A Wilder Rose: A Novel Read online

  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.

  Rose had to admit that Norma Lee was right about the amount of work she put into her mother’s books. Mama Bess was an oral storyteller. She could recall dozens of stories about her family’s pioneer wanderings, but when she wrote them down, they sounded like . . . well, they sounded like stories told by your favorite grandmother in front of the fire on a winter’s night, without (as George Bye, Rose’s agent, had once said) the benefit of any dramatizations or fictional techniques. The anecdotes were rich in nostalgic detail (especially when Mama Bess was prompted with specific questions) but stitched together with no attention to pattern or theme or structure. The characters were realistic because most of them were drawn from her personal experience of real-life people, her father and mother and sisters and their friends. But the basic elements of narrative—plot and scene and point of view and theme—were hard for her to manage.

  Still, over the six or seven years they’d been working together, Rose and her mother had fallen into a more-or-less satisfactory pattern of collaboration. Mama Bess made notes for the book on scraps of paper and the backs of old letters and bills. Then she wrote a pencil draft in the five-cent tablets she bought at a local grocery, a half-dozen at a time. Sometimes she made more than one pencil draft, then sent the final one to Rose.

  Rose would read it carefully and point out the changes that needed to be made; after she left the farm, she had put these suggestions into letters. Mama Bess almost always objected. To change the opening of Silver Lake the way Rose wanted, she lamented in one letter, would mean starting over from scratch. But eventually she agreed, telling Rose to make whatever changes she thought were necessary.

  Rose rewrote the material—shaping scenes and chapters, creating narrative transitions that pieced the anecdotes into a coherent story, crafting dialogue, adding details. Then she revised the typescript in pen, for style, and did a final edit as she typed it. She mailed the finished book to her mother, who forwarded it to George Bye, the literary agent they shared. Mama Bess included the cover letter that Rose drafted for her, which deliberately omitted any mention of her daughter’s part in the process. George Bye sent the book on to Ida Louise Raymond at Harper. When the editorial process was finished, the proofs made their circuitous way back to Rose, who corrected and returned them to her mother to be returned to Harper. It was the long way around Robinson’s barn, as Mama Bess always said, with a little laugh that was part conspiracy, part guilt. But the indirect transmission was necessary to maintain the fiction that Laura Ingalls Wilder was the sole author of the books and that her daughter’s only contribution was publishing advice and some minor editorial suggestions.

  By this time, Norma Lee had a general idea of the collaborative process and had listened eagerly on the infrequent occasions when Rose dropped the pretense. But the girl had been sworn to secrecy from the beginning.

  “If anybody ever asks, tell them I am only marginally involved,” Rose had instructed firmly. “Just say I do some of the technical work on the manuscripts. They won’t know what that is, and they won’t want to give away their ignorance by asking.”

  Rose, who knew the book business inside and out, had covered her tracks with care. And nobody ever asked—not the Harper editor nor their literary agent, neither of whom had met her mother. Ida Louise Raymond and George Bye probably suspected what was going on, but they didn’t want to know, for obvious reasons. As far as they were concerned, the little white-haired farm lady—pioneer-child heroine and untaught literary genius, who wrote her books in pencil on five-cent school tablets, sitting alone at her desk on a remote Ozark farm—cut a unique and delightfully appealing figure in children’s bookselling and book-review circles. Laura Ingalls Wilder was good for business.

  And Rose knew what would happen if the truth were found out. Readers and librarians and teachers and schoolchildren loved the idea of an author who had grown up on the American prairie. They would have accepted her daughter’s involvement if the name had appeared on the cover of that very first book. But if they learned the truth now, they might feel cheated, even betrayed. No. The secret had to be kept.

  And anyway, as Rose often told herself: Who the dickens cared? These were books for children. On the Banks of Plum Creek was not David Copperfield. Her mother’s books had been well received from the beginning, yes. But if she was completely honest, Rose would have to confess that she was astonished at their popularity. She had told her mother once that there was no opportunity to make a name with juvenile fiction. But that had been in the years before the big publishing houses had begun to create children’s departments and the departments had created children’s books and an audience of child readers. Now, it was different. The economy was easing, and good books for children were big business. But children’s books still didn’t loom large on the literary horizon. Perhaps someday, but now, no. And that was more to the point, in Rose’s mind.

  “I don’t want my name on my mother’s books,” she said now. “They’re juveniles, Norma Lee. Successful writers don’t work for both the juvenile and adult markets. All my other work has been for adult readers.”

  Rose had been writing professionally for nearly twenty-five years—newspaper features, travel articles, biographies (even an autobiographical novel), magazine articles, books. Her first ghostwriting project had been White Shadows in the South Seas, which she had done for Frederick O’Brien after she’d left the Bulletin in 1919, when she was living in Sausalito. The book had gone on to become a bestseller and an Academy Award–winning movie and had earned O’Brien a small fortune—while Rose, unfortunately, had been cheated out of her share of the royalties. She had sued but was forced to settle out of court for a fraction of what she was owed.

  After the magazines stopped buying and she was desperate for work, Rose had ghosted a half-dozen books. She had turned scrambled notes and illegible penciled scraps into books that were published eventually under other people’s names and “as told to Lowell Thomas,” the famous journalist who hired her to do the work.

  Times were better now. The magazines were buying aga
in, and the newspapers were hiring. If Roosevelt didn’t wreck things by imposing more of his New Deal nonsense or by dragging the country into a European war, the economy would keep on improving. There was plenty of work for writers with ideas.

  Norma Lee stubbed out her cigarette. “I guess I can understand why you don’t want your name on your mother’s books. But they’re selling well and earning royalties. Don’t you resent that, even a little bit? Shouldn’t you get a share?”

  Resent it? How much did she resent it? Rose pushed the first question away, not to be answered, not even for Norma Lee, and replied to the second.

  “I don’t want a share of the royalties. I want the money, all of it, to go to my mother. It’s not that much, actually. Last year, it only amounted to around two thousand dollars.” That was very good money for Mama Bess, who for most of her life had scraped by on a few dollars a week, but less than a tenth of the amount Free Land had brought. “Now that she has her own income, I don’t have to support her. And earning makes her feel good—makes her feel that she doesn’t have to depend on me.”

  “But she does depend on you,” Norma Lee objected. She pointed to the letter on the stack of orange tablets. “She depends on you to write the books that she takes the credit for. Doesn’t she feel obligated to give you something in return? And doesn’t she feel . . . well, even a little bit guilty about the deception?” Norma Lee wrinkled her nose. “There’s an ethical issue here, isn’t there?”

  “Nobody’s asking you,” Rose snapped. Like any good journalist, Norma Lee knew how far she could push it and then always pushed it just a little bit farther. But the ethical issue was Mama Bess’s business. It was among the subjects—the many subjects—that Rose and her mother never discussed, although she had suspected from the beginning that Mama Bess felt deeply uneasy about the deception. That was her mother’s way: the more troubled she was about something, the less likely she was to say anything about it to anyone. Which meant that there was no way to know for certain how Mama Bess felt about anything, for it was almost impossible to break through that politely silent facade to what was underneath.

  After a pause, Rose softened her tone. “Morality doesn’t enter into it as far as I’m concerned, Norma Lee. Writing is a job for me, a way to make a living. It has always been that way, from the day I became a reporter for the Kansas City Post. I am always surprised and even a little incredulous when I read that one author or another actually loves to write and would do it from dawn to dark, even though he or she didn’t earn a nickel.” She chuckled drily. “That’s not my style. Sometimes I write because I get mad—that’s why I wrote Free Land. But I usually write because I need the money. When I’m not writing, I do things I really like to do. Gardening, needlework, writing letters, talking with friends.”

  “But you’re not working on your mother’s books either for the money or because you’re mad about something or another—”

  Rose shook her head. “Norma Lee, you are missing the point. In her deepest heart, my mother has always wanted to be a writer—a published writer. This is my way of making that happen. She’s pleased, and that pleases me, at least on my best days. I’m her daughter, after all. And I do love her, you know.” She smiled crookedly. “What’s more, I supported my parents financially before Mama Bess began earning, and now that she has money of her own, I don’t have to. And if I earned royalties from the sales of those books, I’d have to pay income tax on it, at a higher rate than she does. I’m sure you know how I feel about the Infernal Revenue Service. It’s just another way for the government to stick its fingers into our pockets.”

  “Yes, I know,” Norma Lee replied seriously. “You’ve told us about that.” She tilted her head to one side. “But you’ve never told me how you got involved in your mother’s books. You’ve told me about your work as a telegraph operator right out of high school, and the reporting for the Kansas City Post and the Journal and your real-estate career in California. And the feature writing you did for the San Francisco Bulletin during the Great War, and your autobiographical novel and the books you wrote about Jack London and Charlie Chaplin and Henry Ford.”

  “And Herbert Hoover,” Rose said. Her book—Hoover’s first biography—had come out in 1920 and was still selling. The former president might be a scapegoat for the Depression, but he wasn’t forgotten.

  “Oh, yes, President Hoover. And I’ve heard about your travels for the Red Cross in Europe and the Middle East after the war and the two years you lived in Albania with Troub.” She pulled her brows together. “Let’s see—when was that?”

  “We lived there in 1926 and ’27,” Rose replied. Right after the war, in 1919, she’d been hired by the Red Cross Publicity Bureau. She was assigned to travel through devastated Europe and the Balkans and write newspaper articles that would persuade compassionate Americans to contribute to the rebuilding process—through the Red Cross, of course. “Sob stories,” her friend Dorothy Thompson had called her pieces, teasing, although there was certainly plenty to cry over. Rose had visited Albania and fallen in love with the wild landscape, especially the northern mountains and the proud people, the Shala, who lived there. That had been only a decade ago, but it seemed like a century, a millennium. Albania itself was as distant as the moon now, as was the life she and Troub, long estranged, had shared there.

  “And then?” Norma Lee asked. “After Albania?”

  “Then I went back to Rocky Ridge. My parents had both been sick, the winter was terrible that year, and Papa couldn’t get any help at the farm. I thought I would build a tenant house and hire somebody to live there and work the farm, then build a retirement cottage for them. And then I could travel back and forth, from the farm to the city and back to the farm, when I was needed there.” She shook her head heavily, feeling the weight of what she had done. “Foolishness. Idiocy. Dreams and schemes, those houses. A waste of money.” She dropped her voice. “Worse, a waste of time.” A waste of time, yes. But the time had wasted her. Those years, those awful, awful years, when there was no work, when—

  “Really?” Norma Lee said sympathetically. “Was it really that bad?”

  “Worse. There was the crash and farm foreclosures and bank failures—” Rose stopped.

  “Tell me.” Norma Lee leaned forward, her dark eyes intent, searching. “Tell me, please, Mrs. Lane.”

  Rose turned away to glance at the clock. “Time to take that chicken pie out of the oven.” She pushed her chair back and got to her feet. “You go tell Russell to wash up and then you can set the table. We’ll eat in about fifteen minutes.”

  Norma Lee put out her hand. “Tell me,” she said again, more urgently. “I love the stories you’ve told us about all the things you’ve done in your life. And your writing—your work as a writer—is so important to me. But that can’t be the whole story of how you got involved or why you’ve done what you’ve done for your mother.”

  “I don’t know why you’d want to hear it, Norma Lee.” Rose went to open the oven. “It was an unhappy time. The magazine fiction market hit bottom. Those summers at the farm—1933, ’34—were so damned hot, and no relief. They were the Dust Bowl years, and the air was thick with blowing grit. Nobody had two nickels to rub together. Roosevelt was setting himself up as a dictator.” She pulled on a pair of oven mitts, took out the pie, and set it on the top of the stove. “If we were unhappy, if we were depressed, if everybody was a little crazy, it was no wonder. That’s it. That’s the story. Doesn’t bear repeating.”

  Norma Lee shook her head stubbornly. “I still want to hear it. It’ll go no further, I swear. Whatever it is, it’s just between you and me. We could do it this weekend.”

  Rose paused. There were mysteries that simple tales, like her mother’s stories for children, could scarcely convey. Even the most artful story ultimately failed, for the deepest feelings—the urgency that drove desire, the desire that compelled choice—were hidden in the secret
places between the words. Why bother, when the effort was bound to fail? Or (and here was a thought that caught her, like a vine snaking around her ankles) why take the risk, when she might succeed too well, tell too much? Was this why she no longer was able to indulge herself in fictions?

  But perhaps there was something she could tell, something that might at least satisfy the girl’s curiosity. And if she could give voice to even the simplest narrative of all that had happened, there might be something in it that would help her understand how she had come to the place where she was now, where she had no more stories of her own to tell, and no more mysteries.

  “I’ll think about it,” she said.

  And in the end, because Norma Lee didn’t give up easily, and because there was a story to tell, and because Rose herself wanted to understand, she did.

  CHAPTER TWO

  From Albania to Missouri: 1928

  Come home, she cabled, and I went.

  Troub—Helen Boylston—always complained that I was at my mother’s beck and call. She was right, of course. Still, the situation was desperate. My father was sick. My mother was sick. They had to have help. Who else could they turn to but me?

  But the matter was more complicated than that. It was time to leave Albania, and both Troub and I knew it. We had gone to Tirana in 1926 because we wanted to get away from the madness of American commercial life and back to a time where life was slower and sweeter, where both of us (Troub was a writer, too) could write and read and soak in the primitive world around us. I suppose in some ways we were joining the great exodus of American writers who sought refuge in Europe in the twenties—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, all of whom, and others, were in Paris when Troub and I were there.

  The two of us had met on a train to Poland in 1920, I a writer for the Red Cross, Troub a Red Cross nurse on her way from an assignment in Albania. We had been instantly, easily drawn together and had made plans to meet in Paris and later in New York. Later still, in 1924, she joined me at Rocky Ridge. We drove around southern Missouri, where I gathered material for the Ozark stories I was writing for the Country Gentleman. We took a longer driving trip, too, to San Francisco with Mama Bess, who never stopped fretting about being so far and so long away from home. And when we got back, we decided to go even farther—to Albania, a land where life was simple and the struggles of our century were very far away. Was I fleeing the farm, and my mother? Troub said so. I think now that she was right.