing. I’ve often thought about that, wondering what signs of impending disaster we missed, what
everyone
missed. The whole world sailed on, gallant and gay, like a four-masted schooner with a band playing on the foredeck and flags flying and all canvas set, into an ocean marked ominously on the map, “Here Be Dragons.” And lo! A dragon rises out of the depths and swallows the ship, masts and flags and all hands on board.

Troub and I might have been isolated at the farm, but we weren’t entirely cut off from the outside world. We had the
Mansfield
Mirror
and the
Wright County Republican
, although their coverage of the national news was limited. The
Kansas City
Star
and the radio news broadcasts did a better job updating us on the world’s daily doings, some of which were memorable. On Valentine’s Day, in a Chicago garage, Al Capone’s gang gunned down seven members of Bugs Moran’s gang in a dispute over control of the bootlegging business in Chicago. In early March, Herbert Hoover was sworn in as president; in response, sales of my reissued 1920 biography,
The Making of Herbert Hoover
, rose in a brief, happy flurry, then subsided as the president settled into the business of governing and the rest of the world went on with whatever it was doing. Amos ’n’ Andy broadcast their first comedy program on NBC radio, and on the Mansfield square, men could be heard muttering, “Holy mackerel.” The first all-color talking picture,
On with the Show
, opened in New York, memorable only for the song “Am I Blue?” Babe Ruth hit his five hundredth home run, the first Academy Awards were presented, and Charles Lindbergh got married. Wyatt Earp died, and his death somehow seemed a symbol of the closing of the Western frontier, although in reality it had been closed for decades. Shortly thereafter the first regular coast-to-coast air service began, and a new frontier of time and space was inaugurated: you could travel by plane and train from New York to Los Angeles in an astoundingly short three days.

But there were no such memorable doings at Rocky Ridge, where this last comfortable year slipped by in an agreeably mind-numbing swirl of small-town activities. I was well aware of the paradox of this, for such things enshrined the narrowly domestic lives of small-town women. And yet, some domesticities—women’s needlework and cooking—seem to me to rise to the level of a folk art and have always attracted and intrigued me. At least once a week, Troub and I went with my mother to her club meetings—the Bridge Club, the Embroidery Club, the Interesting Hour Club, the Athenians, and the Justamere Club (which was exactly what it sounds like: just a mere club)—where the local hierarchy was on display and in fine feather. Mama Bess invited the clubs to her new home, where she served her famous gingerbread and I contributed French pastries. Mama’s friends were open-mouthed at the luxury of central heat, the indulgence of electric refrigeration, and the distinctive textures and Mediterranean colors of the rough-plastered walls, which were nothing at all like the faded pink cabbage roses of their parlor wallpaper.

Although I had grown up in Mansfield, I was always an observer rather than a participant in these gatherings, and the conversations gave me plenty of story material. Books were seldom discussed and politics rarely, unless a local politician or prominent church member had somehow disgraced himself and was being “talked about.” But there were always conversations about children, needlework, recipes, flowers, and friends, observations about the latter often couched in snide but unoriginal asides. I once heard Mrs. Stevens tell one of her friends, “If you can’t say something nice about her, dear, come sit over here by me and
whisper
it.”

And there was Mildred Hill, who frequently remarked in a tone of vague tolerance (as if all my present sins were rooted in our shared past), “Oh, I remember our wild Rose when she still grew in our little garden,” and went on to wonder, with a critical click of her tongue, “I just can’t imagine how a body can make as much money as she does by simply putting words on paper.”
Click click
. And in a lower voice, dark with discontent, “Don’t seem right, someway.”
Click.

Or Hazel Thomas, who gazed over her drugstore spectacles at Catharine (lighting a cigarette) and shrilled, “Why, I never saw a
lady
smoke before.” And Troub responded, with innocent astonishment, “Mrs. Thomas, I am amazed. I’m wondering just where you might have traveled. Not to a city of any size, I imagine.”

Mrs. Thomas had been all her life in Mansfield, of course, where only men and chimneys smoked,
ladies
never. But then everyone knew that Catharine Brody wrote books about S-E-X, so she was clearly no lady. And I wrote books about people like Charlie Chaplin and Jack London and President Hoover and lived in Greenwich Village and went to Communist rallies and traveled with men (
foreign
men, with guns!) in the remotest mountains of Eastern Europe, so I was no lady, either. No wonder that, for Mildred Hill and the rest of my mother’s friends, I was a wild Rose—a divorced Rose, a Rose without a husband, a Rose who refused to plant herself in a Mansfield garden and produce baby Roses. I’m sure this was remarked upon behind my back. No one dared do it to my face, for I was known to have a sharp tongue: a Rose with thorns.

But the world was intruding into Mansfield’s isolation. Radios brought in the news from Chicago and New York and San Francisco. The livery stable and the blacksmith had been replaced by an automobile repair shop. The Bonny Theater showed talkies and put up posters of cigarette-smoking flappers on the wall out front. The town band played dance music at the bandstand on the square, and the young people (except for the Baptists) defiantly danced the Charleston and the infamous “Baltimore Buzz”:

First you take your babe and gently hold her,

Then you lay your head upon her shoulder.

Next you walk just like your legs are breaking.

Do a fango like a tango,

Then you start the shimmie to shaking.

The Mansfield Grays played other area teams on the town baseball field, and Mr. Pierson, who ran the pool hall, made surreptitious book on the games. Under the influence of the world-famous golfer Bobby Jones, the men who could afford it (like Mr. Kerry of the bank) had gone golf crazy, and there was a new golf club and golf course, north of town on newly paved Highway 5.

The paving of the local roads, however much ballyhooed, led not to the hoped-for prosperity but to a disappointing decline. Instead of shopping in Mansfield (population 870), people hopped into their Fords and Buicks and Oldsmobiles and drove to Mountain Grove for groceries or to Springfield for clothes and tools and a fancy restaurant dinner. Not even the
Mansfield Mirror
’s
repeated exhortations to “buy from your local merchant to keep him in business” could stem the enthusiastic tide of outward-bound commerce. And it wasn’t just shopping trips. Everybody who had a car (and there wasn’t any excuse for not having one, with credit so easy to get) spent Sundays sightseeing, to the point where the pastors of the town’s churches felt they had to preach against the sin of skipping church just to go pleasure driving.

There were a few hot days in July, but the weather was fine for most of that last easy summer, and we whiled away the time with simple pleasures. Troub and I took the parents driving and ate dinner and supper with them at the Rock House or invited them to Rocky Ridge. We picnicked at the Gasconade River, where Sparkle and Mr. Bunting chased birds and lizards and Troub and I took off our shoes and danced barefoot in the shallows and giggled when the minnows nibbled our toes. We braved the bee-laden bushes to pick blackberries and raspberries for jam and bought peaches for canning from the Erb Orchard at Cedar Gap. In August, my new Mansfield friend Lucille Murphy and I drove to St. Louis for shopping and then west across the state to Kansas City before heading back home. In September, I canned corn relish, and Troub and I went to the Springfield Dahlia Show and to the Wright County Fair and Stock Show, where a man lit his clothes on fire and jumped into a flaming tank, while awed spectators gasped and trembled at the foolhardiness of the deed.

Troub and my father had gone to Mexico, Missouri (which called itself the “Saddle Horse Capital of the World”), where Troub bought a Morgan gelding. She named the horse Governor, after Governor of Orleans, a Morgan my father had once had at the farm. Troub’s Governor was a big horse and almost too much for her. I was concerned, but she bravely persevered and rode him nearly every day. She also bought a little black mare named Molly and a pony named Topsy. Our guests were encouraged to bring trousers so they could ride with Troub along the country lanes and woodland paths.

We had plenty of guests in that easygoing year. Genevieve came for several short visits, to work on her book. Catharine Brody arrived in March and stayed for two months, then returned later in the fall. Her first novel,
Babe Evanson
, had come out in 1928 to mixed reviews; her 1932 novel,
Nobody Starves
, would be a bestseller, and she would be hailed as one of the “new realists.”

Catharine made news in Mansfield, but not for her books. She was a small woman with brown hair and thick glasses, who “looked Jewish.” This latter observation was passed along to me by my mother, who made sure that I was informed about the reception my friends enjoyed (or otherwise) among
her
friends.

Troub was writing, too, so for a while, there were four typewriters clattering away at Rocky Ridge. We enclosed the upstairs sleeping porch against the rain, and there was plenty of space to work—a pleasant space, too. The porch overlooked green trees and a grassy slope and caught the breeze. In the evenings, there was chess, jigsaw puzzles, books read aloud, stories shared, and conversation—real conversation, stimulating conversation, about politics, culture, books, films. Since we were the liveliest group in town, acquaintances from Mansfield sometimes joined us, although only one—Lucille Murphy—had a mind that was broader than a bridge plank. Lucille, who with her husband, Eddie, ran the Mansfield laundry, was pretty and full of fun and serious questions about life and love, and she enjoyed playing chess. As the year went on, Troub and I saw more and more of Lucille and less and less of Eddie.

Oh, there were dark moments. There were times when I told Troub that I would give anything to hear a real idea come out of somebody’s mouth, and that if I had to listen to yet another bit of trivial tittle-tattle I would go crazy.

“If you’re unhappy, let’s leave,” she would say sensibly.

“I can’t,” I would say and throw up my hands. “I’m working.”

And I was. Happy or unhappy, I was producing, and selling, my usual magazine fiction.
I worked most of the summer on a serial, “An Albanian Romance,” and was disappointed when Carl Brandt wrote that he couldn’t sell it anywhere. While there was plenty in the Palmer account, I continued to write because I was, as usual, in constant need of money (
cash cash cash
). There was the electric bill and the rent to pay to my mother every month, and salaries for Jess (Papa’s hired man) and our cook-housekeeper, Mrs. Capper, whom Troub had found through a work-wanted ad. Mrs. Capper stayed all week (she slept downstairs in the room that had been my parents’) and took the bus back to Springfield on weekends.

And we weren’t quite finished with our remodeling and landscaping. In June, we installed an electric water heater so we could have hot baths without carrying water; in September, a new lawn; in October, an automatic steam-heating system with an oil burner that was supposed to keep the whole house warm. My mother and I both needed expensive dental work, which required several train trips to St. Louis. And I was planning to go to New York in December, where I would stay with Genevieve and see Carl Brandt and my editors and friends, and shop, of course.
Cash cash cash.
At the end of August, I withdrew ten thousand dollars from my Palmer account—not because I was worried about the security of the market but because I wanted to catch up on my obligations.

Ten thousand dollars—oh, if I had only had the wisdom to withdraw all of the money and close the account right then and there, things would have been very different. I could have paid all my bills and tucked the rest under the mattress.

But I didn’t. None of us were wise where the market was concerned. We might have heard a few uncomfortable warnings in the newspapers or on the radio, if we had known how to look and listen. But we continued to crest the wave of national exuberance and, like everyone else in America, didn’t pause to look beneath its surface. The minor breaks in the market—in August and September—didn’t worry us: they were explained as “technical adjustments,” like the other little ups and downs and zigs and zags we were used to. There were disquieting moments, like the minicrash in March, when people who had bought on margin got panicky. And there were a few like Roger Babson, who published a respected investment newsletter and uttered the gloomy prediction, with the Dow at its all-time September high of 381: “Sooner or later a crash is coming, and it may be terrific.”

But the philosophy of the twenties held that “later” was a long time away. Babson’s pessimism was countered by the optimism of other economists like Irving Fisher, who helpfully explained that stock prices had reached a “permanently high plateau” and that the “ever-ascending curve of American prosperity” was sturdy enough to survive whatever small breaks might interrupt it. On September 11, the
Wall Street Journal
published its thought for the day, Mark Twain’s wry wisdom: “Don’t part with your illusions; when they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.” We held on to our illusions until the end of October, scarcely knowing that they were just that.