Georgia (4 page)

Before

T
HEY 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.

M
Y 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.

1918, Waring, Texas

O
N 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 places 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.

L
ATER 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.

He is my future. That is that.

I send off the telegram.

Yes.

New York

T
HE WHEELS OF
the train knock over the tracks hurtling north. Paul touches my arm. “We are almost there.”

Through the window, I see the city rising toward us in the dawn. Gray geometric shapes, angles turned every which way, the river a ring of wide-hammered silver. The fever has come back again, a low grinding pressure in my chest.

W
HEN WE ARRIVE,
Stieglitz is on the platform waiting in a porkpie hat, a loden cape. Strand holds my arm as we step from the train. My body feels weak, but I feel a surge of joy as Stieglitz takes a step toward us. His arm comes around me as his cloak sweeps against my cheek. He holds me tightly—the strength in his arm around my shoulders—everything in me turns suddenly soft. “I could not believe you would come,” he whispers. “I read that telegram over and over and still did not believe that you would come.”

He steers me through the great arched hall, dusty violent sunlight pouring through the upper windows. We move slowly, as through a dream. I can feel my body shaking, chills working through me.

The city hits my skin—noise and smells, a street sweeper at his work just outside the door swush-swushing his broom across the sidewalk as we step out.

“My niece Elizabeth, Dove, and the men—all are so glad that you've come.” He has slowed his pace to keep his steps in sync with mine. I raise my eyes, the worry on his face so lovely.

Strand raises his arm and hails a taxi for us, then with a farewell he heads off walking down the street. Stieglitz bundles me into the cab like he knows I'm a million tiny feverish pieces, all in disarray. My things are loaded in. The driver slams the door—such a final sound—for a moment I am sure I've made a mistake. But then his voice brushes near my ear.

“There's so much to say,” he says as we move out into traffic, the queer rush of the city moving by—so different from the country I've just come from. He draws me more tightly against him.

“You're still unwell,” he says. “You didn't tell me.”

“It only just came on me again.”

There's a dim triangle of sky visible through the upper edge of the taxi window, very high up above the buildings. My breath catches, too sudden, and I cough, leaning forward, my head against the seat, that awful taste in my mouth. He holds me until I am done. My head is light, airless. When the cab makes a sharp turn, I fall back into him. I can feel the coolness of his skin near my face, light kisses through the sweat and the fever, the coolness of him like clear water.

“Darling,” he says. I think he says. His voice is an echo, and I have the sense that this has already happened, for years I've been traveling toward this moment, the back of this taxi, this exact course.

“
F
OUR FLIGHTS
,”
HE
says, when we arrive at his niece's building on 59th Street.

“It is more than four,” I say under my breath as we climb. A thousand stairs. The cough flares again at the landing partway up. I have to stop. He waits with me. I gather myself, he holds my arm, and we continue slowly up the stairs. He has cleaned the studio. Had new keys made.

The room is filled with sunshine, it streams through the windows and the skylight. Pale lemon-colored walls. The floor painted orange, so ridiculously orange it makes me laugh. I see how it startles him, the sound of my laughter. After the wild intimacy between us in those letters we hurled back and forth across the country, now suddenly here we find ourselves, our slighter, imperfect human selves, in this lovely shoe-box room.

“There's a bathroom down the hall, a second room, smaller, where I've stored some of my camera things,” he says, “books, some art.”

In the corner the bed has been made—a simple cot—the sheets crisp, evenly lined. There are a few chairs, a table.

I lie down on the bed, springs creak.

“You must not sleep yet. Have something to eat.”

“I'm so tired.” I slip out of my shoes and crawl under the covers. I hear him by the sink, filling a glass of water. The walls of the room soften.

When I wake, it is night, he sits in a chair beside my bed, his face in the lamplight, his eyes dark and solemn behind the pince-nez, the bronze rim. I love his broad nose, the mustache, the slight unevenness of his teeth when he smiles, how his hair creeps from the temples. It was his hand that woke me, his hand on my forehead slipping down my face, cradling my cheek in his palm.

I remember the train station—a year ago—his hand in the small of my back, my body against him. It feels so distant now. Another life.

“I'll let you sleep,” he says.

He leans over. His lips graze my forehead. Then he's gone.