Read A Wilder Rose: A Novel for Free Online Page A

beginning to get excited, the way I always do when I am about to be seduced by a house. “I could fix it up for us , Troub—do some painting, wire it for electricity, install a furnace, and get rid of those awful stoves. It will be our place to stay in, to travel from. When we’re there, we can hire somebody to cook and clean for us, and I can write. And we can invite friends from New York—Genevieve, Catharine, Mary Margaret. I’m sure they’ll jump at the chance to spend a few weeks at a writing retreat in the country.”
    Inviting friends had been one of the thorny issues the last time Troub and I had stayed at the farm together. Mama Bess complained that we sat up too late and made too much noise, and Papa was annoyed when he found the outhouse occupied. (“Every time a fellow wants to use the privy, there’s some hen on the roost,” he’d grumbled.) I couldn’t blame them, actually. The farmhouse looked large, but the rooms were small, and there were only the two extra bedrooms upstairs. If four was a crowd, five or six was even more so—and a serious disruption in my parents’ daily routines. But if Mama Bess and Papa had their own house on the other side of the ridge, our visitors wouldn’t bother them.
    “A writing retreat.” Troub sat up straight, catching my enthusiasm. “We could have our friends, and parties, and both of us could write.”
    A couple of years before, Troub had showed me her war diary. She was trained as a nurse and had volunteered in France in the last years of the war, where she’d specialized as an anesthesiologist and been promoted to captain. When I saw what a splendid piece of writing she had done, I mailed it off posthaste to the editor of the Atlantic Monthly , who quite naturally snapped it up. We polished it a bit, and it ran as a serial in the magazine and would shortly be published as a book, Sister . Troub could be a fine writer if she settled down to it. But she had inherited a little money, enough so that she could choose to write or not to.
    I’ve never had the luxury of choosing to write. For me, writing has always been a financial necessity. Now, that would be more true than ever, given my ambitious plan for the farm. But I could manage it. All I needed was a thousand words a day, a dozen short stories a year, another book-length serial for the Country Gentleman or the Saturday Evening Post , which paid better. By 1930, if I buckled down to work, my parents would be provided for and I would have a solid, secure fifty thousand dollars invested in the market. I could divide my time between New York and the farm. I could live where I chose and write what I liked, without having to depend on magazine fiction for a living.
    Fifty thousand dollars. Now, looking back, fifty thousand dollars seems like a maniac’s hallucination. But it wasn’t, then. Then, we were all caught up in the rah-rah-rah of the euphoric days before the crash. The stock market was on its way to the moon and the future had no horizons. There was plenty of everything and more to be dreamed of and reached for. More, more, more. Fifty thousand dollars was a goal to be grasped, not a joke to be laughed at.
    “Yes, friends and parties,” I replied. “We can both write. And spend time together, doing just as we like. What do you say?” I wanted her to come, but I couldn’t insist. Our commitment to each other had always been for the moment. We made no promises and imposed no obligations, other than to respond to each other in the truest of ways. When it came time to look ahead, I always felt the temporariness of our relationship. Sometimes, that served. Right now, it didn’t, quite.
    Troub considered, scratched her freckled nose, frowned. After a moment, she said, “Guess I don’t have anything better to do. Sure, Rose. I’ll come.” That was pure Troub: easy come, easy go, with no plans of her own except to enjoy whatever she was doing, and no designs on a particular future. She added, with