by Dawn Tripp
Even after he returns to the gallery, he calls once an hour to check on me.
—
I MISS MY opening that January. There’s still too much pain, I can barely stand. He sends Rosenfeld to the apartment with flowers.
Rosenfeld has just returned from the Southwest, and as we sit together in the living room he waxes on about the untamed beauty of Taos.
“So many artists out there now, writers as well. It’s becoming a cultural mecca.”
“I’ve heard Mabel Dodge orchestrates all that.”
“You’ve met her?”
“Once.”
I don’t add that she struck me at the time as a larger, female counterpoint to Stieglitz—moving people around through space, importing the important ones, all that.
“I’d love to see what art you would make out there,” Rosenfeld says. “The colors and the light are so intense.”
“As magnificent as Marin claims?”
“Every bit. You’d love it, Georgia. Of anyone, you.”
“Sadly right now, I can barely visit the kitchen.”
He looks at me, with those wise drooping eyes. “That place reminded me of you, that something about you no one can touch.”
I brush some bits of nothing off my skirt and tell him that’s very nice of him to say, and perhaps I’ll go sometime when I’m well enough to travel. I do love to travel, and only wish I could get Alfred out of the Manhattan, Lake George rut.
He smiles at this. A good friend, Pudge. He loves us both and knows Stieglitz well—flaws and all—better than anyone apart from me.
—
I THINK ABOUT it more after he leaves. I used to tell Stieglitz I missed that sort of country—wide-open plains, real spaces—but his face would cave in the strangest way and so I stopped telling him.
John Marin has been going to Taos for years, and the Strands were lured out last summer by the plump and lavish force of nature, Mabel Dodge Luhan, an heiress once married to a Bolshevik who’s spent most of her life trying to outrun her bourgeois childhood. Beck, whom I’ve slowly begun to forgive, has told me it’s like no other place, and while she was there, she felt so serene, cut loose from everything.
I know that western sky. Sometimes when I’m alone painting, a blind lifts and I let my mind drift back. I remember walking out into the red sun in Canyon until the night fell. I’d lie down on the scorched hardness of the desert floor, looking up at the stars raining down like small silver bullets into me.
It was all I wanted then—to feel that roar of the infinite that exists within our finite selves. At times it seemed unbearable—that hunger I felt once—like the edges of my skin could not contain it.
I miss that.
V
HE’S DISTRACTED, I notice, which I chalk up to the fact that I am ill in bed until he remarks, in passing, that Dorothy Norman—the young wife of that Sears, Roebuck heir—has returned to The Room.
“You might remember,” he says, “she was the one banished so summarily, I’d say rudely, by that disparaging remark Louis Kalonyme made when she came by one day.”
“No, I don’t remember your telling me that.”
“She delivered her baby in November,” he continues, “and she dropped in last week on her way to a luncheon. She wants to be engaged in the work. She said she’d be happy to do anything for us that we need: manage the goings-on, open the mail, answer the phone, and so forth.”
“For us?” I say.
“You must meet her. You’ll see what I mean. Her innocence is unusual. She’s not at all jaded as the rich can sometimes be. She’s having dinner with the Strands next week.”
“What about the baby?”
“What about it?”
“She’ll just leave the baby at home all day?”
He shrugs. “That’s hardly my affair.”
—
EARLY FEBRUARY, SIX weeks after my surgery, I’m well enough to slip into a plain black coat. On his arm I walk in to see my show. I meet Dorothy Norman then for the first time. She is younger than his daughter but reminds me of his wife, Emmy, whom I may always perhaps think of as his wife. That same coy gentility. She has girlish cheeks and a doe-eyed look. Stieglitz, in his favorite tweed suit, makes the introduction and, among other things he’s already told me, explains that Mrs. Norman is involved in the Civil Liberties Union.
“Why not quit that nonsense and just support the Woman’s Party?” I say.
“Other causes interest me more.” A sweet smile as she answers, but her lips are tense, a coldness in that lipstick line I was not expecting. A funny shiver in my chest, a quick pain in my wound when the muscle tightens.
—
THAT SPRING, WHENEVER I come by The Room, it seems she’s there, answering the phone, reading old issues of Camera Work, or taking notes as Stieglitz answers questions, her head bowed, on the verge of kneeling at his feet. She wants to write a book on him, he says. She’s begged to be allowed to be there, and he’s told her she is welcome as often as she likes.
She begins to root herself into the circle—Dove, Hartley, the Strands. Only Rosenfeld apparently will have little to do with her. But I see the looks exchanged when her name comes up, how they all avoid my eyes. Trouble stirring. When I mention it, Stieglitz reminds me that the week after she met me, she graciously made a one-hundred-dollar donation to the rent fund, and even went as far as to ask if she could borrow his camera to do the installation photos of my show.
“Under your guidance.”
“What are you implying? She’s married, with an infant.”
“That she leaves at home with a nurse.”
“You treat her coldly,” he says, almost accusingly.
“No differently than any other bootlicker.”
He glares at me.
We’re at breakfast in the Shelton cafeteria. A boiled egg and toast on the plate before me, an orange.
“The Room gives her a sense of purpose.”
“That’s of no consequence to me.”
“She is nervous around you. She told me you look at her queerly.”
I don’t answer.
“You could be kinder. She’s just young and old-fashioned. She wishes you would call yourself Mrs. Stieglitz.”
“Since she is Mrs. Norman, it would seem that’s not her decision to make.”
We don’t talk as he spreads a thin sleeve of butter across his toast. I slice my egg into halves, then quarters, then I slice those quarters once more. I eat them slowly, watching my fingers on the fork and knife. I could ask him if it’s her money he is after, but in my heart I know him well enough to know that’s not it.
It’s true I dislike her. That flushed juvenile brightness. There were girls I knew at boarding school in Virginia who had that same quality—cinched waists, wide shining eyes, flounced and ruffled dresses—they huddled in cliques and giggled. One night after curfew, I stole onions from the kitchen, then caught and killed a chicken from the coop, and cooked it up in the wood-burning stove in the dormitory. They were in awe of me from then on. I was the one they could never quite make sense of, but I taught them all poker and my daring enthralled them. Toward graduation, as I illustrated the yearbook with ink drawings and irreverent cartoons, all they talked about were the boys they would marry.
“What about you, O?” my friend Susan asked.
I laughed. “I won’t have the kind of life you’re signing up for. I’m going to give up everything for my art.”
—
I EAT THE last piece of my egg.
“Listen to this, Georgia,” Stieglitz says now. He reads aloud an announcement in the Times that the painter John Sloan sold thirty-two pictures to an unnamed collector for forty-one thousand dollars. “Unnamed collector,” he says. “Unnamed. If that’s not a bucket of nonsense—who would pay for thirty-two Sloans?”
I push my plate of egg and toast away, and begin to cut an orange. It’s her softness he’s so taken with, that breathy, ingenuous tone in her voice. I don’
t realize I’ve cut my hand until the blood comes in a veiny trickle. A small cut, but deep. I drop the knife and feel the acid sting of the juice.
Stieglitz looks up. “Heavens!” he says rushing to my side. “What have you done to yourself?”
—
A FEW WEEKS later, he announces to the press that six of my calla lily panels have been acquired by an anonymous collector from France for twenty-five thousand dollars. The New York Times prints a story on the sale. The news sparks a frenzy when it hits the other papers: “Prim ex-country schoolmistress who actually does her hair up in a knot is the art sensation of 1928!” Stieglitz feigns a stunned disbelief when we are asked about the sale.
“It is extraordinary,” he says over the phone to a reporter calling to request an interview. “Yes, of course, I am thrilled, of course, but at the same time, not entirely surprised. That amount is after all what her art is worth. Europe knows that. O’Keeffe is modern American art. This only proves what many of us have always known.”
He is in his element. He is also, I know, constructing a truth out of smoke. I watch him as he nods, listening, the phone tucked against his ear, not a touch of uncertainty in his face—he knows exactly what he’s done.
“Yes, absolutely,” he says. “Four-thirty, Wednesday. Miss O’Keeffe would be happy to meet with you. Here, at our rooms at the Shelton. I’ll leave your name with reception.”
—
I ALMOST CAN’T bear the landslide of publicity. But the announcement of the sale has done just what he planned: catapulted me to new heights and confirmed him as a visionary. He knew what I was worth before the world did.
As he arranges interviews, I make a list of errands that need to be done. Such a charade, this scheme he’s concocted. I drop our shoes off at Slater and his cape at Barrett & Nephews to be cleaned; I look for the blue cups I like at Macy’s, but it seems they are sold out; I order frames at Of’s.
When the reporter from the Sunday Magazine arrives at the Shelton, I find that my face has stiffened to a mask. I can barely smile. I sit and answer questions and try to play down the exorbitant price.
“But is it true?” the man says, snakelike, leaning forward. “Twenty-five thousand dollars!”
“Yes it’s true,” I say brusquely. “But the idea that you can make an artist overnight is not. There have been many paintings, many years of hard work and hard experience.”
I am in my bedroom, writing to my sister Catherine, when he comes home that night. I start to get up to go and meet him, but I hesitate.
“Hello,” I hear him call. He appears in the doorway. “How was the interview?”
I set down the pen. “Someone will find out,” I say.
“Find out what?” he says.
“That it’s a hoax.”
“It’s a perfectly legitimate sale.”
I think of Mitchell Kennerley with his pipe, his Englishman accent, his thinning hair, swimming in debt. He was forced to sell the Anderson Galleries back in January, and the only plan he has is to buy it all back after his marriage to his wealthy European lover.
“Kennerley does not have twenty-five thousand dollars,” I say.
“His fiancée wants them.”
“She’s never seen them.”
“He signed the contract. You signed the contract. Quarterly installments.”
He has not yet taken off his cloak. One of the buttons, I notice, is loose, a big round shiny button, hanging by a thread. And I think about how I had to walk twenty blocks the other day to find the shirt and tie he wanted. Exactly the same as the old shirt and tie. When I pointed out the fray at the collar, the stain on the tie, and suggested new ones, he was nearly sick. He can’t bear to let go of old things. It would have been funny if I hadn’t had to go in such a mad search to replace them.
There was a painting I did once when I was very young. A picture of a man, but my hand was a child’s hand, and I could not get him right, he seemed to bend where I wanted him straight, and was straight where I wanted him bent. What he became on paper was not at all what I intended, and finally there was nothing to do but turn the page a different way.
VI
ONE EVENING IN June, he slips and falls, spraining his back. He can barely walk from the cab to the doctor’s office. That night, as he fumbles to pull off his underclothes, he tears a tendon in his hand. He is a mass of bandages, tape, and splints. I tell him we should stay in the city until he’s better, but he insists he wants to be at the Lake and limps to the train, his weight resting heavily on me.
The space between us is tensile, wrought. Tiny arguments, no more than usual, but harder for me to set aside. Bickerings over the bathroom door, the rain, the pain from the wrench in his back and what he should do for it.
Nothing new is stirring in me. No shapes. I paint what I know—what is safe. Some calla lilies. Roses. A peach on a glass. But the colors feel flat, bodiless. Midway through a second picture of the peach I find myself in a muddled place, oddly dislocated, clinging to the edges, the geometric order of the shape feeling space.
My hand trembles. I close my eyes. That sudden hard fear and nowhere to put it.
You’re the strong one, Georgia, my parents used to say. The survivor.
Tears sting now, squeezing out against my will.
—
EARLY ONE MORNING at five, what we’ve always called “our hour,” I crawl from my bed into his, my body pressed against him.
“I miss you,” I whisper.
“I’m right here.”
“But I miss you.”
He sighs. “Oh, Georgia. Why are you unhappy?”
I swallow and avoid his eyes, the sorrow going down somewhere deep. He draws me closer and strokes my back like I am a kitten or a child. Pat, pat. I pull slightly away, he sighs again, and we lie there, separately, as the sun rises through the window. Ten years ago, this month, I came to the Lake for the first time.
At breakfast, he mentions that I’ve used the wrong cup for his cocoa, so I pull out another, only to have that one rejected as well.
“Please pick out your own,” I say lightly.
I empty the drying rack, put the silverware away, setting forks with forks, knives with knives. I can feel his eyes on my back. Then he gets up and starts rummaging around the shelves for a cup that will satisfy. I go on doing what I am doing.
As I pour his cocoa, he remarks that before we left the city, he was looking for some mounting paper, because he’d given Mrs. Norman one of his cloud pictures, and how aggravating it was not to be able to find the mounting paper he wanted, it didn’t seem to be in stock anywhere, and where did I think he should look?
“You gave her an Equivalent?”
He stares at me. I stare back.
“You’re missing the point,” he says. “No mounting paper of the old sort. Not in stock, anywhere. We’re all at the mercy of commercial manufacturers.”
Something deep in me turns over. He is so protective of those clouds—they are not pictures of the sky, he will say, but of life. And it levels me—not just the gift, but the offhand way he relayed this bit of information, as if not delivered as an attack, but as a minor detail.
I stir the cocoa. As I hand it back to him, my grip on the handle slips and it falls, nubs of cocoa, ceramic. Pieces everywhere.
VII
I WANT TO go away. I plan a trip to Wisconsin in July to visit my sister Catherine and her family. I will stop to visit with my brother Alexius and his wife and the new baby in Chicago.
“Come with me, Stieglitz.” It’s the first warm day at the Lake and the lilacs are in bloom. Their dusky scent fills the air. We are out on the porch. He is scrapbooking the clippings from the show, as he does for every show.
“Come with me,” I say again.
He shakes his head. “I’m too old to make that kind of trip.”
“Sixty-four is not old.”
He looks at me then, something hard to interpret, then goes back to cutting, pressing, turning the
page.
I arrange for a housekeeper, Margaret Prosser from the village, to look after him. He brings me to the station. Bags packed, cash tucked into a money belt around my waist. He kisses me, and I board the train. I find my seat. Through the window, I can see him standing between the station pillars. The black triangle of his cape between the white triangle of the pillars. His eyes find me, that piercing glimmer, and the train gives a shudder and heave as we begin to move. He grows smaller, his eyes fade into his face, and then he is only a speck, vanishing into the black shape of the station door behind him, his hand waving.
Halfway across the country, I cry. My face turned away toward the window until the handkerchief is soaked through.
—
MY BROTHER ALEXIUS meets me in Chicago at Union Station—the war has aged him. He drives me to the Art Institute because I want to see the Bartlett Collection—Monets and a few van Goghs. His swirls of color stun me—how he used such quick strokes of paint, jab after jab to build those larger arcs of moving light and wind and space. At noon, Alexius comes back for me, and we go to the hospital to see the baby, just born, with his wife, Betty. The sweet constellation of the three of them fills my heart with warmth. The baby is in my brother’s arms. The small skull rests in the palm of his hand. Alexius’s face is worn, his figure sadly drained of its own life, but his eyes shine every time they fall on his child’s face.
“She’s lovely,” I say. “Such a simple thing—isn’t it?—all those toes! You’re lucky.” He glances at me. Perhaps he hears the wistful sadness in my voice.
“You always looked after us when we were young,” he says.
I laugh. “I know, imagine that.”
“You were good to us, Georgia.” He drives me back to the station to catch my train, heading west, toward dark country. I order poached eggs in the dining car. Everyone on the train is playing cards.
—
STIEGLITZ’S LETTERS ARE waiting for me when I reach Catherine’s home in Portage. It feels queer to see them there. Catherine and I walk down to the river with her daughter, Little Catherine. We cross over a bridge, and Little Catherine, who’s five years old and not shy, weaves her little fingers through mine as we walk the woods on the opposite shore. In the afternoon, I lie down on the daybed on the porch, and when I wake, I find her little body lying near me, asleep, the little features, so like my sister Catherine’s, and that echo of our mother’s features as well, like this raw bit of creature is the spit of what we were once, and I am the air around her, flowing in and out. I watch the rise of her little chest, slow and even, as she breathes.
