Georgia (10 page)

T
HE FOLLOWING WINTER,
1920, we learn that our apartment building on 59th Street will be razed. Stieglitz's brother Lee offers us rooms in his house.

“I suppose that's what we'll do,” Stieglitz says. “Given how things are with money, there's really no choice.”

“There's always a choice,” I say. “I've known poor. I've always managed to live on my own.”

“But we could never afford as much as Lee and Lizzie are willing to give us.”

A twist in my stomach—how strange it will feel not to have our own space, living with his family, first at the Lake, now here.

W
E GO TO
see the rooms. It's a dreary day. The whole building feels like a damp cellar. Lizzie's mother, ninety years old, can't quite grasp the idea of an unmarried couple living together, so Lee has arranged that we'll keep rooms on separate floors. We'll have our own sitting room. We'll use their kitchen to fix our own breakfast, and plan on eating out for dinner. Lizzie shows me a sunny back room where the light is good and I can paint. She's a mousy woman, kind, but she always seems a little downtrodden, like marriage has wrung her right out. She and I climb the stairs together to the top floor where Lee is showing Stieglitz an alcove that he can use as a darkroom.

“I don't like feeling so dependent,” I murmur to Stieglitz as we follow them back downstairs.

“Shhh,” he says. “It's only for a while.”

At the door, he shakes his brother's hand, profuse with thanks.

B
Y SUMMER, OUR
living arrangements at the Lake have changed as well. The family has sold Oaklawn. Too expensive to maintain. Stieglitz alone fought the decision for more than eight months, but as he's the only one among them who can't afford to chip in for its upkeep, at last the decision is made: The mansion and the waterfront property have been put on the market. The family will keep the thirty-six upland acres and the white clapboard farmhouse on the hill that was once a pig farm. By the time we arrive, the renovations to the farmhouse are in the final stages: a few carpenters still bungling about; banging, hammering.

When they are finished, the tennis court is gone. Hedwig's servants, gone. She brings her maid from the city, and there is the local help. Stieglitz's sister Selma arrives, all in a huff because we snubbed her, she claims, through the winter. Despite her numerous invitations, we accepted only one. The walls of the new house feel unusually thin. I can hear her in the room next to mine, roaming around, rattling the drawers. She moves a chair, moves it back. I hear the swish of her skirts, the chatter of Rippy's terrier nails on the floor behind her. Within two days of arriving, she starts harping on about how she wants the desk that's in my room moved into hers.

At first it's a casual remark, made over dinner, but soon it seems all she can talk about is the desk.
Georgia doesn't need a writing desk. She is busy with her painting.
Stieglitz counters,
You only want that desk because you don't have it.
The argument between them ramps up, and finally I tell him to please just let her have it, but he doesn't want to give it to her—it is the principle of it.

“Odious,” he says to me. “She is odious.”

“And I need peace and quiet.”

The following morning the desk is moved into Sel's room, torqued at every which angle to get through the door. It is heavy and dark and swallows the space, but she is satisfied for one entire day, and then in the evening after supper, she mentions that perhaps we should have the desk switched back. Stieglitz will have nothing more to do with her.

B
Y
J
ULY, THE
farmhouse is stuffed with people. I take longer walks, past the driveway oval and the ring of the lawn dotted with fruit trees, past old outbuildings, roofs caving in—barns and a chicken coop, an icehouse, a stable. This was all once farm, I remember, pushing through the rusted fence that separates the fields. I climb up to the woods, past the sand cliffs and the boulders to the upper meadow full of sour grasses and wildflowers. The canna lilies I split and planted last summer have bloomed. Such a plain red flower. Thin stem, the bloom like a splayed hand—aureate, stunningly bright. I clip one and set it in a plain jar on the desk in the bedroom upstairs. I dip my brush into a bowl of water, then swirl it through red paint—that quick thrill of the first mark of color on blank paper, the brush's point to cut that outer edge, the petals opening, their redness thinned in places, pale sunlight shining through. I don't fill in the frame of the paper around them, so it is only the flower without reference—a rupture of color, in disembodied space.

On my way back from a walk one afternoon, I spy a one-room unkempt building. It has sagging doors and a window looking out onto the first meadow.

That evening I tell him I want it.

“For?”

“A space to work.”

He walks up the hill with me to see it.

“It needs a new roof.”

“Yes.”

“And a new window.”

“That one there can be repaired.”

He looks at me doubtfully.

“You think I don't know a fixable window when I see one?” I say. “Will you get a bid for the roof?”

He nods. “Very well.”

But he throws up his hands in disgust when the quote comes in. “Prohibitive!” he exclaims. I don't answer. “So discouraging,” he says, “I'm sorry, Love.”

When Lee's daughter Elizabeth arrives, I ask her for help, and along with Stieglitz and her new husband, Donald, we spend the next few weeks making repairs. In August, it grows too hot for Stieglitz. He retreats indoors, but Elizabeth and I continue to work, nailing shingles to the roof, frying up there like strips of bacon. I wear my large floppy hat and peel down to chemise and bloomers. One afternoon, Alfred comes out to find us. He's carrying his Graflex and triumphantly brandishing a newspaper.

“Historic day!” he cries with delight. “Ratified! Women have won the right to vote.”

“Joy!” Elizabeth says. “I can't wait for the dinner-table scuffle tonight. You will be our champion, Uncle Al. How dull it would be around here if you were as conventional as the other males in this family.”

“Alfred isn't one for dull,” I say.

“I hear it already,” Elizabeth says. “Father's dismay, his very serious concern.” She drops her voice to a low somber tone to imitate her father, Lee. “I'm afraid it will skew the upcoming election.”

We erupt into giggles. Stieglitz throws us the paper. Reaching to grab it, Elizabeth nearly loses her balance off the roof. I grasp her arm and pull her down. She lies there, laughing, then spreads the newspaper out to read the lead article, her round cheeks flushed.

“Now I can be finished wondering why it took them all so long to see what was always clearly right,” Stieglitz says.

“Men can be stubborn,” I say.

“Ha! Look at me, Georgia. Look now.” He has the camera raised. I smirk and he frowns. “Please,” he says sweetly. I shake the hammer at him, then smile, the shutter clicks. I turn away, slip a square ticket of wood against another, set a nail to the shingle, swing the hammer and hit it squarely on the head.

W
HEN THE SHANTY
is done, Alfred spends the day inside it with me. I retrieve some bits of molding from the trash and make a frame. He builds a stool from a cast-off piece of wood.

“This side of the room will work for me,” he says, pacing out one end.

“Oh no.” Shaking my head.

“What do you mean,
no
?”

“Just that.” I come close to him, touch the V point where his shirt opens, the top button undone, my fingertip light on his chest, tracing the bone. “You have the run of everywhere else,” I say. “The shanty is mine.”

“
A
WOMAN NEEDS
a child, Uncle Al,” Elizabeth remarks one afternoon in late August. They are sitting in his corner of the porch. I am on the steps reading.

“Georgia's not just any woman,” Stieglitz answers.

“I hear you,” I say.

Elizabeth smiles at me, then turns back to Stieglitz. “
Particularly
a woman like Georgia,” she answers. “Think of what the experience of a child will do for her art.”

“With a baby to nurse, burp, and clean, she'll have no time for art.”

“I can help,” Elizabeth says.

“And how?”

“I can be not only your favorite niece, but also nanny, caregiver, kindergarten—any and all of what you and Georgia need.”

“We don't even have our own home,” Stieglitz says. “There's no place for a child.”

“There is always a place for a child where there is love.”

Stieglitz looks at her over the rim of his glasses, a stern look. “Verbose.”

“Romantic,” Elizabeth corrects. “And nothing wrong with it. You might have a dash of it in you.”

“I am practical.”

She bursts into laughter.

“Besides,” Stieglitz says. “Georgia is barely more than a child herself.”

“Really?” I exclaim. “I am all of thirty-three.”

“But young still,” he says earnestly, “and developing so beautifully.”

The phrase surprises me—something so weirdly awful in it—like Pygmalion and Galatea. I feel a quick wave of anger toward him and toward Elizabeth for stirring this up in the first place.

I look down at the book open on my lap.
Trees and How to Know Them.
My eyes drop to the page.
The bark of all birches is marked with long horizontal…

“And there is the money concern,” I hear him say now. “Things can barely continue as they are.”

“Things work out,” Elizabeth says. “Have some faith in that.”

“I don't want to talk about this anymore today,” Stieglitz says.

“I'll bring it up again tomorrow, then,” she answers.

He ignores her and speaks across the porch to me. “Do you want to go for a row later, Georgia?”

I glance up and hold his eyes coolly for a moment just so he knows I am not pleased. “We can do that.”

H
E HOLDS MY
arm as we walk the path down to the lake.

“Don't ever do that,” I say.

“What?”

“Have a conversation about something that matters deeply to me with someone else in that staged way.”

“She brought it up.”

“Don't do that again.”

I feel him shrink, but he nods.

“I want a child, Stieglitz—you've promised me from the start, and if now is not quite the right time, I'm perfectly capable of talking that through. Alone with you. But not like that again.”

I
HELP HIM
flip the dinghy. Together we drag it to the shallows. We row in silence. Halfway around the island, the wind shifts—a sudden squall moving in over the hills.

“Head back,” I say.

He turns the boat around, so the wind is with us. A gust flays the surface, driving spray against the hull. Small waves have begun to form. The little boat pitches over them, and he rows with long strong pulls, driving the bow through the chop.

Rain has begun to fall—just a drizzle at first, then drenching. Halfway to shore, a streak of lightning rips the sky across the lake. I see the canoe—just east of the island, two small figures in it. Boys.

“Stieglitz, go back! Go back!” I go to stand. He pulls me down.

“You'll tip us!”

“But look! Out there, those boys!”

As his eyes follow my hand pointing, the canoe rolls, two dark shapes disappear into black water. I see one head surface, his arm pale in another burst of lightning. He clings to the overturned canoe.

“Turn around! Go back!” I shout. “Go back!”

He keeps rowing toward shore.

“You can't leave them!”

“I'll return myself. But four in this boat—we can't do it!”

“There won't be time!”

“I'm bringing you in.”

“You can't, not now!”

“You need to go for help. I'll go back for them.”

“No! Go back now!”

But he rows on. I grip the gunwale, straining to see the two heads out in the middle of the lake by the canoe, but seeing only one.

“Go back, please. Turn around.” The words shred like prayer. “Please.”

We strike the dock. I jump out and push him off again. He starts to row into the storm, leaning into the oars, long strong pulls through the rough water.

“Go, Georgia,” he shouts back. “Go!” I run up the hill.

My heart is in my throat as I reach the farmhouse, panicked, shouting, my soaked clothes pouring puddles on the floor.

Elizabeth brings me blankets as Agnes phones for help and the men flood down the hill toward shore.

I watch from the porch, gripping the rail. Stieglitz has reached the capsized canoe. He grabs hold of the boy still clinging there—that pale arm I'd seen—the little rowboat tips and sways, but he braces himself and hauls that boy with one pull into the boat.

“They're going to be fine,” Elizabeth says, coming to stand beside me. She presses a cup of hot tea into my hands. “Others are headed out now.”

“There was another boy,” I say.

“They'll find him.” Elizabeth brings her arm around me. Stieglitz is rowing again, circling the canoe, looking.

They don't find the boy. A week later, a hunter finds a coat near the shore up the lake tangled in tree roots.

“We need to put this behind us,” Stieglitz says to me when we hear the news. “We could not have saved him.”

The others have gone to bed. It's a warm night. Stars flood the sky.

“I wish we'd tried,” I say.

A deep silence falls.

“He was gone the moment the canoe tipped,” he says. “Even rowing back, I knew.” He is looking away across the lake, the dark mass of the island floating in the silver water.

“It was probably the right choice,” I say.

“There was no choice.”

“I'm not blaming you.”

He looks at me then, sorrow so blunt it takes my breath.

M
ID-
S
EPTEMBER, AFTER MOST
of them are gone, I come upon Hedwig in the upstairs hall. She is on her knees. She gapes at me. I try to help her up, an arm thrashes, her voice slurred, she stares through my face as if I am the door she is reaching for. Then her hand drops, and she slumps, the full weight of her pitching to one side.

I cry for help. Stieglitz calls back to me from the other end of the house. A team of doctors swoop to the Hill. She is only just stirring when they bear her away. He weeps when we receive the call from Lee. A stroke. She will recover. To a certain extent.

I hold him, late into the next morning. We take long walks as the leaves burn down into their autumn fire. He photographs lit raindrops on the apple tree. Like tears, he says.

I notice he seems anxious about my work, about what I am doing and not doing, what I have left to learn. Light ripples of tension pass through me when he wanders into the shanty as I am painting. Together, we look over my Apple series. My
Red Maples.
My
Tree with Cut Limb.
Everything I made this summer when the house was bustling seems slightly lackluster, truncated.

“These don't seem to have the life of my earlier work,” I say.

“It will come,” he says.

But it's hard not to feel the dark current of despair running through his hand into mine as we walk to the post office in town, or sit together in the kitchen in the morning.

“
Y
OU WOULD HAVE
to choose,” he says to me out of the blue one day. It's late fall. The rest of them are gone. I'm washing dishes in the sink.

“Choose?” I say.

“Between a child and your art. You do realize this, don't you?”

“No,” I say, rinsing a plate, watching the clean water drain off its face.

“I shouldn't have brought it up.” He takes the plate from my hand and rubs the towel over it, grinding it so it squeaks.

“You are the one with too much on your mind,” I say lightly. “I could manage a child quite well.”

“Well, it's not the time to make the decision.”

“I'm not the one who brought it up.”

He takes the two knives I've just handed him. I notice their thin metallic surfaces, light blinks off them.

I drop the bowl I am holding into the dishpan. Water sprays up, soaking us.

“You meant to do that!” he says, stepping back.

“Did I?”

He reaches for my hands to dry them with the dish towel, but I grab the waist of his trousers, push him back against the sink, and press my thigh between his legs.

“You're sopping wet,” he says.

“I'm sick of this,” I say, “the moroseness, the glumness, it's all such a waste of my time.”

“That's not kind.”

“No one can undo what's done. Not even you.” I unzip his trousers. I touch him, and he smiles.

“Finally,” I say. “A smile.”

He is hard in my hand.

My blouse is spattered with water. He touches my nipples through the cotton, he twists one as I stroke him back and forth. He touches my breasts, then slides his hand under the waist of my skirt, pushing it down my hips until it slips off, his hand around my backside, his fingers working into me.

“Everything's wet,” he says.

His fingers push deeper into me, softly at first, then not.

“I want you,” I say.

“Hard over the sink?” His voice low, an edge near my ear. “From behind on the table? Or straddling a chair?” His hand underneath me now, lifting me up, leaning me back onto the table, that sharp quick rush of him sliding inside me.

“I won't choose,” I say.

He presses my hands over my head. A candlestick knocks over, rolls to the floor. “You have to choose.” His teeth graze my neck.

“I want it all.”