by Dawn Tripp
She has a certain poise, that woman in the photographs. She is me and, at the same time, not. I’ve always thought of my face as round, but in the prints there are angles—cheekbones, jaw. Beautiful. She knows exactly who she is, and there is something so breathtaking in it all, not just in her, but in the inviolate space of this exchange. In my letters, I’ve begun to write to him things I can’t say to anyone else: my ideas about art—how sometimes I’m so full of shapes and colors, my mind can’t hold it all in. It’s become clear to me, though, that if anyone were to understand the particular language of my pictures of light on the plains or the flow of an abstract shape, it would be him.
I look up. It is dusk. The evening star hangs just there through the window above the stick limbs of a windmill. Far off, cows move like tiny black chains, slowly at the sky’s hem. The wind blows the sound of their lowing around so it seems to come from everywhere.
I walk out into the falling daylight across the plains, past the ugly white houses, black windows, his letter folded in the pocket of my skirt. I can feel its edges against my thigh. When the town is a pebble far behind, I lie down on the hard dry earth and let my head fall back. The evening star, unearthly, and the feeling, to be enthralled by nothingness. The sky, so wonderful and big, I breathe it in so deeply. I lie there in the cold quiet, a small thought moving at the edges of my mind—the possibility that he is like that open space, vast like these plains, this night, vast enough it seems sometimes to hold me.
—
THE NEXT DAY after I teach my class, I close the door, pull out a sheet of paper, and lay it on the table with my paints. Water on my brush. A pale wash of sky, orange-yellow. A slight resistance in the woven surface of the paper. I add a line of deeper red, blazing into the light, more energy, more life, quickening—a faint electric thrill in my fingertips as the brush sweeps back and forth, the loss of time, of self, as the feeling of that shape in my mind drives through my hand. The colors seep, sky almost to the edges, just a scrap of whiteness toward the top—my star.
I finish the painting and leave it, rinse my brush, lay it down. I change the water in the bowl. The air in the room is stifling. I crack the window open.
I take a clean sheet and start again, leaving a spot of white for the star in the same place, high up, off center to the left. A yellow glow around it, then rings of darker yellow-orange, red—the colors bolder now, a braver slope in the line, less control. One dark thick stroke below—the weight of land to balance the pure driving radiance of the star.
The pictures, startling. A humming in my body.
I make it again, letting go of the edges even more this time, past where I think they should be, I push them farther, letting that burning light become the night sky, the colors strike into one another, bleed. Each different evocation of that star—luminous, abstract—an answer to the dark hot work of his eyes moving over me that day in 291. As perhaps almost every picture I’ve made since has been.
V
AS THE SUMMER passes, I spend more and more time alone. On an evening when Claudia goes out, I sit on the steps with one of his letters. He writes of the July offensive in Ypres, stunning casualties, so tragic and unnecessary—he writes how the war has completely dismantled America’s young fascination with modern art. They distrust everything foreign now, Europeans in particular. And The Marriage, I’m sad to admit, is a shambles. Mrs. Stieglitz has never understood me. There’s nothing between us except for Kitty, and I would not break my daughter’s heart. I took her to college last week, now she’s gone. So much, it seems, is gone. Prewar hopes, Camera Work, 291, gone. But you are the lamp. The spirit of 291 continues in your art—
Against the vastness of his letters, the town has begun to feel so small. I am some snapping lunatic fire stuck in this wound of a town. The women laugh behind my back because I wear men’s shoes and long straight black dresses, because I am almost thirty, unmarried and not looking to be, and because I do not believe in the warmongering posters slapped up on the walls of the general store, charging us to slaughter every German. Such ignorance. I call it that. And they shun me for it—for how I speak my mind and for how I go tramping about in the dusk like a crazy person shooting at small game and tin cans.
—
A RAW SCRATCHING in my throat and a cough I can’t seem to shake. I’ve not been feeling well. I’ve blamed it—jokingly to Claudia—on the town, how I am choked by its backwater stupidity, the hostile looks. But the cough grows worse. There are days where I have trouble speaking.
Claudia is preparing to leave for a job student-teaching in Spur. It’s good work, but I can’t quite make sense of a life in Canyon without her. She’s been my charge since our mother died. Two days before she is to go, I sit on the bed as she packs her things.
“You need to see the doctor for that cough,” she says, tucking a ball of stockings into a pair of shoes.
“It’s getting better,” I say.
“It doesn’t seem to be. What if it gets into your chest?”
“It won’t.” But my breath catches, and I cough, hard, my body doubled over.
“I’m not going to leave you like this,” she says.
“You will go, Claudie. I’ll be all right.” My voice calm again, controlled, the oldest sister’s voice she knows—the levelheaded strong one, the one who is in charge, who will not be argued with, the one who does not break.
—
THE AIR GROWS cold. Brutal November winds tear through what’s left of the leaves on the locust trees. I have to stuff paper down the front of my dress to block the winds as I walk back and forth to class. I go to the doctor and he mops out my throat with long metal instruments, and tells me I must be more careful. He’s heard I take long walks at night on the plains. I must stay inside. Stay quiet. Keep the cold air out of my throat. He asks about my family history. “Consumption?” I shake my head no. Silent. Lie.
He sticks a needle into my arm, it goes in deep.
—
A BATCH OF my things arrived in New York crushed. Stieglitz has salvaged them but is angry with me. Such rare & glorious things, these works of yours, packed in nothing but a flimsy cheap tube and sent unregistered mail, he scolds. He proceeds to lay out explicit instructions on how to package in the future what I send.
Tears spring to my eyes, a sting of shame for what he does not understand and what I am too proud to explain—how careful I have to be with money. I haven’t much. Nothing left over to save. My throat hurts, the pain growing sharper, more intense.
A savage and futile desire. I miss him. I wish he were here with me. I can’t paint. I seem to have nothing to say.
—
IN NOVEMBER, THE school invites me to speak at a faculty meeting about theories of modern art. When the invitation comes, at first I think it’s a joke—they despise me—but I accept, what choice do I have? I pore over my books—arguments about art and the human body. Arthur Jerome Eddy’s theory that, in painting, one should strive for a higher abstract language—spiritual, pristine. These are theories that meant something to me once. I find myself tearing holes in them now.
When someone looks at something I have painted, I want them to feel what moved me to paint it in the first place. I paint as I feel it. Light, sky, air. As I want it to be felt.
In my speech, I stand up and talk about how when you make a picture—whether that picture is of a chair or a bird or a canyon—you have the chance to say something about what life is, and what it means to you. A picture might be beautiful but if there’s no life in it, it’s no good at all. Then I take them all apart, the entire faculty, and how they teach, the men most of all, because they are the ones who are always so convinced they have a corner on what’s right. I tell them that their program is essentially useless, crammed too full of rattly ideas that have no basis in human emotion, sensation, or need.
I am quite convinced they’ll stone me but they don’t. Afterward, some of the women come up and seem almost pleased, giddy that I could have g
one on like that—out loud. I shake their hands and leave and go to bed.
—
STIEGLITZ WRITES, I am worried about you, the cough, the illness. He seems so far away. I’m afraid it’s worse than you’re letting on. Your handwriting has changed. The letters are very small. You must get well.
—
I FALL TOO ill to teach. The cough has moved into my lungs, and the doctor tells me I’m as close to having TB without actually having it as anyone he has ever seen. He says the word so evenly it almost slips past me. My head spins. “You’ll need to go south,” he says gravely, “to a warmer climate. Or else.” He rubs those last two words in hard, like salt in a cut—but his eyes are gentle and sincere. He is someone I can trust. I feel a sudden bolt of fear. This cough—this stupid, nagging cough—it is not nothing. If you are not careful. Take care. Go south. Or else. My mind a thousand glittery pieces. Everything I want—the vast hope and the magic—his letters, my art, that kiss—lost.
The doctor is looking at me still. “Do you understand?” he says.
I tell him then.
VI
Before
THEY FELL LIKE trees, the males of my father’s family. First the gritty flush, then the telltale, hectic cough. Consumption. It got into their lungs and shredded them.
My father had left school to pour himself into the fields when his own father died of it. Then it took his two older brothers. His last brother, the youngest, Bernard, died in my mother’s arms. She had brought him into our farmhouse to nurse him because there was no one else. I remember her stern and regal face bent over him—her lovely aquiline features, residual traces of the royal lineage she had descended from to this. She would place her hand under his neck to lift his head, a glass of water to his lips, blood in their cracked seams. The light did not quite reach him, but fell just to the side—as if it had made its choice—and when he passed, he left the last share of land to my father “for one dollar with love and affection bestowed.”
We had two dresses each. One to wear while the other was washed. My sisters wore bright-colored sashes to cinch their waists with a lean splash of color, but I preferred mine loose and straight and plain. Our mother was cool but not unkind. Her eyes luminous, austere, held a sort of distance we did not belong to, like the line at the end of the sky—that silent point of reference that held everything tethered, the line that seemed to meet the land but never did. She was educated, mannered, intelligent, she’d wanted to be a doctor once but was married off to my father to merge the farms of their two families. She read to us in the evenings and on rainy days, and my brothers and sisters and I would listen, rapt and silent always, sitting on the great skin of the buffalo our father had shot once in the Dakotas.
After Bernard was gone, and the room where his red-flecked sputum stained the floor had been scrubbed and tidied, linens burned—we never spoke of him by name. There was a day, though, I remember, not long after. Late summer, the warm breeze pressed through the open window, I came upon my mother sitting in her bedroom. On the table beside her were a pair of gold-and-emerald earrings, an exquisite gift her father, George Totto, had made to his wife, Isabelle, before he sailed home to Hungary to claim a lost inheritance and never returned. Those earrings were my mother’s most prized possession. She pinned them to her ears when she entertained ladies from town for tea—a token of wealth and exile, of exotic splendor and the quiet stain of betrayal. The day I found her in her bedroom, the earrings laid out on the table near her, she was sitting very still, and I stayed more still in the doorway so she wouldn’t know I was there. It frightened me, her broken face, grief pouring through it. It was not Bernard she was mourning—I was eleven and old enough to understand—but her own relinquished life.
Everything changed. Our father grew solemn, skittish. No longer the fiddle-playing, laughing, lighthearted man that I adored. Fear of the white plague dogged him. Every cough or fever made him jump. He drank heavily. There were rumors of horse theft, gambling, fights, a woman he kept in town. Our pact was a common silence. That was understood. We never spoke of any of it.
The following winter, the mercury dropped to thirty below. Snow piled up ten feet.
Drawing classes began for us that winter. I did not have the talent my younger sisters had. We were taught to copy shaded cubes and chromos from the Prang drawing book. We drew sprays of oats and twigs, painful imitations of still lifes, inflated red roses, a pharaoh’s horse—failed paintings that my mother framed and hung.
One night on my way upstairs, passing by the window on the landing, I caught a glimpse of something fleeting on the snow. I took a step closer. Just moonlight on the field. That’s all it was. Trees bare and dark against the snow. Across the field, a pale lean strip of sky lay like a long thin door.
I made a picture of it—the first picture I made that said something to me—trees, shadows, moonlight—and not moonlight as I saw it but the feeling I had looking out at that field—the soft work of night, how it skinned the world open.
For the snow, I left the paper bare, but it looked too honest, too desolate and familiar, and I scratched thin gray marks to cover it with the impression of a road.
I destroyed that picture soon after, but from that moment on art would become this for me—singular, indissoluble—the one thing that could rein in the chaos and fear to transmute an untenable world to some form of beauty even as that world fell away.
—
MY PARENTS SOLD the farm and left. My mother was just beginning to show the early signs of illness, but still we knew. We headed east. My parents had sold most of what we owned, like they could rinse themselves of the soiled fate the farm had come to stand for. They took the money, the Irish silver, a favorite carriage horse. My mother packed the gold-and-emerald earrings and the framed copies of paintings that I hated. I packed the moonlight on the field.
VII
1918, Waring, Texas
ON THE DOCTOR’S orders, I take the train south to my friend Leah’s farm in Waring, near San Antonio, where the air is warmer, more gentle and refined, a sparkly mist that drapes the houses.
My strength returns. I begin to make a few things: sketches with graphite on cream paper—one of Leah, another of a bowl of fruit—then some watercolors of the house next door at night, the big tree looming over it, and the moon peeking through. I make the sky in squiggling light bursts—the way the shimmer of the night breeze feels on my face.
Stieglitz’s letters take a new turn. What if you came to New York? I could look after you. I could make sure you got the rest and care you need. It’s on my mind these days. What if she came?
He tells me that the painter Wright stopped by his office at the Anderson Galleries just as a few of my things arrived from Texas. They looked at them together. Wright remarked on my use of color, then said, “O’Keeffe isn’t painting—it’s the beginning of a new art.”
My heart turns over. I look up and everything seems different—naked changing colors of the late afternoon, blue rolling hills and how the sun soaks the little yellow house across the way, light splashing over the red tiled roof.
What if I did go?
—
I SLEEP WITH Leah in her bed, her body warm and soft near mine. I wake up early and sketch her sleeping, her dark head thrown against the pillow, lips parted, long hair streaming out in tangled waves. It’s a simple, abstract drawing—the tumble of hair, the impression of a face.
The lilac bushes in the backyard throw their wild scent. The world at dawn feels soft and kind. I gather wood and carry it back into the house for the fire. And Leah is up, stalking around the kitchen in her man’s coat, her slender feet poking out underneath.
“It’s so different when you’re here,” she says. “You’re so still it makes me still.”
“I’m only still because I’ve been sick.”
“No, it’s deeper than that—the way you always know exactly what you want.”
It’s the slightest thing—the emphasis she place
s on the word exactly. Innocent. And wrong. I don’t answer. Silence is the easiest way to wrap in what I feel. I sip my tea and with my napkin wipe away the wet ring the mug has left.
—
LATER THAT MORNING, I write to him what I have been afraid to write. “I love you very much today.” It seems suddenly very simple, and straightforward.
I tell him I am better, but I know he won’t quite trust it.
I want you here, he writes back. Nothing must happen to you. Could you be happy here?
He tells me that Paul Strand is coming out this way, and in the middle of May, Paul arrives. At first he tries to deny that Stieglitz sent him. I laugh.
“Do you think I don’t see through that ruse?”
He gets all flustered then, his blue eyes uncertain, like he is trying to discern if I am laughing with him, or at him. Paul is so easily thrown.
“Oh come on,” I say. “Did you bring any of your prints along? I want to show Leah.” That evens things out, and he shows us some of his new photographs, and I feel happy, looking at them. It’s like having a shred of Stieglitz’s world out here in the wide-open nothing of Texas.
A wife, I remind myself. That bony reprimand. Don’t toss your future over for a man. He has a wife. How many times have I said these four words to myself over the last months—words that should matter, that did seem to matter once, and somehow now do not.
June 1. A year ago today I left New York. He brought me to the train station. I kissed him.
On the dresser is a short stack of the books he has given me: The Letters of Van Gogh, Clive Bell’s Art, Eddy’s book on cubism, and a copy of Goethe’s Faust, which was the first book he ever sent to me. It is his favorite, he has told me, he was nine when he first discovered it. He rereads it every summer. He swears it settles something in him—oddly enough—that tragic story of the unsatisfied romantic hero who will swap his soul for one transcendent glimpse of the unknown. There’s a brown thread loose at the binding. I pick up a pair of nail scissors and snip it at the root.
