GEORGIA: A Novel
c Marianna Torgovnick 2016
PROLOGUE.
“Who gave you permission to hang these paintings?” Georgia asked, as boldly as she could.
“No one,” he replied, politely but pugnaciously, registering the woman’s slim form and white collared dress.
“You’ll have to take them down,” she insisted.
“I don’t think so,” he retorted, relishing the challenge and shaking his head like a lion guarding its den.
“Well, they’re my work. I’m the artist. I’m Georgia O’Keeffe.”
“And I’m Alfred Stieglitz,” he declared, suddenly imagining himself as Rochester to the woman’s Jane Eyre. “Who says you should let them hang. You’ll learn more by showing your drawings than you would by years of study. Women take an extraordinary interest in your art.“
“Do they?” she asked, her voice higher pitched despite herself, her purpose becoming uncertain.
“Yes. Truly. They don’t just look and pass. They spend a long time, drinking it in and whispering. Sometimes grinning or even laughing out loud. They come back and bring their friends with them.”
“Why?” she asked eagerly. “Do they like my work?”
He glanced at her sharply, surprised by her naiveté. “They sense a woman on paper: a woman like them on paper.” He waved his arms upwards to punctuate his remark in the voluble New York style that still seemed strange to her.
“An artist on paper,” she amended his words.
“Of course. That’s what I meant——but with an almost childlike purity. An artist, on paper. Come, Miss O’Keeffe. Let’s have some coffee and talk.”
With that, and his genteel mittel-european air, he ushered her into his office, adorned with work by famous painters including, she gasped, a Picasso.
“Yes, I’ve shown Picasso here,” he said, acknowledging her glance. “And Rodin. And Brancusi. And Matisse. And Toulouse-Lautrec. And my major Americans—John Marin, Marsden Hartley, and Arthur Dove,” Stieglitz rattled off the list, a tone of mild amusement in his voice as he steered her towards a seat. “Do you think, Miss O’Keeffe, that you’re better than them? It’s an honor to be shown in my gallery, nor an affront or an insult. Miss Georgia O’Keefe should be honored and not annoyed, as she seems to be.”
“I’m honored then,” she replied, “maybe especially by occupying the same room as Brancusi. But you may have to take my work down all the same.” With a start, she realized she had moved from the definite to the conditional.
“Very well, we’ll see. But tell me more—why Brancusi rather than Marin or Picasso?” he asked, pushing back his chair and clutching his coffee mug with one hand as he unbuttoned his jacket with the other and spread his knees to claim space, as men do. By the end of a cup of coffee and their first conversation, she had surrendered. As she shook off the memory, she realized that she had surrendered ever since.
Now, Georgia adjusted her hat in the mirror that reflected his frowning image as he sat in his favorite green velvet chair, rubbed chartreuse at the arms from more than a decade of sitting. His untamed gray hair had a King Lear look and the edges of his moustache resembled a fuzzy caterpillar. Georgia finished adjusting her hat and thought that, at sixty-five to her forty-two, Alfred Stieglitz had not aged well—though she remained fiercely attracted to him still. Bracing her hands on the console, she turned towards him as he resumed urging his case.
“Think of what we were, Georgia. No—not that. Of what we are and can be. Don’t leave. You’re famous and your canvases sell for unimaginable sums—$25,000 that last one.” He looked off into the distance, relishing the memory of that sale.
“It’s the stock market, that’s all. In1929 people feel rich.”
“No, not that. I’m the reason. I guarantee your value. I’ve made your world for you.”
“You have,” Georgia replied, her body tall and firm, her expression kept as neutral as she could, though her insides knotted up in defying him.
“Doesn’t that mean something?” he asked.
“It should. It does.” She paused, considering her answer as honestly as she could before she met his gaze. “It means that I’m grateful. I love you and always will. But, for a while anyway, I need to make my own world for myself now.”
“Don’t go, Georgia. Please don’t,” he pleaded, in a more intimate tone. “And certainly not with Beck Strand. It makes me look foolish and I’m vulnerable now. Stay at least through the summer. New Mexico will still be there in the fall.” Georgia wavered at the word vulnerable—hard for him to say and her to hear. She could tell he spoke from the heart, his dark eyes behind his thick rimless glasses the very meaning of piercing, even as his tone plumbed abjection.
“If you need to be away from the city,” he continued, sensing more than seeing a hint of her remorse, “we can leave right now for Lake George. It would be peaceful there and I can arrange for us to be alone.”
“I don’t want the Lake,” she replied instinctively. “I’ve tried to make it my home but it’s your family’s place, not mine.”
“I won’t invite guests, so the house as well as the shanty will be yours for painting—just yours, everyday, for as long as you want. We’ll be alone together as we were last August and figure things out.” Savoring the memory of their long, hot, erotic August afternoons—in love with the recollection, and with his words—Alfred missed a slight pursing of his wife’s lips. He placed his hands on his heart, like an actor playing Lear, not to her usual Cordelia but to some part of herself she tried to steel to resemble Goneril or Regan.
He was playacting, melodramatic, as always, she thought with irritation. But she remained aware that he might simply be a sixty-five year old man, recovering from a heart attack. And that she might be behaving like a selfish brat. Her stomach tied an additional knot, like shoelaces you don’t want to trip you.
“Later this summer,” he continued, misjudging her silence, “if you’re willing to have anyone come, I’ll ask the family to give you a wide berth. Especially the children; I know they distract you when you’re working.” Georgia heard surrender in his words: if you’re willing; for as long as you want. She leaned towards him, involuntarily, like a magnet towards its pole. He patted the arms of his chair in a gesture that said—of course: it’s all settled. Now we can move on to other things. “You’ll get good work done and we’ll base your next exhibit on it. Our gallery will be yours again, just yours and mine.”
His gallery, her show: he tossed out the lure like an expert and the idea enticed her. But when he named “The Room,” Georgia paused. For, by 1929, “The Room” meant more than Alfred and Georgia—it meant Dorothy Norman. Georgia almost staggered as she felt darkness all around her, placing her hand involuntarily on her belly.
“I can’t,” she said, straightening up and flattening her toes inside her shoes. “The Lake smothers me in green, like the velvet of your chair. That’s why I always cover that chair with my off-white throw when I paint. I can’t go to Lake George this year.”
“Then we’ll summer here,” he rebutted quickly. “Or even in Maine since you liked it so much the last time and wanted to rent that house directly on the beach. Remember that summer?”
She did—though the memory did not include him. She recalled an open vista and endless blue sky; roiling white-grey clouds with scalloped edges above matching curves of blue-green ocean. Ripples of white foam flecking the waves as they rolled onto grey-brown pebbles at the shore. She’d walked the beach, collecting seashells and throwing back into the ocean, as far as she could, those with membranes of being-ness. She remembered time alone she’d come to value, even though her original motivation had been, purely and simply, jealousy.
“We could go to York Beach,” he continued rhapsodically, misreading her silence and pressing the arms of his chair, which she could imagine turning a deeper lime-yellow under his hands. “The clam shells there—I loved your paintings of those clam shells and how you tilted them on their sides, with those enticing slits. I read little messages in them depending on whether the shells were open or closed.” His eyes twinkled flirtatiously as he tilted his glasses on his head, a signal for kisses. She had to force herself not to respond.
“They’d be closed now, Stieglitz,” she replied, as decisively as she could.
At that, he held his arms akimbo but, a sedentary man, didn’t rise from his chair. “Georgia, please, Sweetestheart. I’m asking and I don’t ask for much if you think of all I’ve done for you.”
“No. Not much. Just everything. And you tell me plenty. Too much sometimes.” Her eyes left him and traveled the stylish art deco room, coming to rest on her easel, empty near the north-facing window.
“You know I can’t go to New Mexico,” he said, scowling now and sounding petulant. “I hate to travel anywhere but upstate and to Boston, to visit Mrs. Norman. New Mexico is much too far. Especially now, with my ticker.” Georgia didn’t hear the last part because she’d winced at Boston, where Dorothy, Mrs. Norman, lived—but Stieglitz didn’t notice. “My heart couldn’t stand the altitude out West,” he went on. “Besides, my work is here. Your work is here. Our life together.”
“I don’t care if you come,” she flared out sharply, then softened her tone when she saw his face collapse. “It would be easier to say that I don’t love you anymore. But it wouldn’t be even close to true. I do love you and I want more than anything for you to stay well. That’s important. I love you. But I can’t stay here the way things are.”
They confronted each other now like two boxers in a ring. Him, aged and surprisingly frail over the last few years, virile still, but sitting between rounds seven and eight, knowing that the eighth might be his last. Her, standing, mentally butting her gloves, limber on her toes, hearty and younger, and that was part of it. He remained charismatic, magnetic. But she retained the bloom of youth, at least compared to him. She wasn’t a soft looking woman and never had been: handsome people called her—striking, not pretty. She wavered inside, fearing her hardness. But she couldn’t back down and be who she had become—not now, when she had achieved the kind of fame and independence her mother had only dreamed of. She was Georgia O’Keeffe and needed to act the part. She straightened her spine and put back her shoulders, emphasizing her slimness and height.
Georgia checked her watch and her purse for her ticket so that she could stop looking directly at Stieglitz, whose intensity, she knew, might still disarm her. “Remember when I wrote you from Texas, about the dust?” she asked. “How I stood there one day on the wide open prairie and the wind stirred a nearby field colored grey-brown, like dirt turns when it needs rain. Dirt with a dust outer lining?”
“Do you need rain, then? Someone else, perhaps?” he winced and looked away as he said it, but she ignored the question, which, like Dorothy Norman, remained off their list of acceptable topics.
“The wind blew for what must have been five full minutes—I wasn’t counting—and when it died down I was covered head to toe in dust. Like a scarecrow. A Texas mummy.” She looked off into the distance, past him and out the window. “I loved it. That’s what I need now. Open spaces. Dust. Saturation in both for a time.”
“If you’d like, we can take a taxi over to 59th and Eighth. The wind’s strong there, with the honest smell of horse manure from the carriage-horses, and plenty of dust,” he tried a joke.
“City dust. No,” she smiled but shook her head and tilted her soft bowler hat firmly to the right. “I’m going. I want open space and the sky and the dust.”
“You must believe me, Sweetestheart,” he said sincerely, smiling as he placed his hands on his heart again, for emphasis—his ticker he called it—“I love you despite everything that is making you unhappy now. We belong together in our togetherness.” She looked at his thick grey hair, his slightly humped back, at odds with his slim, attractive body.
“I know that,” she smiled back. “And you’ll always be my Dearest Boy.”
When she stopped and remained silent several beats too long, he gauged her expression and quickly adjusted, waving his hands in a gesture that said all right then—shoo, “But, of course, you are free. You have always been free. If you need to be away in New Mexico, I want that for you too and trust that love will bring you back to me. When will you be back?”
“We’ll know when I do,” she finished simply. She knew that, preferring concession to defeat, Alfred Stieglitz would convince himself within the hour that he’d agreed all along that she should go—for her work. She kissed his cheek and shut the door behind her firmly but quietly. No drama needed. No slams desired.
On the other side of the door, she rested her forehead on the cool wood and clung to the oversized knob beneath her hand. She exhaled slowly and realized that, if she were asked to paint the feeling of freedom right now, she would paint the plain, beige door.
“I’m Georgia O’Keefe,” she said out loud, but in a whisper. Then she turned towards the hall, put her shoulders back, and said it louder: “I’m Georgia O’Keefe.” So loud that a neighbor—if you could call anyone in a New York hotel a neighbor—looked up, startled, from the other end, before opening and entering an identical beige door.
Georgia smiled as she noted the symmetry of twenty tall rectangles up and down the corridor—anonymous, as befit New York—registering them for some possible return or some possible painting. Then she felt a laugh bubble up inside, though it didn’t break the surface. She had packed her trunks and sent them on ahead to the Pennsylvania Station. Now she would follow them.
It’s funny, Georgia thought, as she walked down the hall. She had to think it funny: her leaving him, at least for now, when it might so easily have been the other way around. What with Katharine and Beck early on, and now Dorothy. Stieglitz wouldn’t see the irony in it—not for a while, anyway—but she did. “It’s funny,” she murmured to herself, protectively, a personal Zen, as she pressed the elevator button.
The elevator’s gold doors hurt Georgia’s eyes almost as much as Stieglitz’s green velvet chair, jarring her imagination, which lived in black and white or vivid natural colors. Like New York itself, they looked artificial and shiny—jazz age design in an urban space. When the doors opened with a ping, she entered and faced front, her back to the other passengers. Then, impulsively, she got off on the 16th floor and walked to the terrace at the end of the cafeteria where they had their daily meals, twelve floors down from Stieglitz’s chair. She wanted to see what flowed right outside his window, though he never looked.
There it was, there it always would be: the river, called East though it flowed Northeast to Southwest—names being illogical in the city, like most things. Concrete addles the brain, she thought, and New York contains too much movement and too many people. Grids and numbers moving higher as you walk north and lower as you approach Fifth Avenue, making it easy to find your way if you’re a stranger, but penning you in with their logic if you’re not. Men in suits heading to Wall Street—anonymous black slashes topped by hats. Women in flapper garb; the older ones corseted in the high necks and long skirts of the last century. Unlike Stieglitz, New York did not make her world for her.
That’s why she loved the river, especially from up high, a bird’s eye view of silky silver flowing free against dark Manhattan greys. Her eyes moved up and she saw three angry red smokestacks off in the distance, marking Queens, and she remembered vividly why she had come to dislike the City. New York loved money; a jazz age machine, it hummed with mechanical motion. She shook her head and checked the thought as dishonest. “No,” she murmured to herself. “I’ve loved it here too.”
In fact, she’d crowed with pleasure when they’d found their two-room suite on the 28th floor of the brand-new Shelton Hotel. In their tiny bedroom, they’d had to negotiate who walked where and which half of the closet to use but glorious light streamed in from the north, south, and east. Stieglitz sat and wrote at a desk in the large living room that faced the wall or in that green velvet chair while she painted by the north-facing window. The suite had no kitchen, but they’d never needed one. They liked eating in the cafeteria or out almost every night, tasting the City. The Shelton gave them a place of their own, after they’d camped out for years with Stieglitz’s relatives on Manhattan’s East Side. The Shelton was east too—Lexington and 48th, but set back and higher up than anything around it: a skyscraper in a city made of concrete and steel.
But how she loved the river view, she thought, as she turned her attention fully to the light that bounced pink in the morning, then settled into silvery blues until sunset, when red-purple pinks returned and sealed the deal. It was just turning from pink to silver—the same color her train would be, later today, taking her West. Georgia relished the view, knowing it would be a while before she’d see New York again laid out below her like a Turkish carpet or like the ocean off York Beach. It’s the top of the world and maybe as deceptive, Georgia thought.
Her mind tossed up unexpected shapes and colors at all times, like a kaleidoscope. But it had cast the same ones repeatedly this year of our Lord 1929: New Mexico’s shapes and colors, not New York’s. It’s funny, she thought, steadying herself with the phrase. She knew she had to leave, for a while anyway, to become fully herself. And she knew New Mexico was where she had to go.
A second ping brought her back onto the elevator and, when she left it this time and crossed the red carpeted lobby to greet the doorman, she looked, as she always did in Manhattan, both supremely confident and oddly out of place. Her loose-fitting white skirt and blouse skimmed rather than outlined her tall, thin body, beneath a lightweight black cape. She knew she’d made a peculiar choice of color for travel—white— but she’d wanted, this day of all days, to look like herself in her uniqueness. White, with dark hair slicked into a bun, beneath a louche black hat, with her black cape and strong dark shoes to ground her. She’d let her brows go wild the last few months and they gave her a vaguely foreign look. Craggy, like her forty-two year old face. “Patsy,” they’d called her when she’d studied art at Columbia: a generic name for an Irish lassie, with some Hunkie, Hungarian, blood too. Though she’d been born on a farm as American as Wisconsin cheese.
“Top of the morning to you, Mrs. Stieglitz,” the new doorman Eddie said. “Would you like a taxi?”
“I’ll get it myself. Thanks, Eddie.” She smiled as she approached the gilded, revolving jazz age doors and then added, turning back to Eddie before it twirled, “And please call me Miss O’Keeffe or, better yet, Georgia.”
ONE.
THE DOLLHOUSE