by Dawn Tripp
A thousand kisses, dearest. I send every one to you—
I look up.
Sometimes it seems I know everything about her, that child we might have had. When the thought of her takes me off guard—I sense, I know, it would have been her—it hits me: the smell of her skin. Sweet soft soapy, burnt sugar baby smell skin. I know just how the light would strike her hair, how it would fall in a long black wave down her small back. She would have blue eyes and her nose would wrinkle when she didn’t get her way. She would be willful. Turning cartwheels on the grass, her legs flashing out from under her skirt, as she turned head over heels, again and again, down the hill.
Once I thought I could be an artist and have a real life, like the life my sister Catherine has. I once thought I could disappear into the world of color and shapes and, when I surfaced from it, satisfied, my family would be there. A child, a husband, their shining faces and open arms. I saw it once so clearly—art and life—and my vision of how those two halves could fit was clear. Perhaps it could have been if I had been willing to put my art second. It would be easy, I realize, to blame Stieglitz and say he took this from me. But that is not entirely true. I’ve never been willing to put my art second. And the best things I’ve made—my charcoals, my abstractions, a few of the flowers and trees—have that quality of life ringing through them; they were done out of a kind of ruthless ecstasy when my mind was singularly focused and free, in uninterrupted solitude. I could not live an everyday life of skinned knees, meals to cook, beds to make and also have that kind of solitude, which does not make my longing for the life I did not choose, less.
I get up from the table and walk away from the house, away from the letter and the thought of the child, away from the sharpness of the memory of what I will not have. I walk into the distance and the brightness and the wind-torn skinflint earth that gives nothing back.
—
THAT AFTERNOON I find Beck reading on the bed. She sits up when she sees me.
“What is it?” she asks.
I shake my head. “Will you do something for me?” I ask.
“Anything.”
I take out the letter, and she sits on the floor beside me as I read it aloud. I have never done this. Our letters have always been only for us. And it’s the oddest feeling hearing his words in my voice fill the room.
I look up when I finish. Her eyes are lowered, she looks down at the Navajo rug underneath us, the shadow of her lashes on her cheek.
“Are they all like that?”
“Each one is different.”
“But he always crams in so much of himself like that?”
“Yes.”
She is silent, then she says, “I don’t know what I’d do if someone wrote to me like that. I don’t think I’d be able to do much besides wait and tear them open the minute they came.”
I fold the page back together, slip it into its envelope, and put it with the rest. It feels better to me somehow. Like I can leave the thought of that child behind.
“He writes such big sweeping things.” She is looking at me now, her eyes intense on my face. “But they are entirely real. More real than ordinary life. And that’s Stieglitz, isn’t it?”
I nod.
“You know,” she continues, “I remember the first time I met him, the first time he really talked to me. It was like standing in sunlight. I’d never felt anything like that before.”
I could tell her that he is the kind of man who is drawn to things that are free. It’s not their beauty he sees, but that other thing, that vital thing past beauty. Life, we could call it, for lack of a better term. He is also the kind of man who can never quite let things exist in the state in which he finds them.
I could tell her, too, that when you are an artist, when you are the kind of person who can vanish for days inside yourself, and you are given this kind of promise:
I will sweep up the details so you can paint.
I will find the words to make you a star. I will make you great. I will frame you, hang you, explain your greatness. I will tell others what to think, what to adore.
As I adore you.
It can be so seductive, the glint of this kind of promise, this kind of man. Particularly when you know it is true when he writes, “I will love you completely, to the end of forever, as no other woman has ever been loved.” No matter how untrue it might sometimes seem, this is what he believes, and it is irrefutable for that reason. Truth more than true.
Beck leaves early. Her mother is ill, and she needs to return to New York to care for her. I hug her before I put her on the train, then let her go.
—
I TAKE A horseback trip to Kiowa to visit Lady Brett, with Tony and some of the others. The horses need shoes so we get a late start and wind up passing through a thunderstorm. We ride in single file, in our yellow slickers, the rain coming and going until we arrive and drag our sleeping bags and tents up the hill to a dry place under the pine trees where we will camp. Brett’s house is a crazy house—chipmunks eating up the bed, and toilet paper hanging by a wire in the outhouse. Everything is so haphazard, and it seems to fit Brett so neatly. Seeing a woman fit so well into her own crazy-unkempt life fills me with pleasure. We travel on to Alcalde—to poet Marie Garland’s ranch. The silence is more complete than at Mabel’s. I can wander and meet no one for hours. And the hills are different. They are like sand and change under the touch of the wind. Nothing still.
We drive northwest to the Grand Canyon. There are five of us, and we take two cars, Garland’s Rolls-Royce and the Packard. We keep the convertible tops down, and the wind washes through us as we drive. Starting at 8 A.M., we drive all day, from Bright Angel Trail where the sun rises alone into the canyon, along the soft gray hills that give way to red cliffs. The rain has cut the roads to pieces. I love it, the steepness and the danger of it. For days, we are lost in this country. No mail to send, no mail to receive. I write a telegram to him: Heading into Navajo territory tomorrow. Will wire when I can. It could be several days.
I send it and feel a sharp pang of sadness, something cut, then sweet and deliriously light.
—
WHEN WE RETURN, the household of Los Gallos is on its ear. A gruesome story. All over the paper and for days, the talk has been of nothing else. A man Mabel knew quite well was found with his head severed, chewed on by his two fierce dogs.
There are letters waiting from Lake George. It’s been days since he has had word from me, and he has fallen into despair. He says he prowls the house like a ghost, staying up all night, pacing the floor. He’s afraid I will not come back. The Lake is desolate without you. Meaningless.
He’s begun to destroy his work: negatives, papers, images of Kitty, images of Venice, of 291. He says it is a good thing. A growing into clarity. A purging. I have come to understand that there are things worth saving. Those things are few. The rest must go. He builds bonfires—letters, prints, magazines, all sorts of truck. He throws it on and watches the past burn; the coarse smell of the palladium fills the night sky, leaving his eyes red with smoke, so even the following morning there’s a horrible redness that can’t be rubbed out.
He sends small clippings folded into the letters. In the last, he tucks a photograph of the two of us kissing under the tree out in front of the house at the Lake. Below the photograph, he has written: I have destroyed 300 prints today. I haven’t the heart to destroy this…
It is the ellipsis that undoes me, those three tiny dots that say nothing in themselves. I remember that kiss. I was on tiptoe, he was just above me on the hill, and his cloak enveloped me, and he drew me in against him, and held me, so tightly and so close, as if to say, There is this and only this and I will never let you go.
It’s the strongest pull I know—the pull back. Over every other thing, it seems, still.
I look up from the letter. The room is plain, the adobe smooth, bare. After Beck left, I stripped the decorative ornaments from the walls. It was the emptiness I wanted—only the heat
through the window, the scent of flowers, and the sound of the little stream flowing by outside. The peace in that emptiness.
I send off a wire.
I leave for you on Friday, if not sooner.
—
THAT NIGHT, I go to meet the others in the Big House, but they seem shadowy, like paper cutouts. I leave them after coffee and take the horse for a ride along the ridge. It’s dark by the time I come back. I put the horse in the corral and cross the field, alfalfa grass crackling under my boots. I see the others through the window of the Big House, their lit forms moving through the orange light. I look back toward the mountains I just rode from, and I let the wind breathe into me, and out of me.
III
HE MEETS ME at the train in Albany, and it is the sweetest homecoming. I almost cannot believe how happy I am to see him again, how restored things feel between us. He looks, strangely enough, more sound than he has looked in years. Perhaps it was the bonfires, I whisper, giggling, as we lie together in the bedroom in the early morning. He moves his hands over me, my neck, my breasts, he touches me at that spot in the center, and makes love to me until my thighs ache.
“I’d forgotten how perfect it can feel here,” I murmur.
He pulls me in tight against him and kisses me hard on the mouth. “Do not forget,” he says. “Don’t ever. Promise me.”
We spend the day outside. The lake shimmers, the grass bright and lush, the air strung through with the scent of wild grape—and Stieglitz at the center of it all, stubborn, aging, glorious. The bliss between us is as it was once and, at the same time, new all over again.
Later, I spread out all the work I did on the floor. It’s good. Really just so good. I call him in to have a look, and he comes and sits in the chair, his body folded over the arm, his vest with one button off, his face with a halo of white hair, dark eyes piercing, looking over my things.
“So fine, aren’t they, Stieglitz?”
He nods, smiling. He is happy.
“Do you see,” I say gently, “how good it was for me to go there?”
—
CHARLES COLLIER DRIVES my Ford cross-country and delivers it to us at the Lake.
“Hello,” I say formally, addressing the car, “I would like you to meet Alfred. Alfred, may I present Hello.”
He takes photographs of me with the car, playful images of my hands, the wheel, my dark weathered face, a coy look back at the camera. Like it used to be, he says afterward, holding me to him. How I love photographing you, no one like you.
—
THAT FALL OF 1929, news comes of the stock market. Stieglitz stews over it. Will it affect art sales? Of course, it will affect everything. But we’ll still go ahead and open the new gallery in December. It will be called An American Place. The young ones—Strand, Beck, and a few others—have been working away at it down in the city. So dedicated, they’ve raised over ten thousand dollars in pledges to fund the new space.
We make plans to return to the Shelton. We will attend the opening of the new Museum of Modern Art. He is not keen on it. He looks down at those matrons, Mrs. Rockefeller, Mrs. Bliss, who snubbed his opinion as they were building their new museum, but the second exhibition will include Demuth, Marin, and me, so he has grudgingly agreed to be decent.
—
IN NEW YORK, breadlines wrap the corners by the soup kitchens. Walking the streets, I pass humped shapes under blankets, men with their hats pulled down over their reddened ears, mothers clutching children with torn coats.
I have lunch with my sister Anita at her Fifth Avenue apartment. Her daughter Cookie comes in—almost twelve years old now and with her mother’s slim grace. She has lunch with us, before stuffing grapes in her pocket and running off to play. Anita confides in me that she would like to buy a few more of my paintings. Her husband, Robert Young, whom they are now calling the “daring young man of Wall Street,” netted a small fortune during the crash selling stocks short.
—
AT AN AMERICAN PLACE, along with the main rooms, there’s an office Stieglitz nicknames the Vault and a storage cubicle he converts to a darkroom. I choose white for the ceiling, high-gloss gray for the walls. It’s an austere space, spare and modern. Frosted-glass doors. He draws up an engraved ivory card, with simple black script listing everything that the Place is not:
No formal press reviews
No cocktail parties
No special invitations
No advertising
No institution
No isms
No theories
No game being played
Nothing being asked of anyone who comes
No anything on the walls except what you see there
The doors of An American Place are ever open to all.
“Very Stieglitz,” I say with a smile when he shows me the final version—his sly poke in the eye to the Modern and the ballyhoo of their recent exhibition that included my oils and six of Marin’s. Despite his vindicated pride that they chose to feature two of his six artists, it infuriates him that they did not include the rest. He has always condemned what he sees as the shortsighted politics of institutions, the decisions made by faceless, rich trustees.
Just after the New Year, I learn that my brother Alexius has died. His lungs and heart had been a shambles since the war, and he caught the flu and could not survive it. He has left his wife, Betty, pregnant and with their young child. In my February exhibition at the Place, I include the abstract portrait I made of him three years ago. Beside it, the other paintings float on the walls—pictures of the Ranchos de Taos church, wooden crosses, New York Night, and The Lawrence Tree, that pine tree at Kiowa Ranch I lay under at night, staring up into the giddy swirl of branches and the blue-black falling sky. The only Lake George image is a portrait of the farmhouse I made last fall. A closed flat white door. The sea-green space of the window. It looks strangely two-dimensional against the rest. I debate leaving it in, then decide to anyway.
Stieglitz is concerned about sales. He says my new work is too daring and the world, since the market crash, is too anxious. “You are anxious, sweet,” I say.
When I look at the work, I don’t see daring. I see only the smooth forbidding beauty of a land I can’t wait to pour myself back to.
—
DOROTHY NORMAN IS still at the gallery, managing things, keeping track of the bills. He remarks on how good she is at fundraising, skilled at plucking money out of air, but he does not seem preoccupied with her anymore. He rarely mentions her at home. Whatever was between them seems to be over. Her presence in our life has cooled, faded to the edges of things. And my work feels alive.
The Cleveland Art Museum buys my painting of a white New Mexican flower for four thousand dollars. Can you imagine! I say when he tells me. So much money for nothing more than a flower. The money almost seems unfair when others are in such bad straits. Dove can’t scrape together the twenty-two dollars he owes Stieglitz. He’s lost his single source of income—magazine illustration—and doesn’t have money for food, let alone paint. He and his wife are desperate. Once, at the Place, I watch as he tips black ink from the pot on Stieglitz’s desk to cover a frayed spot on his overcoat. He rubs cigarette ashes into it. “Fixative?” I ask. “You fix what you can,” he answers, with a grim smile.
In March, I agree to a public debate at the Breevort Bar in the Village with New Masses editor Michael Gold. He’s an opinioned, talky man, and he starts in by chastising me for not taking a more political stance in my art. For not reflecting, as others have begun to do more frequently, the working classes who are downtrodden and oppressed. Isn’t that the task of art?
He blusters on, and I study him calmly even as I feel the flush rise in my face, praying only to the low light of the bar that it will not betray me. I think about a woman I saw in the street several weeks ago. A thin, tattered boy clung to her, and she held out his hand. It filled me with rage to see her use him this way, to do her begging for her, but I pressed three coins i
nto his hand, and his fingers grabbed them like a trap. I remember this and sit, listening to Gold, until it is my turn to speak.
And then I remark coolly that art is, fundamentally, a personal struggle, and that women as a class are, fundamentally, oppressed. My work is to free myself of male influence and say something that is inimitably mine. My success as an artist, to use a word that has been flung about quite liberally, is a victory for every woman. I see that woman in my mind when I say this. Would she agree? But I realize, too, it’s not an option for me to meet this man halfway. It’s not an option to offer a concession.
He is on the attack—and already has left me only a corner of ground to stand on. He sneers back that my argument is a convenient way of sidestepping economic inequity. The expression on his face makes my throat tighten—such certainty, cartoonish, the scorn in it. I find it almost shocking that I maintain an even tone in my voice when I answer him that to limit the conversation to economic oppression denies the very human issue that is at the root of this debate. And that human issue involves every woman. That is the real content, just as the form and color of a painting are its true content—deeper and more relevant than the image a picture conveys.
—
MABEL WRITES AND invites me back to Taos. I want to go, but can’t decide. Everything feels so sweet and peaceful here with Stieglitz. I leave the letter with her invitation lying open on the table next to me as I work, but when he comes home that evening, I tell him I will go. He says he understands, as clearly as I do, that this is what I need.
“I may have to go every year,” I remark, “to fill myself up again.”
And so the decision is made—I’ll leave in June.
I go up to the Lake alone to plant the garden and open the house. I sweep the winter from it, cobwebs from the corners, the gathering of must and stillness.
One afternoon, walking by the springhouses, I come upon a patch of jack-in-the-pulpits, just off the path.
