Free A Wilder Rose: A Novel by Susan Wittig Albert

Jack London novel for that reason. Jack London had S-E-X.)
    And then, a week after we pitched the tent on the hillside, Mama Bess changed her mind about the retirement cottage. It might have been the combination of Troub and Genevieve, or of Mr. Bunting and Nero, added to her recognition that Catharine and Mary Margaret and who-knows-how-many other East Coast women were likely to step off the train at any moment, singly or in noisy combinations, giving Mansfield an endless source of gossip about what was going on in the Wilder house, right in front of poor Mrs. Wilder’s eyes—unless she tried not to look, in which case it would go on behind her back.
    Or maybe it was Papa, who had found a building site he liked over the hill on the Newell Forty, where there was an easy slope and a wide view over green bottomland. He liked the picture of the house I showed him, too, although he thought it would be better to build from scratch, rather than take whatever quality of building materials Messieurs Sears and Roebuck felt like shipping us, and I agreed. (I would have agreed to anything he wanted, just to move the project along.) He suggested using local fieldstone for the exterior walls, too, instead of wood shingles.
    “A whole house made out of the gol-durned rock ought to make her happy,” he muttered. I wondered if he was thinking of the stone fireplace she had wept over.
    Or maybe it was Mama herself, imagining life in a brand-new, distinctively styled house with electricity and central heat and hot water—and no cigarettes or late-night dance music or who-knows-what hanky-panky going on upstairs. I had left the drawing of the house on the table where she could see it. Perhaps she studied it and thought of how her friends from Mansfield and Hartville would admire it and envy her, with all her new furnishings, an electric stove, even an electric refrigerator. The Wilders would be “talked about”—and written up in the Mansfield newspaper—in the very best way. And Papa’s workload would be much, much lighter.
    At any rate, one Tuesday afternoon at the end of July she suggested—in a casual, offhand way, exactly as if it had been her idea all along—that she and Papa go to live on the Newell Forty. I joined the pretense that this marvelous notion was hers and proposed that we go straight over there and see if we couldn’t find just the right spot for a house. It was an easy walk along a pleasant footpath, bordered with buttercups and Queen Anne’s lace and lively with dragonflies. From the top of the ridge, the valley below was green and gold, dappled with purple cloud shadows. My mother admired the view and pronounced herself satisfied, and on Thursday, she and Papa picked out the spot for the house. So a week later, I hired an architect and a contractor, both from Springfield, and didn’t waste a moment getting the project under way.
    Mama Bess declared that she wanted to be surprised, so she wouldn’t take part in the construction—her way, I thought, of disowning any construction mistakes, or perhaps a kind of passive resistance to what was now Papa’s and my project. But her withdrawal allowed Papa to choose the materials and oversee the workmanship and gave me a free hand, which perhaps was not a good thing. Where houses are concerned, I am my own very worst enemy. As I wrote to my longtime friend Dorothy Thompson (recently married to Sinclair Lewis): “Without houses, who knows? I might have been a writer.”
    I’m afraid it was true. All spring and most of the summer I had been working steadily—short stories that were snapped up as soon as I sent them off to my agent . Carl Brandt sold “One Thing in Common” to the Journal for a thousand dollars, my best price yet from that magazine. And I had the proofs of Cindy to correct , which Harper & Brothers was putting out as a book in September. Altogether, it was a productive few months that produced a steady and steadily rising income. And, of course,