A Wilder Rose: A Novel
Read A Wilder Rose: A Novel Online
Authors: Susan Wittig Albert
BOOKS BY SUSAN WITTIG ALBERT
An Extraordinary Year of Ordinary Days
Together, Alone: A Memoir of Marriage and Place
The China Bayles Mysteries
The Darling Dahlias Mysteries
The Cottage Tales of Beatrix Potter
Writing from Life: Telling Your Soul’s Story
Work of Her Own
W
ITH
B
ILL
A
LBERT
The Robin Paige Victorian-Edwardian Mysteries
E
DITED
A
NTHOLOGIES
What Wildness Is This: Women Write about the Southwest
With Courage and Common Sense: Memoirs from the Older Women’s Legacy Circle
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2015 Susan Wittig Albert
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of
Amazon.com
, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781477849606
ISBN-10: 1477849602
Cover design by Elsie Lyons
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014952555
For Bill Holtz, whose interest in Rose made this book possible, and Bill Albert, whose support made it happen.
CONTENTS
“I’m sure of one thing,” she said earnestly. “It hurts to—to let go of anything beautiful. But something will come to take its place, something different, of course, but better. The future’s always better than we can possibly think it will be . . . We ought to live
confidently
. Because whatever’s ahead, it’s going to be better than we’ve had.”
Rose Wilder Lane
Diverging Roads
A NOTE TO THE READER
A Wilder Rose
is the true story of Rose Wilder Lane and her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, whose creative collaboration produced
Little House in the Big Woods
and seven more books in the Little House
series. It is the tale of two exceptional women: a mother who had a fascinating pioneer story to tell but whose writing skills were not up to the challenge of shaping and polishing it for publication; and a daughter, a gifted and much-published author, who had both the skill to turn her mother’s stories into memorable books and the publishing connections that would get them into print.
Fortunately for us, their teamwork (complicated, vexed, and reluctant on both sides) has been documented in Rose’s unpublished diaries and journals and in Laura’s unpublished letters. Rose’s Line-A-Day diaries, particularly, allow us to witness her struggle with the daily angers, frustrations, and fears that distanced her from her mother—and the duty, compassion, and caring that pulled her closer. They especially help us understand the difficult contexts of time, place, and politics within which these women lived and out of which their writings were born.
But while the story itself is true,
A Wilder Rose
is a novel. With the diaries, journals, and letters as my guide, I have taken my own imaginative journey through the real events of those years. I have treated the real people as fictional characters and the real events as fictional events. I have chosen some storylines to expand and dramatize and omitted others; I have put words into people’s mouths and listened in on their internal dialogue; I have invented incidents and imagined settings. In all this, I am exactly as true to the real events, settings, and people of
A Wilder Rose
as Rose and Laura were true to the real events, settings, and people of the Ingalls family’s pioneer wanderings across the American plains. The books they wrote are fictional representations of Laura’s life as a child growing into young womanhood;
A Wilder Rose
is a fictional representation of Rose’s life in the 1930s and her struggle—not always successful—to make sense of it all.
In the twelve years spanned by this novel (1928–1939), Rose Wilder Lane lived and worked under the long, dark shadow of the Great Depression, the Dirty Thirties, and the often desperate, always unrelenting need for money. In fact, the Little House
books might never have been written if the stock market hadn’t crashed in 1929, wiping out Rose’s savings and leaving her stranded at her parents’ farm. There, she was available to work with the family stories her mother provided—and could use those same remembered stories as elements of her two most acclaimed novels,
Let the Hurricane Roar
(1932) and
Free Land
(1938).
Rose wrote no more fiction after she finished working on
These Happy Golden Years
in 1942, but she didn’t lose her voice. Instead, she found her passion and turned to writing on behalf of American individualism. Her book
The Discovery of Freedom: Man’s Struggle Against Authority
(1943) was barely acknowledged when it was published, two years into the Second World War. Today, it is recognized as one of the most passionate documents of twentieth-century American libertarian thought.
Susan Wittig Albert
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
The Little House on King Street Danbury, Connecticut: April 1939
With an audible sigh, Rose Lane rolled the letter out of her Underwood typewriter and signed it:
Much love as always, Rose.
She dropped the page onto the stack of orange-covered tablets her mother had sent her a year and a half before. The letter committed her to finish the rewrite and get the typescript of her mother’s book in the mail by the middle of next month. It meant putting off her own paying work—the article she was writing for
Woman’s Day.
But she’d already had the manuscript so long that the book had missed Harper’s 1938 list. Mama Bess had forwarded a chiding letter from her editor, Ida Louise Raymond, making it clear that
By the Shores of Silver Lake
had to be finished quickly in order to appear in this year’s fall catalogue.
But she should be able to meet the deadline. Her mother had already agreed to the changes that had to be made. “Do what you think best,” Mama Bess had written, sounding resigned. “It’s your fine touch that makes all the difference.” If there weren’t too many interruptions, Rose could finish the pen revisions in a few weeks. This time, though, she would pay somebody—maybe Norma Lee, who could use the money—to retype the manuscript, which would at least get
that
job off her desk.
The window was open over the kitchen table, covered in yellow-and-blue oilcloth, and the yellow dotted-swiss curtains blew gently into the room. With the breeze came the scent of lilacs and the sound of the radio: the Andrews Sisters’ hit song “Bei Mir Bist du Schön,” banned the month before by Hitler’s Nazi regime because the composer and the lyricist were Jewish. The swingy tune was punctuated by the irregular beats of Russell Ogg’s hammer as he worked on an upstairs study for Rose. When it was finished, she would no longer have to write at the kitchen table. And bookshelves, ah, yes, there would be bookshelves! At last, she could begin emptying the boxes of books—her entire personal library—that Mama Bess had shipped from Rocky Ridge, the farm in Mansfield, Missouri. When that job was done, she would finally feel settled, she hoped; as settled as she ever felt anywhere, more settled than she had felt since she and Helen Boylston—Troub—had moved into their Albanian house a dozen years before.
Rose leaned back in her chair, enjoying the rich fragrance of chicken pie and apple cobbler. (Chickens had to be obtained from a local farmer until she had her own flock; the apples were from her own backyard trees.) Supper would be a celebration of sorts: the first anniversary of her purchase of the little farmhouse. Situated on several acres some four miles outside of Danbury, on the extension of King Street, it was a small, two-story, white clapboard house with a porch on the front and a woodshed on the back. It had come with lush lilacs and gnarly apple trees; two tenacious tomcats who preferred to stay when the previous owners had left; and a manageable nine-hundred-dollar mortgage, which had put Rose’s initial investment at just thirty-five hundred dollars. The pretty woodland around the house sloped gently down to Sterns Pond, the three-acre lake where, one Saturday morning last month, Russell and his wife, Norma Lee, had caught enough largemouth bass to feed the three of them and the Levines, Don and Ruth, who had come over from Norwalk for a fish fry and an evening’s conversation.
Outside, Rose heard a car door slam—the Oggs’ old Ford coupe—and quick steps on the back stairs. “Hello,” a light voice called. “It’s me.”
The back door opened and Norma Lee came in with a sack of groceries. She was an attractive young woman in her early twenties, dark haired and dark eyed, with a high, wide forehead and prominent cheeks narrowing to a pointed chin. Rose, who at fifty-three was struggling to come to terms with being short, pudgy, and very gray, envied her young friend’s trim figure. Her jacket, slim skirt, and blouse had likely come from a used-clothing shop in the city, since the Oggs were making do on something like twenty dollars a week. Still, she looked stylish and nicely put together, whatever she wore.
But Norma Lee wasn’t just a pretty girl. She was bright, perceptive, and full of energy. She had earned undergraduate degrees in English and journalism, was taking classes in English at Radcliffe, and had already mapped out her future as a reporter and feature writer. Rose, both her mentor and her surrogate mother, had helped her place an article in
The Forum
about the flat that she and Russell rented in a New York tenement. It was going to be excerpted in the August issue of
Reader’s Digest
, too.
Norma Lee put the bag on the counter, sniffing. “Chicken pie! Oh, Mrs. Lane, my favorite! Russell’s too.” She began taking things out of the bag. “Thought I’d pick up a few items for the weekend. Extra butter, eggs, sugar.” She held up a brightly labeled can and danced a little jig to demonstrate her delight. “Baker’s Coconut.”
“You’re sweet,” Rose said. “We’ll bake that cake tomorrow.”
Norma Lee and Russell, recent college graduates, still more recently married, were the latest addition to what Rose thought of as her family. The three boys she thought of as her “somewhat adopted” sons—Rexh Meta and John and Al Turner—were all far away. And since Norma Lee and Russell had given up their flat and come for an extended visit, getting settled in the new house had been easier, even fun. Russell was dark haired, tall, gangly, and painfully thin—he needed to get a few good meals under his belt. Although his career interest was photography, he was handy around the place, always willing to add a wall here, take one out there, dig a garden, plant a tree—and he was unfailingly cheerful about it. Just the week before, Rose had drawn the plans for a small chicken coop that Russell had agreed to build. When the weather was reliably warm, she planned to get a batch of baby chicks and start a laying flock—white leghorns, she thought, like the chickens her mother used to raise at Rocky Ridge.
Russell was handy, yes. But it was Norma Lee’s company that Rose enjoyed most. The girl loved to help hang wallpaper, paint woodwork, and sew curtains. But best of all were the times when she and Rose put their heads together over a piece of Norma Lee’s writing, the teacher offering advice and criticism, the student attentive, focused, taking it all in—and there was always a great deal to take in. Rose wielded her red pencil freely, and Norma Lee made no secret of her belief that Mrs. Lane (she said the words with a warm affection that belied their formality) wrote every bit as well as—and maybe even better than—the writers in the literary canon she was studying.
To which Rose, laughing, responded that Norma Lee was young and impressionable and would meet a great many very good writers in the course of her career. Rose enjoyed being appreciated. But more than that, she liked having young people around—especially young people with energy, ideas, a clear-eyed relish for life, a fresh-hearted belief in the hoped-for improbable. Their optimism boosted her out of the blues that sometimes threatened to swamp her. And Norma Lee had become a friend—Rose’s first real friend since Troub.
Irrepressible Troub, short for Troubles, for her habit of taking tumbles, big and small, and landing on her feet with a grin and a toss of her head. Rose and Troub had shared a house and a life in Tirana, Albania, in those hopeful, hedonistic years before the world spun merrily off the cliff.
Tirana. Today, this morning, the word rang like a bell with the bitter peal of loss. Just the evening before, Robert Trout had reported on the
CBS World News Roundup
that
Mussolini had invaded Albania. King Zog—who had once proposed to Rose (or perhaps this was a fanciful story she had invented to entertain Mama Bess and her Mansfield friends)—was likely to be deposed.
And who could tell what would happen to Rexh? Rexh Meta, the ragtag Moslem orphan with the dirty red Turkish fez, who had rescued her from a dangerous, perhaps even deadly situation when she was traveling in the Albanian mountains. Rose had sent the boy to a vocational school in Tirana and then, when he’d demonstrated his gift for learning, funded his Cambridge education. Rexh was married now, and he and his wife and little daughter Borë-Rose (“a rose in snow,” she was called, to Rose’s delight) were back in Albania, living in the thick of it. Rose had cabled him the week before, offering safe haven if he and his family wanted to emigrate. But Rexh was committed to his country. She knew he would never leave.
Rose herself would have liked to return to the Balkans, to revisit the mountains and the ancient tribal ways she’d written about in
The Peaks of Shala
in 1923. But to go back was impossible. Even before the threat of a Europe-wide war, the Albania she loved existed only in the realm of places and people remembered and written about—seen and experienced vividly then, in dimensions and bright colors, but now fading to a soft sepia, the figures and faces blurred, the voices indistinct. Her dreams, that dream and others, seemed to have shrunk within a ruthless, implacable circle of reality, starved by the dwindling of imagination, darkened by the flickering-out of an inner intensity. In a way, it was a relief not to have dreams—to have, instead, what she had now. A few friends, this little house and its domestic pleasures of paint and wallpaper and garden. It was enough. She was learning to content herself with the possible and leave the improbable to those who still dreamed.
“Sweet?” Norma Lee asked with an easy laugh. “I am not sweet. I am sneaky. I am manipulative. If you have butter and eggs and coconut, you can bake Russell that cake he lives for.” She took off her jacket and hung it on the peg by the door. Holding her loose dark hair away from the flame, she bent over the gas stove to light her cigarette, then put the teakettle on the burner. “Hey—I’m ready for a cuppa. You want one?”
“You’ll singe your hair doing that, Norma Lee. Use a match.” Rose pushed the typewriter to the middle of the table and picked up her own cigarettes. “Tea would be grand.”
In a few moments they were settled at the table with their cups and cigarettes, the lilac breeze brushing over them, Russell’s hammer and the radio silent for the moment, a phoebe singing, bright and clear, in the maple outside the window.
Norma Lee glanced at the typewriter and then at the orange notebooks. “What are you working on? Some new fiction, I hope.” She paused and added, with a certain casual significance, “It’s been awhile, hasn’t it?” That was Norma Lee, always ready with questions and impertinent little nudges.
“I was writing a letter to Mama Bess,” Rose said matter-of-factly. She hadn’t written a piece of fiction for almost two years. Not since
Free Land
, which had been recommended by the
New York Times
for a Pulitzer
.
Of course, there had always been arid stretches over the course of her nearly thirty-year writing career—what writer didn’t dry up now and then? And she had ideas for nonfiction—for articles, plenty of them, mostly having to do with politics or the economy. But she had never gone this long without an idea for a
story
, and the drought was beginning to frighten her. She tapped her cigarette ash into a glass ashtray that bore the logo of the
Saturday Evening Post.
“The editor at Harper says she needs my mother’s book by the end of next month. Otherwise, it won’t get into the fall catalogue.”
“That’s
Silver Lake
, I suppose.” Norma Lee made a wry face. “You can’t put it off? If you had a few free days to work on your own material—”
Rose cut in. “I’ve put it off long enough. I promised my mother I’d finish it.”
Norma Lee kicked off her patent-leather pumps and flexed her toes in her cheap rayon stockings. “I hope Mrs. Wilder knows how lucky she is to have you for a daughter. I’ve seen the months of work you put in on her stuff. Really, Mrs. Lane. No other writer would do it—or
could
do it. I really can’t believe your name isn’t on those books.”
Rose smiled tolerantly. She and Norma Lee had met in 1936, at the end of the summer that she had finally managed to escape from the farm. She was living at the Tiger Hotel in Columbia and working on her mother’s fourth book,
On the Banks of
Plum Creek.
That September had been hot and lonely, and Norma Lee—a bright and observant honors student at the university and an intern at the
Columbia
Daily Tribune
—had blown into it like a cheerful October breeze. She had been assigned to interview an author. Rose—whose novel about pioneer life,
Let the Hurricane Roar
, had been serialized in the
Saturday Evening Post
and then published as a book—was the closest thing to a famous author the city had ever seen. A story about her would be a scoop. Norma Lee pounced.
Rose and the girl were a good match, and they quickly became friends. One evening, in an unguarded moment, Rose had shown the girl the work she was doing on her mother’s draft of
On the Banks of Plum Creek
, which had led Norma Lee to read the three books that were already in print:
Little House in the Big Woods
,
Farmer Boy
, and
Little House on the Prairie
.
She had admired them, which had led to long conversations about the writing and editing process and about Norma Lee’s journalism classes and her ambitions. Satisfying conversations for Rose, whose natural eloquence was ignited into exuberance by an enthusiastic listener, as a spark lights a Roman candle.
The next summer, 1937, Rose had moved to the Grosvenor Hotel in New York, where she settled down to work on another
Saturday Evening Post
serial,
Free Land
. Norma Lee had followed (didn’t all would-be writers end up in New York?) and she’d been around when Rose received Mama Bess’s draft of
By the Shores of Silver Lake.
Deeply inquisitive about the workings of authorship and the making of books, Norma Lee made it her business to see what was going on. Impertinent or not, once she had seen the extent of Rose’s rewriting, she made no secret of the way she felt: Rose’s name really ought to be on those books.