A Wilder Rose: A Novel (17 page)

But she was faced with a hard choice. To become independent in the long run, she would have to depend on me in the short run. I knew it was a bitter pill for her to swallow.

She tried to get around it by saying in a careless, offhand way, “Well, then, I suppose I’ll have to go over it once more. When I’m finished, if you can spare the time from your work, Rose, maybe you could type it.” She sighed. “Again.”

“I’ll be glad to,” I said and looked at her squarely. “But I won’t do it unless you let me make the necessary changes.”

She looked away for a moment. By agreeing, she risked ceding—in her mind, at least—a portion of the ownership of her book.
Farmer Boy
would be mine as well as hers, even though my name would never be on it. She didn’t like the thought—but she was beginning to see that she would have to live with it.

She met my eyes and looked away. Then met my eyes again. “Yes,” she said, very quietly. “Yes. Fine. Whatever you have to do to make it acceptable.”

“Good,” I said and gave her the carbon of the typescript that had gone to Harper. I suggested that she go through and mark the sections that Miss Raymond wanted cut, then rewrite, paying attention to the other criticisms.

I made another suggestion, too. Miss Raymond had noticed, as had I, the lack of landscape descriptions in the book. My mother had never been to Papa’s boyhood farm home in New York State. New York farm. She couldn’t describe what she had never seen. And she wasn’t the kind of writer who could imagine a setting she had never visited. That would be “fiction.”

“It’s an entirely understandable problem,” I told my mother, wanting to reassure her. “I know that the task of making word pictures for blind Aunt Mary gave you the gift of description. But in this book, all you have to go on are Papa’s descriptions, and he’s not very free with his words.”

She bit her lip, her blue eyes troubled. “If I were younger, I’d go and have a look for myself. But as it is, I don’t see how I can manage. Your father would never leave right now, with all the autumn work to be done. And I couldn’t go alone.”

“I just got my check from the
Post
,” I said, “and I want to go to New York City and see some people. Instead of taking the train, I could drive upstate to the farm where Papa grew up and take notes for you. It’ll only mean an extra week—two, at the outside.”

My mother sighed. “I hate to see you spend so much of your time on my project,” she said heavily. “But I suppose it has to be done.”

“I think it does,” I said and poured her another cup of tea.

She went back to the cinnamon toast on her plate. “Thank you,” she added in a low voice.

I couldn’t be sure whether she was thanking me for the tea or for the offer of a week’s research at the Wilder farm and the rewrite of her book. But it didn’t matter. The words were sweet.

“You’re welcome,” I replied and smiled. It felt as if we had achieved some sort of truce.

Lucille Murphy, always eager for a new adventure (and certainly ready to get away from Eddie for a month or so), volunteered to come along. We left the next week. I was glad for the company and for someone to share the driving. Lucille was a good companion. I thought I was good for her, too, as our conversations often took her outside the bounds of her day-to-day experience
.

Since one purpose for the trip was to gather material for
Farmer Boy
, we drove north to Spring Valley, in the southeastern corner of Minnesota, where my Wilder grandparents had settled after they left New York State. Papa and Mama Bess and I had spent eighteen months with them in the early 1890s, recuperating after the disastrous last days on the homestead claim. All the Wilders were gone now except Papa and his younger brother, Uncle Perley, who still lived in Louisiana. The grandparents had died long ago, and Aunt E.J. and Uncle Royal, Papa’s older brother, in the last few years.

But I found the farm and the church and a few people who still remembered us. I wrote to my mother with a message from Mrs. Landers, who (with a good-natured laugh) directed me to tell Mama Bess to send back the pie tin she had borrowed, full of gingerbread, when we left there in 1891.

“She don’t need to bother with the gingerbread,” Mrs. Landers said. “Just the tin’ll do.” My mother, chagrined at having borrowed something so very long ago and failed to return it, immediately sent a pie tin from her own kitchen, with a note and a pair of crocheted doilies as an apology.

The trip was rather like a vacation. Lucille was lively and gay, and for the first time in too long, I could relax and be cheerful—and why not? The air was crisp and the autumn trees flamed like crimson and gold torches against a very blue sky as we drove across the upper Midwest, then through Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York. The check from the
Post
and the advance from Longmans, Green on the publication of
Hurricane
in book form meant that I was free from urgent financial worry for the moment, and we could treat ourselves to nice hotels and good meals.

It was a time for conversation, too. One or two nights into the trip, sitting late over apple pie and coffee at a candlelit table in a hotel dining room, Lucille said, “You know, Rose, I don’t think I love Eddie anymore. Not the way I used to, anyway.” She looked away. “And I feel guilty about it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, not because she no longer loved him—I thought she had probably outgrown him, or outgrown her need for him, both of which were quite natural, although tragic in their way. I was sorry that she felt guilty. But that was natural, too.

She sat still for a moment, her gray eyes sober, her soft blonde hair haloed around her face. She seemed very young, or I felt very old, or both.

“Has that ever happened to you?” she asked, almost timidly. “That you fell out of love with someone?”

“More than once.”
Gillette
, I thought.
And Guy.
And Troub, whom I thought of quite often and sometimes even missed.

“Or perhaps it wasn’t that I fell out of love,” I amended. “Perhaps I simply understood that I hadn’t loved in the first place. That I had only loved my image of the other person, which was made out of myself, out of the best that was in me at the time.”

Lucille frowned, understanding, but not quite. She picked up her coffee cup in both hands, her elbows propped on the table, the fabric of her dress falling away from her arms, plump and pale in the candlelight.

“Well,” she said in a practical voice, “I don’t much think that Eddie is the best of me.” Her grin was lopsided. “The worst, maybe. Could that be?”

“But remember back to when you first loved him,” I prodded. “Who were you then? And who was he?”

“Who was I?” She looked away, silent, musing. “I see,” she said, after a moment. “Yes, I see. I was a kid then. I needed somebody brash and cocky, somebody I could belong to, who would tell me what to do. I’m . . . different, now. But he’s still brash and cocky. And thinks I belong to him, and he can tell me what to do.” She put her cup down, chuckling ruefully. “Funny, isn’t it?”

“I wish it were,” I replied, not smiling. “We marry to get what we think we want and need, and after a while we don’t. But there’s still the marriage to deal with.”

Somewhere a tray rattled and a waiter dropped a handful of silver. Lucille picked up her white napkin and began to pleat it in her fingers. “You were married once, Troub told me. What was he like?”

I thought of Gillette, his superficial culture, his energy and drive, his push to get ahead, his skills as a promoter, as a
self
-promoter. “He was a traveling salesman with an impressive line of goods,” I said, as if that explained everything. Not quite, perhaps, but close enough. “And I was a foolish girl and lonely and very tired of working and eager to be impressed. And eager for a life that was something other than being on the job every minute. Both of us thought marriage was something it wasn’t. We were made for each other, you might say.”

“When did you know—” She stopped, looked away, looked inside herself. “That you didn’t want to be married any longer?”

I heard the question behind the question and said what I thought would help her. “When I knew he didn’t have anything left to teach me. When I understood that there was nothing more I wanted to learn from him. When I could find myself in myself, and not in him. When I saw how many things I wanted, and wanted all of them at the same time, and knew that
none
of them could come from him.”

“Ah,” she said very quietly. I could see her mentally tabulating what I had said, considering it in relation to herself and the husband she no longer loved. “Was it hard . . . to get the divorce?”

“The divorce itself wasn’t hard. But first I had to cut myself free from the clinging.” I thought of something I had once written to Dorothy Thompson. “We’re not born to be ruthless, we women. But that’s what it takes to hit the hands on the gunwale with an oar until they let go.” I remembered something Gillette had wailed at me—“Oh, why can’t you, just once, Rose, be
human
!” when what I had wanted,
all
I had wanted, was the most fundamental of human desires: to be free to live my own life.

She shivered. “I’m not sure I can be that ruthless. That heartless.”

“I wasn’t sure,” I said. “You won’t be sure, either, until you
are,
suddenly.” I remembered myself at her age, facing her dilemma. “The thing to remember is that something will come to take its place. Something different, of course. But something better. Because whatever is ahead will be better than what you have now.”

She gave me a skeptical look. “Do you really believe that?”

I laughed. “I believed it once. I wrote it, once, in a book. Perhaps I can believe it again, in the right circumstance.”

“Well, then.” Lucille picked up her water glass and tipped the edge of it to mine in a mock toast. “Here’s to the right circumstance.”

A few days later, we reached the small town of Malone, New York, fifteen miles south of the St. Lawrence River and five miles or so from the village of Burke, where the Wilder farm was located. I sent my father a postcard view of a grand hotel that, in a rather curious fashion, had been built around the Methodist chapel he had attended as a boy. We got a room at the hotel, had lunch, then drove out to Burke.

We found the old farm easily from Papa’s directions. I was glad to see that the house was still standing and in decent repair. There were two large maple trees nearby, which might have been there when Papa was a boy. The weathered split-rail fence along the road—that might have been there then, as well. When I told the owner that my father had grown up in the house and that my mother was writing a book about the farm, she invited me to come inside and look around, and I did, breathlessly.

There had been some alterations, but the rooms seemed to be pretty much as they had been when my father lived there. It didn’t take much imagination to see him, going on ten, taking his bath in front of the kitchen fire or rocking the big barrel churn in the whitewashed cellar or blacking the stove—and throwing the blacking brush so hard at his sister Alice that it hit the parlor wall and left a big inky smear on the wallpaper. I looked, but there was no sign of that smear. And no sign, either, of Aunt E.J.’s repair, so perfect that Grandma Wilder had never even noticed. But that had been nearly sixty years ago. The wallpaper had likely been replaced many times since then.

Most of the barns still existed as they had in those early years, matching the sketch my father had made for my mother. I took detailed notes about them and about the surrounding pastures where the cows had grazed, and the fields my father had harrowed with the work team of big, gentle brown mares, Bess and Beauty. The schoolhouse the Wilder children attended was still standing, too, down a narrow dirt lane to the bridge on the Trout River, not far from the spot where Papa had said the sheep were washed before shearing, then along a path through a wood. Now that I had seen the place, I knew I could sharpen the vague descriptions and prompt my father into more detailed recollections.

Lucille stayed for a few days in New York, then left me there and drove back to Mansfield—and Eddie—alone, still unsure of what she intended to do. I stayed with Genevieve, and we made the old, gay rounds of people and places. But the city had a bleak, almost Dickensian feel to it; there were encampments of homeless people in empty lots and along the riverbank in Morningside Heights, with men, women, and children huddled around campfires, trying to keep warm. I spent several weeks seeing friends (but not Troub, who was on a nursing assignment in Florida), talking with George Bye about the current writing market, discussing
Hurricane
’s
book publication in the United States and England with Maxwell Aley, and dropping in on editors. Everyone had read the serial in the
Post
, and I was heartened by their congratulations.

“I told you so,” Floyd Dell said. “Entirely worthy of you, Rose.”

Berta Hader put her arms around me and whispered, “Elmer and I
loved
it. We can’t wait for your next one.”