A Wilder Rose: A Novel Read online

  In Tirana, we rented a lovely two-story villa, cool and dignified in its blue-gray whitewash, with a narrow front court and an archway that led into a lush walled garden. The house had been previously occupied by American diplomats, and people were still accustomed to dropping in to talk. So we held afternoon teas for the foreign-service community—Germans, French, British, Americans, Greek, but not, of course, the Italians.

  Ah, those lovely days. The air in that house was fragrant with the aroma of Turkish tobacco, and electric with international intrigue in four or five languages. We drank tea and wine and, yes, sometimes French champagne; nibbled on whimsical Albanian pastries contrived by Yvonne, our French cook; danced to the latest records on Troub’s Victrola: “Whose Who Are You?” and “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” and “Tea for Two.” Troub and I—two American women, reasonably attractive, well traveled, well read, and lively—were much in demand. From the wide windows, our guests could admire the view of Mount Dajti, stretched out like some lazy prehistoric beast against the bluest sky. On moonlit nights, they could spill out onto the balcony and into the garden, where old Ibraim, our Albanian gardener (who could not read the labels on seed packets but knew every Albanian proverb ever conjured) had planted a formal bed of chrysanthemums edged with an unlikely lace of green lettuce. Ibraim had come to Tirana as a refugee. He told me that he had finally scraped together enough qindarka to buy four oranges, which, in a moment of entrepreneurial inspiration, he had displayed on a white handkerchief on the sidewalk, thereby launching his career as a fruit-stand man, from which vantage point he had promoted himself to salaried gardener.

  Ibraim’s garden was gorgeous. The house was a fabulous delight. Tirana, with its white minarets rising out of the hot white dust of medieval streets, was a cabinet of treasures. Those two years there, I led in many ways an ideal life: strange and unfamiliar surroundings, Troub for companionship and conversation and sweet sustenance, and servants who cooked and took care of the household so I could have all day to write. I had the idea of writing something that was true and real and satisfying, something I was passionate about, not just the magazine stuff I had been writing for a living during the last decade. Something that would express me, if I could ever manage to understand who I was.

  But I was too many things, and wanted too many things, and could never decide which ones might (if I would pay them the proper attention) be most important. There were distractions in Albania, and sights to see, and things to do. At home, there was Lazar, our all-purpose kavass who considered himself the boss of the household, telling stories with Yvonne and Ibraim around the great stove in the stone-walled kitchen. Out in the dirt streets there were the daily calls to prayer and the joyful singing of wedding parties and the silvery tinkling of bells on the pack camels and donkeys. And in the villages, the lovely peasant costumes and the melodious chattering of children and the glorious smell of tavë kosi, baked lamb with yogurt. But all these distractions made it easy to lose focus, to scatter my energies—perhaps (and this was the hard part) because I lacked the sense of purpose that would bind all the loose pieces of myself together.

  And in the end, I didn’t find the time or the energy to write anything more than the magazine stuff that paid the bills. I was supporting two households even then: our household in Tirana and Mama Bess and Papa on their Missouri farm, some two hundred acres of hardscrabble Ozark mountainside that produced nothing but apples, milk, and eggs, and not enough of any of them for a decent living.

  So I did what I had been doing ever since I’d left the San Francisco Bulletin at the end of the war. I rattled off a dozen or so magazine pieces and a serial, Cindy: An Ozark Romance. Carl Brandt, my agent, sold the serial to the Country Gentleman for ten thousand dollars, which mostly went to pay household expenses and repay debts. I managed to send some of it to George Q. Palmer in New York, for my brokerage account, which was keeping pace with the bull market in that go-go year. My mother had invested some of her own saved pennies with Mr. Palmer, and I wrote to tell her that stocks were leaping around like corn in a popper and we couldn’t lose. Now, post-1929, I think of that with some irony. Then, I more often thought of the lines from the Panchatantra: Money will get anything, get it in a flash. Therefore let the prudent get cash, cash, cash.

  Ah, yes. Cash cash cash: my mantra. I told myself that I longed to write something of my own, something significant that emerged from who I was. Something like “Innocence,” my best story, which had won second prize in the O. Henry Awards for 1922. I would be happy to write another story like that, or one about Albania and the ragged street boys with the baskets in the bazaar and the minarets in the clear light of dawn and the haunting call to prayer.

  But I was, in the end, relentlessly practical: my haunting call was always for cash cash cash—no surprise, I suppose, given the long, grueling poverty of my childhood and my parents’ often desperate need of support. Money meant freedom, the freedom to live where and how I chose, and with whom—although I understood too well the irony of this: the price of freedom was hours and days and weeks at the typewriter. So I settled for writing what the magazine editors wanted. I put what I could into the Palmer brokerage account and spent the rest.

  And there were plenty of places to spend it—the Tirana house, for instance. For me, houses are a vice. No, it’s worse than that: they are a seductive, enthralling, soul-stirring joy. My life is littered with the bones of houses that have enchanted me, on which I have lavished time and money—a curse and I know it, but there it is. So Troub and I happily painted and plastered and tore down walls and built new ones in our rented house and dreamed and drew sketches of the even-larger villa we would build on the green hills above Tirana.

  We had thought when we went to Albania, Troub and I, that we would stay forever. I had first gone there for the Red Cross, and I went back later that same year—1921—to the northern mountains, to collect material for a series of travel articles. But the medieval Albania I had seen and loved was now being transformed into a misbegotten by-blow of European culture. Italian officers in full military regalia strutted on the streets, and youngsters in the villages paraded in Westerners’ cast-off clothing. Automobiles darted here and there, horns blaring at intransigent camels. Electricity came to the city, bare bulbs replacing the yellow glow of lamp and candle light. Witnessing that transformation was like tasting the bitter truth at the end of a dying love affair. Then came the earthquakes, tremors that opened cracks in the city’s mud walls and shook our house so badly that we slept in our clothes, with our shoes under our pillows. And the political earthquakes—that damned Mussolini, who even then coveted Albania’s strategic location on the Adriatic and was poised to possess the country the minute the fragile young government collapsed. He wasn’t above helping it toward that goal, either, by stoking the fires of rebels and turning any economic thumbscrew he could reach.

  There were practical considerations, too. I needed to see my agent and talk to my magazine editors and my stockbroker. I absolutely had to get something done about my teeth, and not in Albania, where dentistry was a blood sport. Troub had tired of writing and spent hours every day reading American newspapers and mentioning this play and that movie and a new book that was already old by the time it reached us. Altogether, our days seemed to be darkened by needs we couldn’t fulfill and a kind of subterranean discontent we couldn’t quite bring to the surface. It wasn’t long before the question of how long we might stay became how soon we would leave.

  So it was almost a relief (not quite, but almost) when Mama Bess cabled: Come home. Yes, it would have been nice if she had said “please,” but international cables are priced by the word. My mother pinched every single penny she took out of her little leather purse, then (when she had to) as now (when she doesn’t). “Please” would have cost too much.

  Troub agreed that it was time to leave but wasn’t crazy about the idea of going back to the farm. “It’s February now,” she pointe
d out. “It will be spring by the time you get to Missouri, and your mother won’t need you anymore. Anyway, she just wants to know that she can still make you do what she says. She has you under her thumb.” Troub was a slim, athletic woman, younger than I by some nine years, intelligent, perceptive. She looked good in trousers, which shocked the Europeans and amazed the Albanians. “Your mother may seem like a sweet little old lady, with her white hair and blue eyes. But she is the most overbearing woman I have ever known. The way she bosses your sweet, long-suffering father, the dog, the cat, the cows, you.” She quirked an eyebrow. “It’s no secret. Ask your mother’s neighbors. They’ll tell you who wears the pants in the Wilder family.”

  I laughed at that, but ruefully, for it was true. My mother looked like everyone’s ideal grandmother: diminutive and pretty, her hair going white now and her eyes a dark, deep blue. When she went into town to shop or to a club meeting, she always wore her best dress, a pert little hat, spotless gloves, and a sweet smile.

  But her father had always said that she was as strong as a little French horse, and there was a firm set to her mouth that belied any softness in her face. The two of us had been fighting a battle of wills since I was old enough to realize how good it felt to be willful, if not willfully bad. She was afraid of what I would come to if she let me go, and I was afraid of what I would come to if she held on.

  Finally, at seventeen, I taught myself Morse code. My friend Ethel Burney’s father was the agent at the Frisco depot and had a telegraph key at home that Ethel and I learned how to operate. Then I took the train from Mansfield to Kansas City, where I got a job as a telegrapher with Western Union and wrote little articles for the newspaper. I worked for the company there and in Mount Vernon, Indiana, until 1908, when, not yet twenty-two, I followed Gillette Lane to San Francisco, and life began all over again.

  Yes, I left home to earn money (cash cash cash), some of which I sent back to Mama Bess. But mostly, I left to escape her instructions on how to behave, her small-town moralizing, her worries about what people would think if I did this or said that. And to escape the parochial quicksand of Mansfield, which, if I had stayed, would have swallowed me, heart and soul and every original and rebellious thought in my head. Another year there and I might have married George Cooley and settled down to washing and starching his shirts and ironing them with a flatiron heated on the coal-fired cookstove, and having his babies, and baking gingerbread for meetings of the Justamere Club—all to my mother’s very great pleasure.

  In the twenty-some years after I left Mansfield, I went back occasionally and kept in dutiful touch by letter. But mostly I was on the move, onward, outward. I married Gillette Lane in 1909 in San Francisco and divorced him nine years later; in the interim, in Salt Lake City I lost a baby boy and buried with him a piece of my heart. I went to the East Coast, then to the West Coast, to the East Coast again, then abroad. I was a wife, a real-estate salesperson, a newspaper reporter, a feature writer, a freelance writer.

  “There’s all the world, all the world, outside, waiting for me!” I wrote that in 1919, at the end of Diverging Roads, my first novel, the disguised and fictionalized story of my young life. There’s all the world, all the world, waiting—but I was still my parents’ only child, with an only child’s obligations, which fell heavier on me now that they couldn’t manage the farm.

  In 1928, when I got the cable, Papa—lame since he had suffered a stroke or maybe contracted polio when I was still a baby—was past seventy. Mama was sixty and (though we didn’t know it at the time) diabetic. They adamantly refused to sell the farm and move to town (which I would have much preferred), so I was duty-bound to see that they were taken care of. I once read that the sociologist Jane Addams called this burden the “family claim,” two words that explain it well enough: a bond—no, a bondage, braided of strands of guilt, duty, and affection. I understood, for I had felt its tug when I left the farm in 1903: a powerful bond that held daughters (especially only daughters) to parents in the days before the Great War, before the 1920s roared and girls bobbed their hair, hiked their skirts above their knees, painted a red cupid’s bow on their lips, and kissed their mothers good-bye.

  So when Troub advanced the opinion that I was afflicted with an immoderate sense of obligation (“You are your mother’s little slavey,” she said), I defended myself. I invited her to think back to the world as it was when I’d left home, already inoculated with the idea that adult daughters are responsible for the care of their aging parents. If mine had been able to support themselves (like Troub’s father, who was a prosperous dentist), it would have been a different story.

  In the monthly articles she wrote for Missouri Ruralist, my mother liked to present the Wilder farm as a great success. But she and Papa and I knew that it had never been more than marginally productive. Rocky Ridge may have been one of the larger farms in the county (in a word, my parents were land-poor), but it was too hilly and the stony soil was too thin to support much more than her chickens, his cows, and the apple trees that were now long past bearing. Papa and Mama Bess grew most of their food, so they weren’t in danger of starving. They earned a few dollars selling milk and butter and eggs in town, my mother made a little money as secretary-treasurer of the local farm loan association, and there was the five-hundred-dollar “subsidy” (the word I chose for this annual payment) that I had been sending them since 1920. Mama Bess, whose mantra was save save save, had even managed to piece together a cash reserve out of those few crazy-quilt scraps of income.

  But she told me that she still dreamed of walking down a long, dark road with wintry trees closing in on either side, knowing with a bone-chilling fear that it was the road to the county poorhouse. Now they needed me. I had to go home.

  Troub gave me a searching look. “I have the feeling that your mother, and even your old hometown, are a kind of safe haven for you, Rose, a refuge. You head for home when the big wide world gets too scary. But I hope you remember how you felt the last time you were there alone, with your parents—and even when we were there together. You hated it.”

  A safe haven? A refuge? I doubted that. But the other part was certainly true. I hated the isolation, the feeling of being exiled. I was irritated by the parochial pettiness of the townspeople and loathed the unrelenting drudgery of the farm and household work, which my mother liked to romanticize. In one of her Ruralist columns she wrote, “Work is a tonic and an inspiration and reward unto itself. For the sweetness of life lies in usefulness like honey deep in the heart of a clover bloom.”

  I’ve always admired my brave and energetic mother for the amount of work she performed in a single day, but I can guarantee you that it wasn’t “honey deep in the heart of a clover bloom.” In an article I wrote for Harper’s Magazine, I listed the chores that had to be done at Rocky Ridge. There was the firewood to fetch, the stoves to feed, the ashes to shovel. The floors to sweep and scrub, the lamps to clean and fill and light, the beds to make, the clothes to wash (in a tub, with a washboard and hand-turned wringer) and iron. The potatoes to peel and biscuits to bake, three meals a day to cook and serve and wash up after. The milk to strain and skim, the cream to churn, the chickens to feed, the pigs to slop, the garden to plant and weed and harvest, and all of it mindlessly, continuously, endlessly.

  I didn’t intend to go back to that drudgery. This time, I had money, cash cash cash. And a plan.

  Troub, seeing the handwriting on the wall, gave a resigned sigh. “How long are you thinking of staying?”

  “Only as long as I have to,” I said. “Will you come with me?” Troub and I were close, as close as two friends could be, and closer. I didn’t like to think of going back to the farm without her.

  “I’d come in a minute if it weren’t for your mother,” Troub said. “I’m pretty easygoing, Rose, but the farmhouse is crowded with four of us, and there’s no place to escape. She’s always begging us to sit down and have a cup of tea, or go to a cl
ub meeting with her so she can show us off, or drive her to town. And all in the sweetest way, of course, which makes it impossible to refuse.” She made a face. “And then there’s the bickering.”

  I sighed. What Troub was saying was perfectly true. A few years before, I had bought my parents a car—a 1923 blue Buick they named Isabel—and my mother could drive just as well as my father. But she preferred to be driven and, in a smooth-as-cream voice, would ask us to drop what we were doing and take her into town. For her regular Wednesday trip to the grocery, she would put on her best hat and gloves and call out instructions for every stop and turn, as if the driver—my father or me or Troub—were her chauffeur.

  As for their bickering—well, Troub was right again. My father was a lamb. I adored him, and I’m sure my mother did, too. But my parents argued endlessly about the farm: whether they should hold on to a piece of it or sell it to a neighbor; whether my mother should give up her chickens or my father should sell his cows or both; whether they could afford to buy another heifer or perhaps a pig. Eventually, my father would escape to the workshop or the barn, but in the meantime, the voices from downstairs (Troub and I usually worked or read upstairs on the sleeping porch) would be vehement. And loud, because Papa was hard of hearing.