A Wilder Rose: A Novel (11 page)

At another point, she said that she and Mary caught a rash at school and had to be smeared with sulfur and lard. They weren’t allowed to touch the baby. The baby was her brother.

Her
brother
? Until that moment, I hadn’t known that my mother had a brother! Or that he had died: “Little Brother got worse instead of better and one awful day he straightened out his little body and was dead.” I stared at the words until they blurred, their despair clutching like a tiny fist at my breaking heart.

Was my mother remembering her brother as she wrote this? Or her own infant son,
my
brother, who died before they could give him a name? Or perhaps even my son, dead at birth? My grandmother’s child, my mother’s, my own—three little boys who would never be men; three dead boys, never spoken of but never forgotten. That afternoon, I put her story aside and went for a long walk along the edge of the ravine, where I could weep alone, not only for the sons but also for the mothers who had never known them.

On Friday, I sent Carl a few rough-edited pages as a sample. On Monday, I was surprised and cheered by his telegram saying that “State’s Evidence” had sold to the
Country Gentleman
for twelve hundred dollars—and that the sample pages I had sent him were fine.

I telephoned Mama Bess to tell her the good news and went back to work. By the next Saturday, I had turned my mother’s handwritten manuscript into 160 rough-edited, typed pages. I sent the package to Carl for his opinion, not for submission. I already knew what he would say. He would tell me that the story was fascinating, but that it needed a great deal more work before he could send it out. Both statements would be accurate. It
was
a fascinating story. And it needed a great deal more work before anybody else had a look at it. That’s what I wanted Mama Bess to hear: that, in a literary agent’s professional opinion, the project was worth doing, but it wasn’t ready—it wasn’t
nearly
ready. What I sent was for his eyes only.

I didn’t do any serious writing of my own for the next few weeks. Mama Bess’s teeth were causing her a great deal of pain, so we made several trips on the train to St. Louis, where one dentist pulled the rest of her teeth and another fitted a new set of dentures for her—expensive but necessary, and she felt (and looked) much better when it was done. She could smile now, and she did, showing off her pretty teeth.

The weather that summer was horribly hot—the worst since 1901—with temperatures topping one hundred for day after debilitating day, with almost no breeze. I bought electric fans for both houses and set them up to blow over bowls of ice cubes (thank heaven for the electric refrigerator), and I sat at the typewriter with a damp towel over my head and shoulders.

But I was too exhausted by the heat, too stupefied, really, for serious work or even serious thought. During the long, languid days, I wrote letters and read and watered the rhododendrons and visited with Catharine, who came in July for a long stay. In the cooler evenings, Lucille drove out from town, and the four of us—Troub and I and Lucille and Catharine—had moonlight suppers on the garage roof, where we might hope to catch a breeze. We played bridge, and Troub and I told stories about our wild adventures with Zenobia, the Model T Ford we had bought in Paris in 1926 and driven through France and Italy to Albania.
Albania.
That life—our lovely villa, Ibraim’s fragrant garden, the minarets and medieval streets—seemed like a dream, another existence, another incarnation.

And as if in another dream, far away across the moonlit ridges, we could hear the hounds crying joyously on the trail of the elusive fox that, in Ozark foxhunting tradition, would be brought to bay but never killed. The dogs were always called off with a hunter’s horn, and the canny fox that fooled them was free to repeat his fleet performance another night. Briefly inspired by this wild night music, the vast night sky, and the clamoring dogs, I wrote a piece called “Reynard Runs,” which immediately sold to Elsie Jackson, editor of the
North American Review.

But even if it had been cool enough to do serious work, I wouldn’t have done any. There were only so many magazine markets, and Carl already had a substantial backlog of my stories, which he would sell when he could. And as I said, I write for money: when there’s no money to be had, there’s no point in writing. The check arrived for “State’s Evidence,” but it went quickly, and by the middle of June, I was down to seventy dollars in the bank and worried to distraction about the monthly bills I couldn’t pay. The electricity had been turned off once already, and I was afraid of losing the telephone. I hadn’t yet paid the big bill for Mama Bess’s dental work, and my own teeth needed attention. Mr. Palmer kept promising that our losses would be recouped when the market recovered, but I knew it wasn’t going to happen. I slept badly and dreamed of being pursued down a dark alley by a menacing creature named Debt, like a monstrously misshapen figure in a Thomas Nast cartoon.

A month after I sent “Pioneer Girl” to Carl, he returned it. It had been turned down by editors at
Good Housekeeping
,
Ladies’ Home Journal
,
Atlantic Monthly
, and
Country Home
. Everywhere he’d sent it. In its present form, he said, it had no future.

I was furious,
furious
.
Of course it had no future in that form! The typescript I had mailed him—for his opinion about the story itself, not the telling of it—was only lightly edited, a quick first pass through my mother’s manuscript. I hadn’t asked him or expected him to send it out: that was only inviting rejection. He had jeopardized the whole project.

And now I had to tell my mother.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“When Grandma Was a Little Girl”: 1930–1931

She was devastated, of course.

She looked at me across the little table in her kitchen. “I did so hope it was ready to send out,” she lamented and added sadly, as would any disappointed writer, “I spent
so much
time on it, Rose, weeks and weeks. All wasted.”

“It’s not wasted,” I replied consolingly, picking up my teacup. “You can’t give up yet. I’ve had more rejections than I can count, and I’ve learned not to take no for an answer. What I sent to Carl Brandt was just your manuscript, typed and rough-edited. He made a mistake when he sent it out—your draft wasn’t ready for submission. If it’s all right with you, I’ll run it through my typewriter again.” I gave her a smile. “Okay?”

Her mouth tightened and I remembered what Troub had said about her fussing over the edits. But “Pioneer Girl”
had
been rejected. If she refused to let me do another edit, it was the end of her project. She had to decide.

After another moment’s thought, she replied, warily, “I suppose I wouldn’t mind if you could fix it up a little.” She wrinkled her nose. “Just don’t turn it into fiction, like your stuff, Rose. I want my story to be
true.
”

I drained my teacup and put it down. “Tell me,” I said. “If it came to a choice, which would you, as an author, rather have—money or prestige?”

“Your father and I could use the money,” she said, and added primly, “I certainly never want to be a burden to my daughter.”

I winced. How often had I heard that refrain?

She reached for the teapot. “But I wouldn’t object to a little prestige.” She refilled my cup. “Why are you asking?”

“Because part of the material—the section about the Big Woods—could work as a children’s book. I was thinking of sending it to Berta Hader. She might be able to use it as the text for one of her picture books. Berta says that several of the publishing houses have developed juvenile departments—and she knows the editors. It likely wouldn’t be worth a great deal of money, but there might be some recognition, especially if it won a contest. Shall I send it to Berta? And maybe ask Carl about contests it would be eligible for?”

“I suppose,” she said, and poured another cup of tea for herself. After a moment, she added, “I’m glad you thought of that, Rose.”

It was as close as I was going to get to “thank you.” As I walked home through the hot August afternoon, I wished with no little irony that I had enough money in the bank to allow
me
to write for recognition—or even just to write something that pleased me, rather than my editors.

Recasting my mother’s material for children took ten full writing days. I pulled out the section that was set in the Big Woods and rewrote it from the original first-person narrative into a third-person story for children that I was calling “When Grandma Was a Little Girl.” My mother looked it over and gave her approval. On August 18, I sent the twenty-two-page typescript to Berta.

By that time,
Good Housekeeping
had bought one of my backlog of stories for twelve hundred dollars, enough to pay immediate bills and give Mama Bess the first half of her overdue 1930 subsidy. Feeling better, I settled down to work on the rest of her project: a wholesale rewrite of “Pioneer Girl.”

The day after Labor Day, the work was done. I had spent another nine working days on the rewrite, creating dramatic scenes from some of the narrative material, expanding and adding dialogue to many of the events, and building a stronger story line. The typescript now came to a little more than two hundred pages. Mama Bess said she liked what I had done, although I thought it was still flat and not nearly dramatic enough. But Genevieve, who had arrived for a brief stay, read it and was enthusiastic.

“This really ought to sell, Rose,” she said. “I wonder about Carl Brandt, though. He just doesn’t seem to have any oomph left. Mary Margaret told me last week that several of his writers have left him.”

And with that, I made up my mind. A week later, I told my mother I was going to New York. I wanted to look for a new agent.

I had been with Carl Brandt’s literary agency since 1920, when I was on my way to Europe and needed an agent to handle my Herbert Hoover biography and deal with editors while I was abroad. Over the course of the decade, our association had always been pleasant, and he had sold a lot of work for me at good prices. But as Genevieve said, the difficult market seemed to have taken the starch out of him. The mistake he had made with “Pioneer Girl”—sending it out when it clearly wasn’t ready—was bothersome. It was time for a new agent, someone more attuned to the new landscape.

On October 15, I got off the train at Penn Station with my trunk and my typewriter. I was nearly broke. But in one of those wonderful nick-of-time happenstances, I had just taken off my hat in Stella and Mary Margaret’s Greenwich Village apartment when Carl’s office called.
The
Country Gentleman
had bought “Paid in Full,” which I had written in a ten-day, all-out stint after I had finished the rewrite of my mother’s manuscript.

Now happily supplied with pocket money, I began a round of lunches, teas, dinners, and visits with old friends. The city was a manic mix of frenzied gaiety—in the nightclubs and speakeasies—and the bleak miseries of the unemployed men on the street, lined up for cups of hot coffee and soup.
Hoover is doomed
, I thought when I saw them.
No president could survive this kind of national disaster.

I hadn’t yet told Carl I was shopping for a new agent. When I dropped in at his office, he advised me not to try to sell “Pioneer Girl,” but I persisted, showing the newly rewritten version to several editors. George Lorimer, the editor of the
Saturday Evening Post,
looked it over, shaking his head.

“Interesting story,” he said. “But as it stands, too flat, not enough flesh on the bones. Why don’t you take this in hand and rewrite it as fiction, Mrs. Lane? Do that and we’d be glad to have another look.”

And Thomas Costain, the
Post
’s fiction editor, handed the typescript back to me and said that he might be willing to read my
father’s
pioneer stories, if I worked them up. “I should think that your mother’s experiences would be better suited to a woman’s magazine, rather than the
Post
,” he remarked dryly over the pipe stem he held in his teeth.

But the women’s magazines were publishing their backlog—and anyway, they were mostly interested in romantic fiction. I knew Mama Bess was disappointed when I wrote to tell her that “Pioneer Girl” and I weren’t having any luck.

I wasn’t having any luck finding an agent, either. The markets were slow; publishers were cutting back, and many had gone out of business. Discouraged, I began to think about going home, where Troub was holding the fort, taking care of Mr. Bunting, who had been sick, and keeping an eye on Mama Bess, who had a very bad cold.

And then something entirely unexpected happened. Dorothy Thompson’s husband, Sinclair Lewis, won the Nobel Prize for literature, the first American to receive it. Dorothy wanted to go to Stockholm with Hal (as she called her husband), so she asked me to stay in their Westport house and oversee the care of their six-month-old baby until they got back, around the first of March. They had a maid, a chauffeur, and a baby nurse, so it wouldn’t be an onerous duty. My job was simply to make sure that the household held together and report any problems to Dorothy. Westport was within easy commuting distance of the city, and I would be able to come and go as I wished. It would mean that Troub and I would not be together at Christmas for the first time in years. We would miss each other, but that couldn’t be helped.

And in the meantime, thankfully, I had found more work. Lowell Thomas, a roving journalist best known for his film of T. E. Lawrence,
With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia
, knew of me in connection with
White Shadows in the South Seas
, the book I had ghostwritten in 1919 for Frederick O’Brien. (An ill-fated project for me—I didn’t get the royalties I was promised—but a very successful one for O’Brien. The book became a bestseller, largely on the strength of my rewrite, and was made into an Academy Award–winning movie.) Thomas was publishing a series of first-person “true adventure” books. He needed a ghostwriter.

Hack work, yes, of course. But there were no other projects in sight, it was work I could do while I supervised the Lewis household in Westport, and I needed the money. Thomas was paying a thousand dollars a book for the two manuscripts he had in hand, and he had more lined up after those were done. What’s more, he held out the very attractive possibility that he might send me to Venezuela or Singapore to do some research for him. That scheme would eventually come to nothing, but while I thought it might work out, it was a powerful enticement. Altogether, the project had a golden glimmer. Instead of going home empty-handed, I’d be taking
cash cash cash.

I ghosted one of the Thomas books in November and December, and another in January and February, and got a start on a third in early March. I won’t pretend it was easy to keep at it, because the manuscript material ranged from very bad to utterly wretched. But I spent long days at the typewriter, feeling ironically grateful that Hal’s Nobel Prize for literature had awarded me the time and space to do this distinctly nonliterary work. But when Genevieve came to Westport for a weekend, I concealed the evidence of my cottage industry. It wouldn’t do for her to know that I was ghostwriting for Lowell Thomas. I was perfectly aware that other writers were doing the very same thing, when they were lucky enough to get the work, but it was a secret that every ghostwriter intended to keep.

And then a surprise. In mid-February, I received a call from Berta Hader, to whom I had sent “When Grandma Was a Little Girl” the previous August, hoping that she—or one of her editors—might think it had merit as a picture book. Berta and Elmer had written and illustrated a children’s book that Knopf had published the previous May
.
Their editor was Marion Fiery, who had begun her career in the children’s section of the New York Public Library, had moved to E. P. Dutton’s new juvenile department in 1925, and was hired by Knopf in 1928 to start a new juvenile program. Berta had shown “When Grandma Was a Little Girl” to Fiery, who liked it—with reservations.

Berta arranged to introduce me to Marion Fiery at a Sunday afternoon get-together at the Haders’ beautiful, hand-built stone house on River Road in Nyack, overlooking the Hudson. It was a congenial gathering of artists and writers, and afterward, Marion and I (by this time on a first-name basis) rode the bus into the city. I took her to the Brevoort Hotel for supper and an evening’s talk. She said she liked “Grandma” because it covered a period of American history about which almost nothing had been written for boys and girls. But she was thinking of it as a story for young readers, eight to ten years old, rather than as a picture book for children. If she bought it for that market, it would need to be lengthened to about twenty-five thousand words and retitled.

The next day, back at Westport, I wrote to Mama Bess, who had already received a letter from Marion confirming Knopf’s interest. She didn’t have a copy of the version I had sent to Berta, so I told her where to find my carbon copy in the filing cabinet beside my desk on the upstairs porch. Currently, the story was set during the winter, so to get the additional words Marion wanted, I suggested that Mama Bess expand it to include the other three seasons, a full year, adding as many details of pioneer life as she could remember. I told her that if she would rather write in first person (always easier for her), I would change it to third when I typed it.

“Just get another tablet,” I wrote, “and start putting down whatever comes into your mind, in any order. When I come home, I’ll go through the whole thing. Then we’ll send your book off to your editor and get the contract signed.” I added that I hoped she was pleased. It would be quite a feather in her cap to have her book published by Knopf, a major publisher.

Her book.
This was a tricky letter. I had made a great many changes to my mother’s original material. I wasn’t sure how carefully she had read the rewritten pages I sent to Berta or even how well she remembered her original work. I also knew that in order to have the confidence and the motivation to go on writing, she needed to hear that it was
her
book that would be published. On such fictions our confidence, our relationships with others, and even our lives, are often built.

I had not corrected Marion’s impression that what she had read was entirely my mother’s work. As far as she knew, it was produced by a natural, untutored talent. She wanted it that way, of course. Marion made no secret of the fact that there was a certain appeal in the idea of a sweet, sixty-something farm housewife sitting down at her desk, alone, to write the remembered tales of her pioneer childhood. It was the kind of human interest drama that any publishing house would make the most of.