Pioneer Girl (11 page)

“Hey,” Alex said, coming over from a cabinet of keepsake items he'd been checking out. “Did you see Laura's jewel box with the tiny porcelain teacup? Remember that? It's really real.”

I could have stayed for hours, trying to keep track of all that was real, but I knew we had to make our way over to the main house. The first thing I noticed as I stepped into the book-lined living room was a cordoned-off door near the hallway. A tour was in progress and Alex and I tagged along for a few minutes. The guide explained that the door led to a second stairway, now too delicate for use, that led up to Rose's old room. The guide, an aging, no-nonsense woman who could have played a schoolteacher in the television version of
Little House on the Prairie
, was one of the volunteer biddies Ron had mentioned. They all seemed territorial. Possessive. They knew more about Laura and her legacy, had memorized more of the books, than anyone.

She talked about how Laura and Almanzo had lovingly built each room, with some later modernizing financed by Rose. But I was struck by how the parlor seemed the only warm place in the house, with its varnished wood and stone fireplace. Nearby, Laura's library bookshelves were crowded with titles she and Rose had selected. The kitchen was dim, a place to get work done rather than a place to gather. Standing there, gazing at the few cupboards, enamel cookstove, and narrow counter area, I felt like I needed to drape a shawl over my shoulders. In the two small bedrooms on the first floor, the iron bedsteads were twin-sized and I told Alex that I bet the mattresses were as hard as bone. Here was where Laura and Almanzo had slept, their beds nearly toe to toe.

Though Rose's room upstairs was tiny, it seemed at least a little more welcoming. I could picture a child dreaming away the seasons there, staring out the window with her books. Plotting her future, determining her escape. The rest of the second floor was closed to the public, and yellow strings were taped over two closed doors. When I saw that, I knew I was done just imagining what might happen next. I knew I would have to see what was in those rooms.

As the rest of the tour started back downstairs, Alex and I dropped back to the end of the line. There were no other guides around and I doubted the house had any security cameras in use. Alex stood guard while I tried the doors. It was almost too easy: they weren't even locked.

The first room looked like a meeting space: folding table, metal chairs, filing cabinets. Stacks of brochures sat on the floor, along with diamond-patterned curtains that had probably hung at the window. The paneled walls had been painted a dull gray, and someone had laid a cheap mauve rug over the oak floor. I poked through the cabinets—museum papers. I decided to move on to the second closed-off room. This one had had the allure of clutter: half-open storage boxes pushed against the walls. It was here I shut myself in, feeling the heat of stilled objects rising all around me. It felt like a chamber, filled with things to be dealt with in the vague future. I wondered if it was Laura or Rose who had chosen the wallpaper of tiny bud-sprouting vines that covered even the steep slant of the ceiling. Who had hemmed the green-striped fabric for the tiny square window? Like any proper attic, the room smelled of forgotten things.

Glancing into the collections of clothes, books, newspapers, magazines, I couldn't tell what was Laura's and what was Rose's, or if perhaps the items belonged to someone else entirely. Who had wanted to keep what? One box contained purple mimeographs of Laura's As a Farm Woman Thinks column. Another held cross-stitch hoops and yarns.

Dust spun in the air when I pulled out a small crate that had been shoved under a faux-Chippendale-style chair that no longer had a seat. On top of the crate lay a few yards of pink floral jacquard, maybe meant for pillow shams. Inside: an old apron, a collection of plain, unused stationery, three copies of Rose's novel
Free Land
, and two slim soft-bound journals. They were, disappointingly, empty—not a single line of writing in the yellowed pages.

I paused at the
Free Land
books. They were first editions, perhaps saved from the copies that Rose had received upon publication. The cover appeared to echo the gold pin: a wooden shanty sat near a pond, bordered by sheaves of golden wheat and grasses. I had never held such old original editions before. Maybe that's why I felt compelled to open each copy, to touch the brittling pages and imagine how it must have been for Rose to see her work come to such tangible fruition, to hope it would launch her to the literary success and acclaim she had so desired.

It was the middle copy of
Free Land
that held the letter, though it wasn't so much held as it was captive, pressed as thin as the pages of the book, and easily missed. It didn't fall out; the book didn't open to it. I just happened to flip past that particular page.

The paper was carbon-copy type, like the old onionskin I remembered from Ong Hai's earliest ESL classes at a community center. The ink had blurred, and I had to bring the letter to the small window at the far end of the room to read the words.

October 14, 1918

To Whom It May Concern at San Francisco General Hospital:

Two days ago, I was made a mother by a woman at your hospital. I wish her to know, if it is acceptable, that I am profoundly grateful. If it is irregular to write this letter, I apologize. May she know that the boy's name is Albert? He will be well taken care of all his life.

Yours,

Mrs. Louis Stellenson

The handwriting was scratchy, calligraphic. All at once I imagined a woman sitting down at her husband's desk, her hand traveling over the thin cream-colored paper edged in blue. A burst of feeling, an impulse sent off in the mail. And what about the recipient? Was she still in the hospital when the letter arrived? Had a nurse handed it to her silently, apprehensively? How had the letter found its way to this book?

I forgot I was in the dim heat and dust of Rocky Ridge Farm, that even now another tour group was right outside the door, surveying the little room where Rose had slept and grown up. I forgot about Alex playing watchman. I forgot everything but the two women poised on either side of this letter, bound forever by a child. Rose's child?

I was startled by two soft knocks on the door. Alex opened it and whispered, “Better hurry up.”

I had to take the letter. I refilled the crate with its contents, but I must have arranged them wrong, because the lid wouldn't fit. Alex tapped on the door again, so I added the copy of
Free Land
to my bag too, secured the crate, and slid it back where I'd found it. Then Alex and I were down the stairs and out on the front lawn, walking away from Rocky Ridge. The choral group was still at it, now singing about Charles and Caroline Ingalls. More children and families were streaming in from the parking lot, eager to visit Laura's life, while Alex and I hurried to his car like a pair of bandits.

W
hatever it was that befell Rose in San Francisco in 1918, she left it behind two years later, when the Red Cross Publicity Bureau offered her a writing job in Europe. She spent much of the next eight years traveling—Paris, London, Vienna, Albania, Armenia—before returning to Rocky Ridge for what she thought would be a respite. Always big on resolutions and always obsessed with money, she'd set a goal of storing up at least $100,000 in savings. At the same time, the extravagant part of her couldn't resist another plan: to add modern electricity and plumbing to the farmhouse and to build her parents a new stone cottage, English-style, accented with Mediterranean tiles and tall, diamond-paned windows—a generous overture but also, perhaps, an attempt to absolve herself of the devastating fire she had accidentally caused as a child, decades earlier in De Smet.

Either way, the new construction would be a gain for Rose too. By moving her parents a half mile away to Rock House, as she named it, she could have the old farmhouse for herself and some quiet from her mother. Then she could finally concentrate on her writing and, in her spare time, be on hand to help her mother's.

Mama Bess had other ideas. Happy to have her daughter back at home, she agreed to the move but showed little regard for solitude and privacy. In her diaries Rose complained about her mother's incessant visits, knocks on her door, repetitive questions, and efforts to draw her into the ladies' social groups Mama Bess had formed in Mansfield. Rose had no patience for these perceived wastes of time, not to mention the provinciality of her mother's friends.
Days on the farm do not fill diaries
, she wrote. No doubt too she felt disapproval from her parents' friends for being a divorcée, and she didn't bother to dispel the reputation she'd always had for being snooty. Over the years of distance, Rose and Laura's correspondence had been filled with proclamations of love and of how deeply they missed each other. Now, in person, there was strain. A lot of it.

The Mama Bess Rose describes in her journals and letters doesn't much resemble the Laura Ingalls of the
Little House
books. Where bravado and spark defined the heroine I'd often thought I knew better than my own sibling, a sense of distance, a withholding, characterized the Laura of Rose's journals. Rose, one of her friends once remarked, had never gotten over the despair of a childhood marked by literal and emotional deprivation. Her impulses and mood swings touched everything from real estate to furniture shopping to friendships. Most of all, her relationship with her mother, whose ardor and acrimony Rose recorded.
No tongue can tell how I want to get away from here!

Then came the Crash of 1929, which wiped out most of Rose's funds and left her trapped at Rocky Ridge, with debts coming due. On Rock House alone she had ended up spending more than twice the $4,000 amount originally estimated. The next few years were a blur of anxiety as she tried to make money through freelancing and ghostwriting, all the while working on
Let the Hurricane Roar
and helping Mama Bess turn
Pioneer Girl
into children's books.

Rose may have dismissed any interest in sharing the credit for
Little House
, calling her role as that of barely an editor, but there was no question she believed that her mother ought to defer to her on matters of craft. She was often frustrated by Laura's stubbornness during the writing process. Rose was the “real” writer, after all, with hundreds of publications under her belt. She had tons of friends in the business in New York, had socialized and sparred with the likes of Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis. And she would brook no resistance when it came to laying out the span of the books, making sure their narrative arcs revolved around the seasons, from planting to harvest.

On some level Laura must have known what her daughter felt about her small-town circle in Mansfield. And perhaps Laura privately thought her daughter too big for her britches. She must have known she could not keep her. By 1935, following the success of
Let the Hurricane Roar
, Rose was spending more and more time away from Rocky Ridge. Laura was helper and helped, caught between wanting to mother and wanting to be mothered. By 1937 Rose had left Rocky Ridge for good and her parents had moved back to the main farmhouse. Rose would never again visit them for longer than a couple of weeks. Soon mother and daughter would be collaborating on the rest of the
Little House
books through letters. Laura would send pages; Rose would edit, correct, fix, rewrite, and send them back. Sometimes, out of exasperation or exhaustion, Laura sent anecdotes, telling Rose to use them or not as she saw fit.

When they argued about the writing of
By the Shores of Silver Lake
, Rose insisted her vision was correct, ending a back-and-forth by saying:
You will just have to take my word for it
.

Change the beginning of the story if you want
, Laura conceded.
Do anything you please with the damn stuff if you will fix it up.

—

A
t the Tastee-Freez, Alex and I argued.

We had a name—Albert Stellenson—but I refused to let Alex search it on his phone. I wanted to go back to Rocky Ridge, to see if there was anything more to discover at Rock House.

“It's a sign,” I said. “First the pin and then Rose's poem and now this letter.”

“Or the pin is a chance likeness, and the poem is something you're reading too much into, and this letter is just a bookmark. They don't necessarily add up to anything at all.”

“What about that photo of my grandfather?”

“Lee, you said yourself that the guy's face is barely visible.” He knew that I hadn't shown the photo to Ong Hai on my brief return to Franklin, and I wondered if he'd guessed at my fear that Ong Hai would say it wasn't him at all. “Besides, you're not supposed to return to the scene of the crime. Have you even considered what you're going to do with all this contraband?”

He jabbed a soggy french fry into the puddle of ketchup he'd poured onto his cheeseburger wrapper. We had a corner booth, with a view of people tromping through the restaurant, their flip-flops slapping the floor. Skanky teenagers in cutoff shorts; old people in long pants and sweaters; no shortage of weary parents, each step signifying a sigh. All of them and their kids, sloppy and hopping around or whining, tilting their heads back to read the lit-up menu of burgers, fries, onion rings, and sundaes. I had always liked the look of swirled soft-serve cones, the tall elegance of creamy, airy spirals folding in on each other. How long had the Tastee-Freez been here? What had Mansfield looked like in 1968, when Rose died? When was the last time she had seen Rocky Ridge? Could she or Laura ever have imagined what their town would become?

“You mean,” I said, trying to answer Alex, “how am I going to give this stuff back? I don't know.”

“No, I mean—not that I'm saying you were planning on doing this, but if you were ever to publish an article about Rose Wilder's alleged double life, wouldn't you have to admit that you'd stolen some things?”

“I guess so.” I hadn't thought that far ahead.

“If the end justifies the means, then what's to stop every scholar from breaking into archives and old houses?”

“Yeah, every academic is just waiting for her
National Treasure
moment.”

Alex smiled at that. We had watched more bad movies together than good ones, preferring anything with multiple chase scenes. We'd agreed that, should villain or alien come after us, we would stick together.

Being with him had always made me feel like real life—whatever had to be faced or endured—could be postponed for a while. Even with all of his questions and doubts about what I was doing with Rose Wilder, I still felt like that, tucked away at this Tastee-Freez in a remote patch of Missouri. No one in my family knew where I was.

“I think I just need to get to the end,” I said. “See where it ends. If Rose did have a child and gave him up for adoption, what happened to him?”

“I'm just not convinced. It seems too out there. Whoever had that baby could have easily been a friend of Rose's. You said yourself she had a big social circle and that she had a soft spot for helping out anyone in need.”

“She did. But—” I didn't know how to justify my growing certainty that the presence of the letter and the poem among her belongings had to signify
her
. “She didn't have to keep those things. She was pretty meticulous about making copies of her letters and keeping her diaries organized. She wanted to be famous. Probably her private writing was done with the hope of future biographers reading it. She could have destroyed the evidence, but she didn't.”

“Because it wasn't about her.”

I shrugged.

“Anyway, we can't go back there, Lee.”

“We've already come all this way.”

“And it's far enough. Really. What more do you need?”

—

S
o we drove the three and a half hours back to St. Louis.

I got Alex to agree not to search any variation of Albert Stellenson until we got to the hotel. His true identity would be, I said, my own personal blue-dye cake moment.

So it was at the Holiday Inn Express downtown, a rundown stretch off the highway, that we sat on the bed and I opened my laptop. I typed the name. Stellenson, it turned out, was unusual enough to yield only three in California. One of them, Gregory, lived in San Francisco. A phone number was right there on the screen, along with a list of current, previous, and known addresses, all in the Bay Area. Gregory Stellenson, born 1979. Counting back the generations, he was the only Stellenson who matched.

“That could be Rose's great-grandchild,” I said.

“Or not,” Alex said. Then, “Only one thing left to do.” Reaching for the laptop, he clicked on Facebook. In a matter of moments, Gregory Stellenson's profile, apparently not at all private, showed us what he looked like. “What do you think?” Alex asked, but I couldn't tell. Gregory Stellenson looked like what he said he was: thirty-two years old, blondish-brownish hair, educated, liberal, eco-conscious, with a fondness for Wilco, bicycling, Alexander Payne movies, and Bi-Rite ice cream. He had only a handful of photos, and all seemed to be group pictures with friends. He didn't mention family anywhere, didn't mention his relationship status. He had 328 friends and under his name was the tag
San Francisco
.

Google told us that Gregory had studied at Berkeley and had received a humanities award there. He had been an intern in the San Francisco Library system and he had participated in bicycle races to benefit cancer research.

“Looks like your average Berkeley do-gooder,” Alex remarked.

But all I was thinking was:
San Francisco
. California, the sun and the West. Pioneers. Rose. The Promised Land of so many migrants and immigrants, all those travelers seeking a resolution nearer to the sea. I thought:
Sam
.

Alex got up and went to the bathroom. I could hear him getting ready for bed, brushing his teeth. When he came back into the room he seemed irritated to see Gregory Stellenson's profile still on the computer screen. He grabbed a book of William Trevor stories and settled into the bed, leaning back on the chenille, gold-tasseled pillows.

I said, “They never wash those, you know.”

“Did you bring one of those UV lights or something?”

“So you're done with this whole Rose thing now? Don't you wonder what this guy knows, or if he does know?”

“Assuming there is something to know. I'm sure you're thinking about going to San Francisco no matter what.”

“Road trip?” I asked jokingly.

“Just keep in mind that you might be chasing a false story.” Alex turned toward me. “If Rose Wilder had had a baby, why wouldn't she keep it? Especially after her first child died.”

“There could be a lot of reasons. She was going through a divorce. That was scandalous enough, but to have a baby out of wedlock?”

“You said she wasn't conventional.”

“Maybe the baby was Gillette's and he didn't want it. Or maybe it wasn't Gillette's. Maybe Rose had already decided she didn't want a domestic life. I could see that. She always wanted to be free and unencumbered.”

“Or maybe you're overanalyzing. That baby, and that Gregory guy, could very well be related to someone else entirely.”

“What about the pin?” I countered.

“Okay, say that pin really did belong to Rose Wilder. It doesn't legitimize the rest of the story.”

We fell into silence, side by side on the same bed. I pulled a book from my bag—another Wilder biography—and Alex returned to his. I didn't remember falling asleep, but when I woke up he was curled up next to me, our books on the floor.

In the morning we picked up lattes and cinnamon doughnuts at a bakery and Alex drove the four hours back to Iowa. The highways alternated between steamy rain and hazy sunlight. We didn't talk much about Rose, drifting instead to our undergrad days. We kept using the word
remember
. Professors, classes, dates, the campus in winter. Then I fell asleep again, waking up to NPR just as we were crossing the river into Iowa City.

As soon as we got back to his apartment Alex returned to work, sitting down to his computer. He seemed to want some space so I headed out to a coffee shop and called my pharmaceutical sellout friend Amy. She had been a
Little House
fan since elementary school and, true to form, she encouraged me to come to San Francisco right away.
This is momentum
, she said.
What else do you have to do anyway?
As we talked, she e-mailed me a last-minute deal that left O'Hare in two days. She said I could arrive on Tuesday and by the next day be looking, maybe even finding, Rose's possible great-grandson.