A Wilder Rose: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

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