"It was very successful, a best seller," Stover said. "Mother was very surprised when she read it and also angry because of the liberties Baum took with her story. She thought about writing him and telling him so. But she cooled off quickly—Mother is very stable—and she decided to ignore it. After all, what else could she do? She did not want publicity. She wouldn't like it nor would her husband and his parents, and she'd be accused of being insane. So she did nothing about it."
Dorothy did, however, read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz aloud to her son when he was five. He was entranced by it, and, when the sequels came out, he read them over and over again.
"When I was eight, my mother told me that she had been to this world and that she was the Dorothy in Baum's books. At least, that she was the child on whose adventures Baum had based his first book. The sequels were all fictional, of course, except for a few items like personal and geographical names. I was both stunned and delighted to find this out, though I was disappointed, frustrated, because she'd made me swear never to tell anyone about her revelation."
Though he was often tempted to tell his playmates that his mother was the Dorothy of Oz, he did not. Then, when he got older, he lost his belief in the existence of Oz. He decided that his mother had been fantasizing. But he was not sure. She was not the joking kind nor would she have lied to her child. To anyone, in fact.
One day, when he was eleven, he brought the subject up. He asked her if she had indeed been telling him the truth or was she merely entertaining him and making him feel important because his mother had been the heroine of a child's book?
She had gotten angry, though not for long. She had taken him into her bedroom and unlocked a little bureau. Out of the drawer she took a small iron box. She unlocked that and took from it, not the treasure he had expected, jewels or gold or a dagger, but a common steel housekey.
"Mother said, ‘This is the key to the door of the house that was carried by the tornado to the land of the Munchkins.' "
Stover had gazed awestricken at it.
" ‘I wish that Uncle Henry and Aunt Em were still alive,' Mother said. ‘They could tell you that, after I'd returned from the Quadling country, I had a shining spot on my forehead. It was visible at day, and at night it gleamed brightly. That was the mark that the witch of the North set on my forehead to indicate that I was under her protection. That mark was the main reason why my aunt and uncle believed my story. But they were not dumb. They knew that I'd be subject to all sorts of publicity and pestering by curiosity-seekers and newspaper reporters and that I'd be ridiculed and mocked or exploited. They made me put face-powder on it. They also told me to keep quiet about where I'd been. But I couldn't help telling other children. They told their parents, and word got around. Of course, I was bound to be a celebrity, since everybody thought that the tornado had carried me and the house off, and I was a seven days' wonder when I showed up. But Uncle Henry put out that I'd been wandering around all that time and that I'd had amnesia—forgot who I was—and had also suffered from brain fever. That's what he told Mr. Baum when he came out to see me.' "
Stover continued, "Uncle Henry had assumed that Dorothy was dead, and he wanted to hold services for her. But Aunt Em told him that they wouldn't consider her dead until it was proven. She had faith that Dorothy still lived, and she prayed a lot for her."
"Surely the newspapers would at least have reported that she had appeared after she was thought to be dead? The reporters would have wanted her story of how she'd survived."
"Yes, especially in that small community where even a tea party was a hot item. The story about her seemingly miraculous escape from death and her amnesia and all that was printed. My mother kept it in a scrapbook and showed it to me."
"Why did this Baum put Dorothy in the state of Kansas?"
"I don't know. Maybe he didn't want to be sued by my mother. As I said, he fictionalized her story, put stuff in it that didn't happen."
He told Glinda about the chapter in which Dorothy and her companions on the quest, the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Woodman, Toto the dog, and the Scarecrow, discovered a city of living dolls.
"Even Baum's most ardent admirers feel that that chapter had no place there, that it was contrived and didn't work. But he did other things, too, all accountable by his desire to write a children's book. It had to be quick and simple reading, and the action had to move smoothly and swiftly. Thus, he ignored the fact that the people of your world would not speak English. He didn't tell the truth, which was that Mother didn't set out at once on the Yellow Brick Road. She had to stay where she'd landed for a month in order to learn the Munchkin language. She's a whizbang at picking up foreign tongues. I'm pretty good, but she outshines me by far."
"All this is interesting," the queen said. "But you still haven't told me of her later life."
"Sorry. I have to fill in the background. Otherwise, you won't know what I'm talking about."
Glinda smiled and said, "I may know more than you think I do."
Hank stared at her for a moment. "I wouldn't be surprised. I'll ask you some time what you mean by that."
His mother had lived the hard struggling life of a Dakota farmgirl until she was almost sixteen. She'd gone to the local grade school and high school and also read much whenever she had the chance.
"Which wasn't often, since she helped with the house chores and even with the plowing and reaping."
But life as a whole was easier and better than before her visit to the other world. Dorothy was hardheaded but not so much that she wasn't also somewhat superstitious. She attributed the improvement to, one, the blessing the North Witch had given her and, two, to the housekey. That had become a semimagical token. But when Uncle Henry was killed by the kick of a mule and, two weeks later, Aunt Em died of a heart attack, Dorothy thought her luck had run out.
"However, she realized some profit from the sale of the farm. She couldn't get her hands on the lump sum because she was a ward of the court, and it was doled out to her for her living expenses and education. She quit high school and went to a business college in Iowa. Then she told the lawyers handling her affairs that she was going to New York to be a stenographer and secretary. They objected, but she went anyway. She got a job by lying about her age. At the same time, she looked for openings in dramas or musical comedies. Mother was—is, even at forty-one—a good-looker."
He was going to say that she had legs almost as good as Glinda's, but he decided that that might not be discreet.
His mother got a job as a dancer in a chorus line in a very successful Broadway production. Shortly afterwards, she met Lincoln Stover, the only child of a wealthy stockbroker. Lincoln was ten years older than Dorothy, and he was a regular stage-door Johnny.
Hank explained this term.
"His parents came from distinguished families, Massachusetts pioneers who came from England in the early 1630s."
Lincoln Stover, Hank's father, was born in Oyster Bay, Long Island, an area where great estates were owned by such as Louis Tiffany and F. W. Woolworth and where Theodore Roosevelt had a home, his summer White House. Lincoln's parents expected him to follow in his father's footsteps, and so he did—except that he did not marry a daughter of a wealthy New York family. Instead, he fell almost violently in love with Dorothy and proposed marriage.
Mr. and Mrs. Robert Stover, Hank's grandparents, were both affronted and aghast. Lincoln just could not—could not—marry the penniless and pedigreeless daughter and niece of poor dirt farmers. Though threatened with disinheritance, Lincoln ran off with Dorothy to the wild state of Nevada, where the parson who married them failed to ask the age of the bride.