A Wilder Rose: A Novel Read online

  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

  WITH BILL ALBERT

  The Robin Paige Victorian-Edwardian Mysteries

  EDITED ANTHOLOGIES

  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

  www.apub.com

  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

  START READING

  A NOTE TO THE READER

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  HISTORICAL PEOPLE

  FOR FURTHER READING

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  “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 N
azi 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 th
e 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.”