A Wilder Rose: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

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.
    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