by Dawn Tripp
“Go, Georgia,” he shouts back. “Go!” I run up the hill.
My heart is in my throat as I reach the farmhouse, panicked, shouting, my soaked clothes pouring puddles on the floor.
Elizabeth brings me blankets as Agnes phones for help and the men flood down the hill toward shore.
I watch from the porch, gripping the rail. Stieglitz has reached the capsized canoe. He grabs hold of the boy still clinging there—that pale arm I’d seen—the little rowboat tips and sways, but he braces himself and hauls that boy with one pull into the boat.
“They’re going to be fine,” Elizabeth says, coming to stand beside me. She presses a cup of hot tea into my hands. “Others are headed out now.”
“There was another boy,” I say.
“They’ll find him.” Elizabeth brings her arm around me. Stieglitz is rowing again, circling the canoe, looking.
They don’t find the boy. A week later, a hunter finds a coat near the shore up the lake tangled in tree roots.
“We need to put this behind us,” Stieglitz says to me when we hear the news. “We could not have saved him.”
The others have gone to bed. It’s a warm night. Stars flood the sky.
“I wish we’d tried,” I say.
A deep silence falls.
“He was gone the moment the canoe tipped,” he says. “Even rowing back, I knew.” He is looking away across the lake, the dark mass of the island floating in the silver water.
“It was probably the right choice,” I say.
“There was no choice.”
“I’m not blaming you.”
He looks at me then, sorrow so blunt it takes my breath.
—
MID-SEPTEMBER, AFTER MOST of them are gone, I come upon Hedwig in the upstairs hall. She is on her knees. She gapes at me. I try to help her up, an arm thrashes, her voice slurred, she stares through my face as if I am the door she is reaching for. Then her hand drops, and she slumps, the full weight of her pitching to one side.
I cry for help. Stieglitz calls back to me from the other end of the house. A team of doctors swoop to the Hill. She is only just stirring when they bear her away. He weeps when we receive the call from Lee. A stroke. She will recover. To a certain extent.
I hold him, late into the next morning. We take long walks as the leaves burn down into their autumn fire. He photographs lit raindrops on the apple tree. Like tears, he says.
I notice he seems anxious about my work, about what I am doing and not doing, what I have left to learn. Light ripples of tension pass through me when he wanders into the shanty as I am painting. Together, we look over my Apple series. My Red Maples. My Tree with Cut Limb. Everything I made this summer when the house was bustling seems slightly lackluster, truncated.
“These don’t seem to have the life of my earlier work,” I say.
“It will come,” he says.
But it’s hard not to feel the dark current of despair running through his hand into mine as we walk to the post office in town, or sit together in the kitchen in the morning.
—
“YOU WOULD HAVE to choose,” he says to me out of the blue one day. It’s late fall. The rest of them are gone. I’m washing dishes in the sink.
“Choose?” I say.
“Between a child and your art. You do realize this, don’t you?”
“No,” I say, rinsing a plate, watching the clean water drain off its face.
“I shouldn’t have brought it up.” He takes the plate from my hand and rubs the towel over it, grinding it so it squeaks.
“You are the one with too much on your mind,” I say lightly. “I could manage a child quite well.”
“Well, it’s not the time to make the decision.”
“I’m not the one who brought it up.”
He takes the two knives I’ve just handed him. I notice their thin metallic surfaces, light blinks off them.
I drop the bowl I am holding into the dishpan. Water sprays up, soaking us.
“You meant to do that!” he says, stepping back.
“Did I?”
He reaches for my hands to dry them with the dish towel, but I grab the waist of his trousers, push him back against the sink, and press my thigh between his legs.
“You’re sopping wet,” he says.
“I’m sick of this,” I say, “the moroseness, the glumness, it’s all such a waste of my time.”
“That’s not kind.”
“No one can undo what’s done. Not even you.” I unzip his trousers. I touch him, and he smiles.
“Finally,” I say. “A smile.”
He is hard in my hand.
My blouse is spattered with water. He touches my nipples through the cotton, he twists one as I stroke him back and forth. He touches my breasts, then slides his hand under the waist of my skirt, pushing it down my hips until it slips off, his hand around my backside, his fingers working into me.
“Everything’s wet,” he says.
His fingers push deeper into me, softly at first, then not.
“I want you,” I say.
“Hard over the sink?” His voice low, an edge near my ear. “From behind on the table? Or straddling a chair?” His hand underneath me now, lifting me up, leaning me back onto the table, that sharp quick rush of him sliding inside me.
“I won’t choose,” I say.
He presses my hands over my head. A candlestick knocks over, rolls to the floor. “You have to choose.” His teeth graze my neck.
“I want it all.”
VI
OCTOBER. PAUL ROSENFELD comes up to the Lake, bringing the artist Charles Duncan with him. Rosenfeld has just been named the music critic for The Dial. He adores us, and is becoming one that Stieglitz can count on. He buys art as Stieglitz tells him to—paintings by Marin, Hartley, Dove—and hangs them in his elegant apartment at Irving Place where we met the poet Marianne Moore last year at a winter soiree. She and I laughed at the fact that we were born on the same day, same year. Rosenfeld has asked Stieglitz if he can buy one of my oils.
“I’m afraid her work is not yet for sale,” Stieglitz responds, “but when it is, Pudge, you’ll be the first to know.”
Soon after they arrive, Rosenfeld exclaims that all he can amount to in the kitchen is scrambled eggs. And so, the next morning for breakfast, scrambled eggs it is. I take over the rest of the cooking and task the men with cleanup. I garden, can vegetables, and press cider from apples. The sweet scent fills the room with a kind of certainty I crave. I’ve taught Stieglitz how to stoke the furnace, and he shows off his new skill.
“Georgia’s so very capable,” he says. “I like to think some of it will rub off on me.”
“Did you know,” I say, “that when Alfred was a child, he spent whole days reenacting the great horse races of the past on a Parcheesi board. Thus, he never learned much in the way of housekeeping. What chores did you do to receive an allowance?”
“There were no chores.”
I burst into laughter. “So you were being paid to simply exist?”
“Something like that, I’m afraid,” Stieglitz says sheepishly.
—
ONE AFTERNOON, HE photographs Rosenfeld, Duncan, and me at lunch, sitting around the table set with bouillon, olives, asparagus, bacon, eggs.
“To paradise,” Rosenfeld says, raising his glass, then bending back over his food as Stieglitz directs.
Later, I will look at that photograph, and there is something so domestic, so simple—how he caught us, mid-stride—the easy white drape of my shirt, a smile on my face as I spear an olive with my fork, and the fourth place, Stieglitz’s, empty at the front of the small table, the loaf of bread on the cutting board beside it, the knife laid perpendicular to a slice just cut. I will look at that photograph—a small print, the size of a playing card—and I will try to remember if it was ever as simple and lovely as he made it appear. This was his gift. This is what we were entranced by. How he could capture the momentary flicker of a soul in
the image of raindrops on an apple, or three people gathered around a small table at a meal—such a simple and intimate pleasure—the trees in the background, blurred.
—
THE FOLLOWING DAY, I overhear Rosenfeld expressing concern that his presence at the Lake might be an intrusion on our work, mine in particular.
“I haven’t seen her painting since I arrived.”
“No,” Stieglitz says firmly. “Nothing but pleasure to have you here. Georgia feels the same way.”
“Well I can’t tell you how grateful I am,” Paul says, his manners as always so beautifully streamlined, “it’s such an opportunity to observe the two of you this way at close range.”
“You must see her newest things.”
“I’d love to.”
“It’s extraordinary, Pudge—what she’s doing right now with color. Her new oils have a daunting power. Almost as bold as those early charcoals.”
It’s fascinating—to hear him talk this way about my things—when just a few weeks ago he seemed anxious about them.
“I’m thinking,” he continues now, “at some point, you should write about her painting for The Dial.”
“A marvelous idea!”
“Not yet,” Stieglitz says quickly. “But at some point soon. Let’s bear it in mind.”
—
SEVERAL MORNINGS LATER we are out on the porch, Alfred in his old gray sweater, the black cape tossed over one shoulder, writing his letters and, beside him on the table, the black portfolio folder that holds a selection of my watercolor paintings and drawings. The men have nicknamed that black folder of my work “Stieglitz’s Celestial Solitaire,” because he always seems to have it with him, or near him—and he’ll take it out and flip through the pictures, and occasionally show them around. They seem to have a particular meaning to him—my early things. As I sit on the steps jackknifing picture frames, I notice Paul observing us, a wistfulness in his drooping eyes. But then he smiles, a warm smile. I smile back.
Stieglitz looks up from his letter. “Let’s do a portrait.”
“Of?” Rosenfeld says.
“You, Pudge.”
“Me?”
Stieglitz stands up. “Yes. You. A portrait of the Writer.”
“I’d be honored.”
In one of the upstairs bedrooms, Stieglitz has Rosenfeld sit at the small, older desk, his arms crossed, and beside him a typewriter, a stack of books, including Carl Sandburg’s recent collection of poems, galley proofs, cigarettes.
Charles Duncan and I watch from the doorway as Stieglitz positions the objects exactly where he wants them to be, and it occurs to me that this is what he does. He moves us through space. I see the glow of warmth on Rosenfeld’s face, the joy he feels at being the unexpected center of attention. His bow tie is crooked. It hangs skewed to the right, oddly small under the round portly dish of his face. As I move to straighten it, the shutter clicks, I freeze.
—
WHEN THEY LEAVE, the Lake is ours again. Just hours of work and solitude stretching from one day into the next. The air grows cold. I think of the apartment in his brother’s brownstone we are moving back to, windows looking out into the dark faces of the buildings behind.
“I don’t want to leave,” I say. But Stieglitz needs the city—the bustle and comforts that sometimes seem so strange to me.
I dig out a sketch I made earlier in the year, and work it into oil. Red and Orange Streak—a dark expanse of sky cut at the horizon line by a chain of red mountains. A wide-grooved orange arc that drives up from the bottom left and off the edge.
“It’s a sound,” I say when Stieglitz comes in to see it, finished. “That loud raw sound of the cattle in Texas.”
It still haunts me—the rhythm of that sound in the desolate emptiness.
He stands before the painting, studying it.
“This is what that country out there means to you,” he says.
“Go with me sometime.”
The sunlight falls on his shoulders—very soft and tender, tame. The sunlight here.
“You’ve done it, Georgia,” he says. “The union of form and color. This. It’s a new American Art.”
VII
ONE DECEMBER EVENING, back in New York, Mitchell Kennerley, owner of the Anderson Galleries, comes by and Stieglitz shows him the dozens of prints he made at the Lake this year, many of them of me.
“These don’t belong in storage,” Kennerley says. “I think it’s time for a retrospective of your work.”
“No,” Stieglitz says quickly, glancing at me.
“When was your last exhibition?”
“Over ten years ago.”
Kennerley nods, then looks back at the raindrops on an apple, and a few images of my body and face.
“These are electrifying, Alfred,” Kennerley says. “High time for the rest of New York to be introduced to your new work.”
—
AFTER KENNERLEY LEAVES, Stieglitz clears his throat and tells me that he would never do this, never think of exhibiting the photographs of me without my consent.
“But you have my consent. This is your art.”
“You don’t hear what I’m saying.”
“You held showings in the apartment—I was right there.”
“This will be different,” he says.
“Different people may be looking at the photographs, but other than that, isn’t it the same?”
He glances at me, a pause, considering. “It will be an opportunity for your work as well.”
I am sitting in the large chair at the end of the table, my legs tucked up underneath me, black shoes set together on the floor.
“Kennerley said nothing about showing my work.”
“You will be a sensation,” he says.
“My body, you mean. Not my art.”
“No. That’s not what I mean. This could work as much for your art as for mine,” he says. “If we do this, your art will be a sensation even before it’s seen.”
I stand up and walk over to his prints on the table. Her glistening silver form. They feel very alive to me, the livingness about them—their stunning erotic beauty, their irreverence.
I pull one from the table and look at it more closely. White and black, silver-toned, complete. Her hair pulled back tightly, the cloak around her shoulders, the cords of her neck just visible, a low defiant heat in her eyes that looks directly into the camera, poised, almost insolent. She seems absolute. No past. No future. She belongs strictly to herself, alone.
I remember what Edward Steichen said that night when he came to the shoe-box room and saw the photographs and my oils for the first time: Nothing like this has come into our world before.
“Do it,” I say now.
“You’re like no other woman,” he says, his voice quiet. His eyes so strangely earnest search my face.
I say, “We’ve had our small studio showings. Kennerley is right. New York should see your art. It will bring attention to the gallery. Maybe buyers, too.”
He catches my face, his palms warm and firm, and draws me to him.
—
WHEN HIS FAMILY learns what we’re intending, they descend with a slew of objections. “Alfred, you can’t do this! What about Georgia?” I remain silent, through these debates, until he summons my opinion.
“We discussed it, and I agreed,” I say.
Stieglitz goes to pieces over how to choose which photographs best represent the arc of his work over the last thirty years, and I begin to realize how anxious he is. He’s spent most of the last decade building up the careers of other artists, letting his own fall by the wayside, and now he seems to be questioning just how good his new work really is.
There’s a tacit agreement between us not to discuss the glaring intimacy of some of the prints of me he wants to include. Some are clothed, many not. The ones of the buttocks are in his “to mount” pile. I remove them and put them with the others bound for storage.
I come across an image of my hands. I do n
ot remember exactly when he took it. I recognize the button on the coat—it was the first year I was here—but there were many days when I wore that coat, and I find a quiet fear kick in me that I can’t quite place the day he made that image. There is something unsettling in the disembodied hands—the way the fingers of one seem to claw, almost to tear into the palm of the other. It is one he has chosen. I leave it. She will be called simply A Woman in the catalog and will remain unnamed. My face is cropped in the nudes. There will be no image where the naked body and face are shown together.
He obsesses over his words for the catalog. He reads it aloud to me as we fix breakfast in the kitchen, and then again at night before we sleep. I was born in Hoboken. I am an American. Photography is my passion. The search for Truth my obsession. At night, I sneak upstairs into his bedroom to keep up propriety’s face for Lee, Lizzie, and the mother-in-law.
“So ridiculous!” I whisper, laughing. “They all must know!”
“But they don’t want to know they know.”
“A façade is so much work, Alfred. You must sell twenty photographs from the show, so we can find a place of our own.”
I lie beside him, his hands just touching me, not holding tightly at all. I can feel his anxiety, a tremble in his fingers on my skin. It always surprises me to see him vulnerable this way.
“Why are you so afraid, love?” I say.
He shakes his head. “I just want it to go well.”
—
WARREN HARDING, THE dark-horse Republican, wins the presidential election, soundly defeating newspaper publisher Cox and his running mate, Franklin Roosevelt, who lives directly across the street from us in 47 East 65th. Stieglitz remarks that Harding’s victory marks the country’s disgust with any policy that smacks of the progressive. “Four steps forward before the war,” he says, “now twelve steps back.” Instability seems everywhere: large-scale race riots in Chicago, strikes in the meatpacking industry, terrorist attacks on Wall Street. “They don’t see how they bring it on themselves,” he says bitterly. “Go crazy with fear over anything new, cling to what they think is safe, and cement themselves right into deadness and doom.”
My sister Claudia writes. She’s leaving Texas and coming to New York—my heart soars when I read the news—my sweet youngest sister. She wants to get her degree from Columbia Teachers College. She’ll stay with our sister Ida, or perhaps Anita, who’s married a wealthy financier—imagine all those chandeliers and spare bedrooms, Claudia writes. So much of home—her familiar handwriting, her self-confident humor that matches mine.
