Georgia (26 page)

Through the kitchen window, the shapes of the sky—a zigzag of spindly treetops. Light echoes in the glass. Just a small quiver. But something moves in me, watching it.

S
NOW BEGINS TO
fall. A light dusting of white on the ground, the last burnished leaves. I move a cot into the front room downstairs. Everything sits, my rocks and bones on the shelves. Easel, paints, brushes, still waiting for me.

Jean Toomer writes from Chicago, looking to see if I've kept any letters I might have received from his dead wife, Margery Latimer. Margery died in childbirth—she began to hemorrhage, but she was a Christian Scientist, and so no doctor was called. She delivered the baby and, several moments later, lapsed into a coma and died.

In his letter, Toomer says he's coming east to gather Margery's correspondence for a memorial collection. I write back.
Yes, I believe I do have one she sent to me, a lovely letter—she was a beautiful soul, your wife. I'll be in the city later this month. I'll find that letter for you then.

I had not in fact planned a trip down to New York, but now there it is. So funny—that little intent inside me working away on its own, leaving aside my daylight mind.

“
I
DON'T SEE
why you won't stay at the Shelton,” Stieglitz says when I tell him I'm coming to the city.

“I'm going to stay at Anita's.”

I can feel his uncomprehending sadness, a crinkle in the silence on the phone line.

I
N
N
EW
Y
ORK,
I go to the Brancusi exhibit, and visit with my sisters. I ask Claudia to stop by the Shelton with me so I can hunt up that letter for Toomer. I keep my arm tucked through hers as we make our way down Fifth. “It's somewhat thrilling,” I say, “that I can walk in the streets again without losing my mind.”

After lunch with Rosenfeld on Thursday, I stop in at the Place to see Marin's new landscapes. As I'm studying one, the slightly cubist thing he has begun to do with planes of space and color, I sense a presence behind me, and turn. For a moment, I don't recognize him. Then I realize that it's Jean.

“So good to see you!” I say.

“And you as well.” He presses my hand, his fingers warm.

“I couldn't find that letter,” I say. “I'm sorry. It seems I've misplaced it. It was an extraordinary piece of writing, and I'll keep looking.”

“How long are you in the city?” he says.

“Too long already.”

He tells me he's working on his essay for the Stieglitz portrait. He needs a quiet place to finish it and is going to talk with a friend who has a house on Long Island.

“Come to the Hill,” I say. “If you're writing about Stieglitz, isn't that where you should be?”

“I never thought of it.”

“Nothing but quiet this time of year. The house is drafty, but if you don't mind a few sweaters along with some mice to share the kitchen with, consider it.”

“I think I could brave it.” A pause. “All right,” he says. “I'll come.”

A
FTERWARD,
I
WILL
see my invitation as strange, as it must have seemed to him. Stieglitz, however, is ecstatic that I'm feeling well enough to suggest a visitor.

“You'll be yourself again,” he says. I almost smile. He has a new Picasso drawing in the office—a standing nude. I want it for the upstairs hall at the Lake. He gives it to me happily, and I leave the Place.

I think of Jean again on the train back up to Lake George, the drained fields rushing by. Through the window, a light snow has begun to fall. The sky breaks up into soft flakes floating down.

T
HE FIRST WEEK
he is there, I spend the better part of every day closed up in my bedroom with a miserable cold. I hear him moving through the house, talking to Margaret. He makes her laugh, and laughs with her. A good strong sound, the way he laughs. Then long hours of silence, only the tap-tapping of his fingers on the typewriter keys. He works all day, then goes out and does our errands. He gets the mail no matter the weather. He starts my car to make sure the engine doesn't freeze.

“It's quite nice,” I remark to him one evening at supper, “to have you around. Very useful.”

He looks at me across the roast beef in the center of the table, unsure of the tone in my voice—if I am teasing.

“You've been quite taken by that head cold of yours since I arrived.”

“That doesn't mean it hasn't been nice.”

And it has been. Unexpectedly nice. Having someone here preoccupied with his own thoughts, work, and silence.

T
HE TEMPERATURE OUTSIDE
plunges to eight below. The lake skims over with a layer of ice.

That afternoon, I make up my little cot downstairs by the window, add two more blankets, and crawl under them to read from the new Jung book Stieglitz gave me down in the city. From some far-off corner of the house comes the soft tapping of his typewriter, his fingers on the keys, a pause between thoughts, then the uneven sound taken up again, tap-tap-tapping. A drawer closes above, a door opens, footsteps on the stairs, coming down. He walks into the living room, and stops, surprised to see me there.

“Could you get me some water?” I ask.

He goes out and returns with a glass. “So, at last, she has surfaced to the world,” he says.

“Barely.”

“Stieglitz wrote a few days ago to say how he worries after you.”

I nod. “Give it one more day, he'll catch the cold. My sister Ida puts it in this way: One of us sneezes and we both get sick.”

Toomer laughs.

I take a sip of water. “Next life, I think I'll come back as a blond soprano.”

“Spare us.”

“No,” I say. “A blond soprano who can sing very high, clear notes that shatter the glass.”

“You'd break all the windows.”

“That's exactly what I'd do. And I'd be living in a place where there was not this kind of winter, and one could afford to lose a window now and then.”

“Taos, perhaps?”

“Taos is awfully incestuous—lots of high drama.”

“Too much for your taste?”

“By tenfold.”

His eyes slide over my face to my throat. It is only a moment. Then he gets up and says he needs to refill the wood box before dark.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
we have frozen pipes. Putnam comes up from Bolton's Landing.

“They can be thawed,” I say.

“Not with this kind of cold, Miss O'Keeffe.”

“You're wrong, Putnam.” I give him succinct instructions and pack him off to the cellar and, when his head pokes up, I banish him back down again until he has done what I told him to do and realized I am right.

It snows and snows. I love winter up here, in this house that was never built for it. I love the hardship, the bitter cold. I love the minor mishaps—frozen pipes, for example, which are, unlike other things, fixable.

When the snow finally ends, Jean goes out to shovel.

I wear my slippers to the back door. “See how useful!” I call out to him.

He quits shoveling and smiles at me. “It's a hard life I've got up here.”

“Such trouble.”

“Go back in. You'll catch cold.”

“I can't catch worse than I've got.”

He laughs and shifts his grip on the shovel handle. “Go on, Georgia,” he says. Again, his eyes rest on my face, then he turns away and digs the blade into the next drift. I close the door, a quiet thrill in my chest. The phone starts to ring as I climb the stairs. Stieglitz more than likely. Who else would it be? I should answer. I should let him hear my voice to give him assurance. The steps are cold through my socks, the phone echoing. I let it ring.

J
EAN.
I
AM
beginning to know him. How he sits, speaks, moves, how when he is working at his typewriter, he leans slightly forward, his weight on his elbows. He gives me things to read—sections of the novel-in-progress he is writing, and a copy of his first book,
Cane.
After supper, we listen to music—Bach, Mozart, the spirituals. We talk late into the night, disconnected abstract conversations about his dead wife, writing, art, politics, the race issue. His father was born into slavery, he tells me, then became a prosperous farmer. His mother was the daughter of a governor. He went to segregated schools—all-white, as well as all-black. He is mixed race—half Negro, the other half Dutch, Welsh, German Jewish.

“Does it matter, Georgia, really? Negro, white, mulatto, what does it all amount to? I am none of those things and all of those things. I'm no more or less than the man I am.”

His eyes have a strangely risen quality; they seem to float near the surface of his skin. Inexpressibly beautiful. Light coming through water.

I tell him about New Mexico, and Abiquiu, that small village that seems cut right out of the hills. “It is such a particular point of earth,” I say. “Light like nowhere else. Even the dust there is different.” Powdered adobe, walls crumbling to mix back into the earth they came from. That dust is different from the dust of any other place.

“I don't believe that.”

“That's only because you've not been.”

“I've been to Taos.”

“It's not the same.”

There is a wrinkle then in the silence between us. My voice came out stronger than I intended.

“You should stay,” I say abruptly.

“What?”

“I originally invited you for two weeks.”

“Yes.”

“It's been nearly two.”

He doesn't answer.

“You don't have to,” I say.

“I know that.”

“But you are welcome to. If you want.”

The edges of his mouth turn up. “Because I am useful?”

“Exactly. You are useful, and everything is humming along here quite nicely. Don't you think?”

“Yes,” he says slowly. “I do.”

The cat comes up to me and jumps onto the pillow of the cot. I stroke her head. She tolerates it for a while, then leaps down and circles his chair.

B
Y THE TIME
Stieglitz comes up for Christmas, the air feels almost warm, and I can get outside again. The grass sheathed in frost glitters in the sunlight.

When he walks through the door and sees me, his face lights. “Look at you!” he says happily, touching my chin with his hand. “You look so well!”

I feel something in me twist, and resist the urge to turn my face away.

T
HE THREE OF
us exchange simple gifts. My gift to Toomer is a bright-red scarf. “It looks dashing on you,” I say.

“That's your teasing voice, isn't it?”

I laugh. “Stieglitz, tell him how fine that scarf looks.”

“Indeed,” Stieglitz says. “A glorious red.”

“There,” I say. “Now, you'll believe me, won't you?” Jean shoots me a quick look, then presses the tissue back into the box. Stieglitz is saying how he's always wanted a Christmas at the Hill, and now it's here—a few perfect days with snow everywhere—and how heartening it is to see me looking so well, looking almost like I did fifteen years ago. I feel my breath catch. Has it been that long?

W
E HAVE A
big dinner. Bellies stuffed, we roll into the kitchen. Stieglitz builds up the fire, then sits down at the table as Toomer and I start on the dishes. We are laughing. So much food, so many plates to wash. My arms are plunged into the warm soapy water, suds on my sleeves, I've pushed them back, but they keep sliding down.

“Give them here, Georgia,” Toomer says.

I hold my dripping sudsy hands toward him and he folds the cuffs back from the wrist, until they are tight against my elbow.

“You do that very neatly,” I say. A quick flash of light breaks across his face.

“Do I?” He picks up a rinsed dish from the rack and runs the drying cloth over the moon-white center.

When the kitchen is clean, we move into the living room, and Jean reads us his essay on Stieglitz. He has written about the Hill—how it was an old farm, now with a new world set into its borders, how every window is uncurtained, each with a searing capacity to perceive and feel and know. He speaks about my presence here, how I've molded the house to my austere vision: the lack of ornaments, the pale-gray walls, the uncovered lights. He continues reading about Stieglitz's genius, his generosity, his commitment to the livingness of art. He talks about the artists Stieglitz saw before the world did, and his uncanny gift to render in his photographs
the treeness of a tree, the stoneness of stone…what a face is…what a hand, an arm, a limb is…the amazing beauty of a human being…

Under his hands, the papers shine in the light off the fire, and I know. Even before he has come to the end, before his eyes lift from the last page and meet mine, I feel the rise of desire in his face, how he wants me, and has, I see now, for some time.

S
TIEGLITZ STAYS UP
late with me. He sits in the chair by my bed. When he starts to fall asleep, I nudge him, but he claims he doesn't want to go up to his room. I am well again, and he doesn't want to wake up tomorrow and find anything changed. He clutches my hand, so happy I've begun to rouse again as the woman he knew, the woman he loves.

His pleasure seeing what he calls this sea-change in me is genuine. He sees the light moving through my face. He hears my laughter, the same kind of laughter he and I fell into fifteen years ago, that first summer in our refuge. That time in his life when he discovered me was the time when he was most certain, virile, and alive, and he will always love me for that reason. And when he hears my laughter now, it reminds him of who he was when he heard it then—