Pioneer Girl (5 page)

It was so much easier, and preferable, to block out such thoughts with Alex. He was the second person I'd ever slept with (the first being a guy in my dorm, freshman year, who took me to free lectures on global filmmaking), and neither of us had ever endured long relationships, with each other or anyone else. Somehow we managed not to feel jealous. We could go months without calling or e-mailing and still be able to pick up where we'd left off.

So when we got back to his apartment I kissed him first. We were on the bed soon enough, the sex faster than I remembered, his hands a little rougher as he moved on top of me.

When it was done I asked him to order a pizza and he laughed. “Mushrooms and olives, right?”

We stayed in bed and Alex checked his e-mail on his phone.

“Are you going out with anyone right now? One of those girls at the party?”

“Did you meet Allison? Blondish-reddish hair—”

“The one wearing boots on a warm spring day.”

“We broke up a few weeks ago.”

“Is she the one who prettied up your apartment?”

“I guess so. She's in poetry here. It was only a few months.”

“I'm not involved with anyone at the moment either,” I said, though he hadn't asked. “Aren't the hookups at this school supposed to be legendary and incestuous? That didn't happen so much at mine.” This was true, disappointingly so. I'd kind of hoped to find some agreeably distracting escapades, but most of the guys were already married, engaged, or involved in long-term or long-distance relationships. “You know what, I can't imagine being Jonah and Silvie right now. I wonder if they planned the pregnancy.”

“They did, and that's why he's in law school. He said he decided to grow up finally.”

“Maybe that surprises me more than it should. Aren't we just a little too young for this?”

“And then one day very soon we'll wonder what the hell happened to us. Once upon a time, you'd be a spinster by now.”

“And you'd be ‘baching' it, trying to learn how to cook your own salt pork and pancakes,” I said.

Our grandmothers would turn in their graves
, Ma Ingalls had said at the idea of sewing sheets by machine rather than by hand.
But after all, these are modern times.

Yet my mother still believed children should live at home until marriage. And spinsterhood might now be called singlehood but it still elicited private worry and pity. I thought of Laura's sister Mary, the pretty one, whose luxurious blond hair Laura had envied. As a young girl, Mary pieced together a quilt for her trousseau, planning ahead for her future house, husband, and children. Then illness left her blind. The
Little House on the Prairie
TV show gave Mary romance, marriage, and babies, but none of that actually happened. In real life, blindness ended her dreams. The Ingallses scrimped and saved in order to send Mary to the Iowa College for the Blind because they knew that her education there would be the extent of her adventures. Then she would return home to live out the rest of her days. Which she did. Mary died at age sixty-three, only a few years after Ma Ingalls. How had Mary reconciled all her lost potential, all those lost wishes? Could she even have talked about it with anyone?

When the pizza arrived Alex and I ate it straight from the box as if we were undergrads again. Afterward I showed him the
Little House
box set I'd brought in my overnight bag, explaining that it had been an eighth-year birthday gift from Ong Hai, after he and Sam and I had gotten hooked on reruns of the TV show. Gamely, Alex opened to the first page of
Little House in the Big Woods
and we started reading together, slipping down into the plot of land near Pepin, Wisconsin, where Laura Ingalls had been born in 1867.

One thing I loved about the books this time around was how they were a DIY guide to frontier living: how to make butter and cheese from the cow you milked yourself; how to make sausage from the pig you butchered in the yard; how to make a smooth pine floor and a door with hinges; how to sew a lady's dress with all the requisite flounces and bustles. I saw myself living alongside Laura as she grew up, as her family left Wisconsin for lands unknown. I could have been her invisible twin or make-believe friend, helping her trick Nellie Oleson into getting leeches stuck to her legs, rushing to bring in the woodpile under threat of a sudden blizzard. I imagined myself living in a dugout, saw myself timidly attending a fancy birthday party where oyster soup, codfish cakes, fried potatoes, white cake, and whole oranges were served. At Thanksgiving I too might have enjoyed stuffed rabbit roasted with slices of salt pork. At Christmas I too would have rejoiced over a piece of horehound candy, a cake sprinkled with white sugar, a tin cup for my very own, and a new, gleaming penny.

Yet the books were also filled with shadows of hunger, sickness, violent storms, worries about money. And they had a baseline white entitlement: the Indian lands should, of course, be given to white settlers; the only good Indian was a dead Indian. (Pa and Laura, at least, objected to that.) The Ingallses roamed as if any parcel of land out West might be theirs for the taking. Once, the family spent a winter subsisting on little more than tea and brown bread. Laura grew up knowing the meaning of sacrifice and stillness, the same way she knew she'd always have to wear a corset and keep house for a man. All of this for “freedom,” homesteading, the will and claim of land—of assumed ownership.

Sometimes the
Little House
books mentioned life “back East,” that distant apparitional place that supplied workers, goods, and coal from the railroads. Also mail, newspapers, and magazines that provided glimpses of politics and fashion. Ma Ingalls had to wait for
Godey's Lady's Book
, or word from other women with connections to the East, to find out if hoop skirts had come back into style to replace petticoats. Even on an empty prairie, style mattered. There was satisfaction in owning a new dress made from poplin freshly arrived from the East, each imagined pin tuck traceable to the prominent families of New York that floated and fretted through Edith Wharton's pages. While those women dressed in satin gowns, Laura Ingalls, during that same time period, sewed her own calico aprons and helped to stack the winter's hay.

Alex and I had gotten through the first book and part of the second when he started drifting off. I sank down next to him and closed my eyes. At some point I wasn't sure if I was dreaming yet or merely thinking images of empty houses and unfamiliar beds, struggling to know where I was in the first place.

L
ong before Laura Ingalls Wilder became Laura Ingalls Wilder, she was simply Mrs. A. J. Wilder, wife of Almanzo, known to her daughter as Mama Bess. They lived on a farm named Rocky Ridge in southern Missouri. For a while she wrote a column called As a Farm Woman Thinks for the local
Ruralist
newspaper, covering observations about chickens, horses, gardening, and weather. But she had bigger, secret ambitions. After Rose left home and became a writer, Laura completed a small memoir about growing up in the 1800s. She called it
Pioneer Girl
. She wanted to sell it to the publishers, and surely Rose could help her. After all, Rose had connections and Laura needed money. Rose was the one who had encouraged her mother to write her memories down in the first place.

This was right after the Crash of 1929. Laura was sixty-two years old, Rose forty-three. By then, Rose had made a name with her articles, stories, and biographies; she had traveled in Europe, found friendships with other writers, mapped out ideas for future trips, future books. But she wanted to be a novelist. So she went home to Rocky Ridge, thinking she could have her own quiet space for work, and in her spare time help her mother with
Pioneer Girl
. For years, both women wrote the same territory of the Ingalls family's adventures westward.

Rose sent
Pioneer Girl
to her agent but he returned it soon enough, rejected by numerous publishers. An editor friend suggested that the memoir could be made into a series of books for young readers. Quickly Rose and her mother reshaped the pages into a new manuscript,
When Grandma Was a Little Girl
, what would later become
Little House in the Big Woods
. Harper & Brothers published it in 1932, the same year the
Saturday Evening Post
serialized Rose's novel
Let the Hurricane Roar
. Over the next ten years the two women would collaborate on the rest of the
Little House
books.

Laura wasn't a born writer; her personal jottings, her column for the
Missouri Ruralist
, and
The First Four Years
, which Rose never edited, show a spare, wooden style. If Laura's narration was the flatness of prairie, then Rose's was all hills and mountains, metaphor and suspense. Still, it wasn't until the early 1990s that a critic, William Holtz, brought this discrepancy to the forefront, going so far as to argue that Rose had ghostwritten the
Little House
books. But Rose never had any interest in claiming them under her own name. She had no desire, she said, to attach herself to “juveniles.” She couldn't have known how the future, its legacies and obscurities, would shake out. By the time
These Happy Golden Years
, the last planned book in the series, came out in 1943, she'd achieved her own literary renown with the 1938 best-selling novel
Free Land
.

Except I'd never heard of it. Who had? Until recently, all I'd known of Rose had come from the TV show and
The First Four Years
. Her name had so fallen into obscurity that she had become a mere afterthought.

—

T
hese were the baseline facts, gathered from the web and from the Holtz book I'd found at a used bookstore, that were circling through my mind when I stepped into the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum in West Branch, Iowa. Rose had been pals with Hoover back in the day and been his first biographer, which was why her papers were there. Pictures of him, looking stern but trying to smile, lined the walls, leading the way to a back room where archives were kept.

I'd always loved the stillness of academic libraries, the comfort and competition of being surrounded by people involved in slow, scholarly endeavors. The library at the Hoover wasn't exactly a Newberry or Beinecke, but the kind of place that reminded me of home: a reading room time-warped to three decades past, with rust-colored carpet and microfiche readers the size of early IBM computers. A small band of researchers squinted over Hoover's notes and newspapers, setting up cameras on tabletop tripods to record their findings. They were a standard lot—frumpy and frowning, pallid and disheveled. Only a couple of them glanced at me, disapprovingly, I thought. Suddenly I felt silly in the bright turquoise ballet flats that I'd thought were so cute, with their little gold lamé bows. Like a lot of Asian people, I probably looked younger than I was.

The librarian, a skinny guy who looked a lot like an engineering grad student I'd dated a couple years back, looked up from the journal article he was reading as I approached the desk. He asked me to sign in and list my affiliation. “I'm Ron,” he said. “I'm here to help but, just so you know, we can't provide any change for the Xerox machine.” He printed out an identification card and handed it to me.
The researcher, Lee Lien, has duly applied to use materials in the Herbert Hoover Library.

When I explained that I wanted to look at the Rose Wilder Lane papers he led the way over to a shelf that held the index: a row of three-ring canvas binders, nearly two dozen in all, cataloguing Rose's diaries, letters, and mementos.

“Seems like every few weeks or so someone new wants to see these,” Ron mused. “Some are fans, some are researchers.”

“I'm a researcher,” I said, a little too stridently. I mentioned that I'd just gotten my doctorate.

“That's cool,” he said. He seemed to regard me with a new respect, I thought. “So, first, take a look at these catalogs. All the Lane papers and documents are listed. See which ones you want to take a look at, then fill out a request sheet and I'll bring them out from the back. Of course, the diaries are photocopies of the originals.”

I thanked him, already reaching for the binder marked
1930s
. I sat down at the nearest table and turned the pages. As Ron had said, it was just a list, generated long ago on what was probably a manual typewriter, with brief descriptions of what the papers held.

RWL diary, 1930, Jan.-Feb. Rocky Ridge, Mo.

RWL diary, 1930, March, part I-II.
Rocky Ridge, Mo.

I went back to the shelf to look at earlier years, marveling at how they tracked Rose's moves—California, Missouri, Albania, New York, Texas, Connecticut. It was so overwhelming I just sat there for a few minutes: I hadn't expected there would be so much information. Hadn't realized how large her life had been.

On the request sheet I asked for a few of Rose's journals from 1930, when she and Laura would have started working on
Little House in the Big Woods
, and the diaries from 1965, when Rose visited Vietnam. Ron disappeared into the back and after a while wheeled out a cart with several boxes, like the kind used to store file folders.

“Here you go,” he said. I must have looked surprised, because he said, “I know, it's a lot. She was prolific. Take your time.”

He left the cart next to the table I'd claimed. It was ten in the morning and as I stared at the boxes, my resolve started to slip. What was I doing here, anyway? Was this all I knew how to do—research and read? The idea of Rose at her desk, piecing together the origins of her parents' lives, then wandering the earth to the end of her days, brought back an old anxiety: my mother and grandfather, also searching, landing, restive in the Midwest. I had to banish this—them—from the room. I remembered Alex, instead, tapping away at his laptop. I remembered Iowa City and the evening drinks, dinner, and bed that were waiting for me. Alex would want to know if I'd found anything here.

I opened the box that held photocopies of Rose's 1965 journals and saw that it included a pile of Vietnam souvenirs as well. Blank postcards, with faded, dreamy drawings of the old opera house in Saigon and the Hotel Caravelle. Boarding passes from Pan Am and United. Hotel bills. Her passport and visa, which displayed a photo of Rose wearing a turban and looking like the famous portraits of Laura in old age. Most of the journal entries from the trip were scattered notes about the history of the country. Her handwriting took time getting used to—sprawling, loop-filled, an old style people had stopped learning more than half a century ago. I couldn't see where she'd written about anyone in particular in Saigon. No young man and his daughter, no Café 88.

Instead, she mostly wrote scraps of grand abstraction—about colonization, about civilian dignity in spite of war—and travelogue remarks about weather and rice fields.

Ao dai is the V dress.

8 acres. Rice crop garden palms bananas. Village destroyed by V.C.

All admire adaptability, flexibility, the bamboo reed.

Foreigners are disliked, admired, & respected.

Nothing so far corroborated my theory that Rose Wilder Lane was the American woman who had visited my grandfather's café every day for two weeks. Ong Hai had said he'd helped her cross the street, navigating the traffic that flowed without signals or stops. He was worried about her being by herself in Saigon. He told her his home would be hers as long as she ever wanted it. And she had thanked him, pressed his hand. This American woman was both old and young, Ong Hai tried to explain once. She'd possessed joie de vivre, and a mind completely intact. But the Rose of the archives, Rose Wilder, had died in her sleep three years later, at the age of eighty-two, at her home in Connecticut.

Nowhere in these journals was there mention of a gold pin. If Almanzo's gift to Laura in
These Happy Golden Years
had been real, it would have been an heirloom, no small thing for Rose to lose or give.

I had nearly emptied the contents of the box onto the table and now, disappointed, I started to put everything back. The items had been out of order in the first place—just light penciled numbers on them to correspond to the index—so I didn't worry about keeping everything neat. There were a few black-and-white photos in the mix, small snapshots encased in plastic. Most were scenes of Saigon life—people on bicycles and cycles, French colonial buildings—the standard images one would find even now in
Lonely Planet
guides. There were pictures of Rose too, standing amid all of this. Only one of them wasn't of her. It was a faded, blurred portrait of a man standing on a sidewalk. The photo had been taken at an angle, as if Rose had impulsively turned to get the shot. The man looked out at the street traffic. My grandfather had no pictures of himself from his younger days. But I thought it could have been him. Like the man in the picture, Ong Hai often wore light short-sleeved shirts and flip-flops. Café 88 could have been on that street.

In the index the image was simply listed as
Photo No. 12, Saigon, Vietnam, 1965
.

I looked up to where Ron was manning the front desk. He was staring at a computer screen, clicking a mouse. I wondered if he was playing some online game. Around me the other scholars and researchers kept on with their own work, making no noise except with the shutters of their cameras.

For the second time in a week, I turned into a thief. I didn't even think before the photograph was in my notebook, closed between blank pages where I had yet to write anything down about Rose Wilder Lane, or Laura Ingalls Wilder, or why I was there at the Hoover Library, looking them up, searching for, maybe hoping for, my own claim on America's favorite pioneer family.

—

T
hat night Alex and I ordered Thai food in. While we waited for it to arrive, I showed him the photograph and the gold pin.

“Who knew you'd turned into such a sly little klepto?” he said, holding the picture up to the floor lamp near the dinette table where he kept a stack of
New Yorker
s. “If I turn it just a little to the right and close one eye, I can see how you maybe do kind of look like him.”

“Yeah, yeah, his face is hardly visible, I know. But there's something of my grandfather in the guy's deportment. It's like the signature Ong Hai stance.”

“Did you just use the word
deportment
?”

Alex's buzzer rang, and he tossed the photo back to me on his way to the door. “You're going to stay and find out what's next, right?”

The ease of his generosity, right after my theft, which couldn't help but remind me of Sam's thefts, shamed me. Perhaps my brother and I were more similar than I cared to admit.

“Rose Wilder must have been rolling in royalties,” Alex said as he spread out containers of larb gai and noodles and tom yum soup.

“Only late in life.”

There were no other direct descendants of Laura Ingalls Wilder, I explained, and none of Laura's siblings had had children. Rose did have a child but he died shortly after birth. “Rose, Laura, and Laura's mother all at one point gave birth to baby boys who ended up dying in infancy.”

“You know, so many people can't bear the thought of not going on, of not continuing somehow in the world. But there are her books. That's Rose Wilder's legacy.”

“Sort of. If anyone remembers her books. Anyway, everything ended up with Rose's lawyer. She thought of him as an adopted son.”

“So all of the lawyer's descendants are the beneficiaries of the estate? Think of all the merchandising. The TV show, movies, the millions of reprinted books. When were they published, again?”

“In the thirties, and continually in print since then.”

“Jackpot.” Alex helped himself to more noodles. He offered the rest to me but I declined. Thai food had been the wrong thing to get, though I didn't say so. It reminded me too much of Franklin, of the way so many Asian restaurants in suburbs and small towns had to take on a pan-ethnic identity so that patrons walking into a Vietnamese or Chinese restaurant could also find the comfort of a tamed-down pad Thai.

“No one knows who Rose is, though,” I reminded him. “Laura is the one people know; she's the hero of the books.”

It was something I kept thinking about, later, as we returned to Alex's bed, and on into the night long after he had fallen asleep. Aside from the known truths of Rose's life, seeing her in those Saigon photos at the Hoover Library made me consider how alone she might have felt in the world. If she resented her mother for becoming the star, if she believed herself forgotten, if her travels to my family's homeland had been an escape from the fame she'd delivered to the name of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Alex would say it was wanderlust pure and simple. Who didn't want to be free of their family's choices?