White-haired and courtly, Dr. Hunter sat by my bedside and asked me questions that I struggled to answer. He went downstairs to talk to Mama, and I drifted off again into feverish sleep. Later, when I woke up, my mother was sitting quietly beside me with a basket of mending.
“The doctor has diagnosed typhoid fever—there are many cases of it around here just now. It comes from dirty water or contaminated food, and it can be very dangerous. He says there’s nothing to be done but let the ailment run its course.”
“Yes,” I said, too weak to ask how long letting it run its course was going to take.
I remember almost nothing about the days that followed. I slept and slept. I was too weak to get out of bed. My fever raged, and I endured dreadful dreams that tormented me both awake and sleeping. “She’s delirious,” I heard Mama whisper when Papa came. I didn’t know if he stayed for minutes or hours. They coaxed me to take sips of water, tried to tempt me to taste a little of this or that. I turned my head away.
The doctor visited often to listen to my chest.
“How long have I been ill?” I mustered enough strength to ask Mama after he’d gone.
“Three weeks.”
“How much longer will it go on?”
“We don’t know.”
Am I going to die? I was afraid to ask her that.
When I first got sick, my fever was low in the mornings, rising higher and higher as the hours passed, but now it stayed high all the time. I felt like I was burning up. Red spots appeared on my stomach.
My sisters were not allowed into my room and peered at me from the doorway with big, worried eyes.
My hair began to fall out. “I think it would be better if I cut off your braid,” Mama said, and I was too weak, too exhausted, to argue. She helped me to roll onto my side, and I heard the scissors and felt the tug. Tears rolled down my cheek and onto the pillow. She laid the braid on the table by the bed, like a dead thing, and then one day she took it away. Even the short hair that was left came out, fistfuls at a time. Soon I would be bald and ugly as a baby bird. Auntie sat close by, crocheting a lace cap to cover my naked head.
Then one day the fever didn’t climb quite so high, and the next day it was lower, and the day after that, lower still. The bedroom, stifling in summer, felt a little cooler. When I was able to sit up for a few minutes, Mama urged me to try to stand. My legs were too weak to hold me. My arms were thin as matchsticks. I refused to look in the mirror.
There was no question of going back to Chicago that fall. Francis left for Boston in September. I felt even worse when Ida and Nita were sent to Chatham. I couldn’t hide how much I hated being left behind. They sent cheerful letters about how Mrs. Willis had welcomed them at my old school. They discovered Susan Young, who had visited us the summer we rented the house on the York River. Susan had returned for an extra year and taken up painting on porcelain, and they’d all become close friends. I envied my sisters so much I wept.
The most I could do was shuffle from my bed to a hammock on the verandah. At last there was a bit of breeze. A whole summer was lost, gone forever.
Only the three youngest O’Keeffes—Alexius, Catherine, and Claudie—were still at home. Alexius was enrolled at the academy at William and Mary, and the girls had set up a classroom in our vast attic and studied up there with a hired tutor. As I grew stronger, I took over some of their lessons, and the tutor came to Wheatlands just three days a week, then two, and then not at all. I was glad to be able to save my parents some money, because it was obvious by then that they were in dire need of it. They never spoke of it, but it must have been a terrible strain to continue to provide a good education for six of their children.
Papa’s businesses were barely surviving. He’d never been able to overcome the fact that we were outsiders. For the past year Mama had been baking pies and cakes and bread to make ends meet. Now she decided to open our home to table boarders, students from the College of William and Mary who came to Wheatlands for their meals.
“I’m cooking for seven anyway,” she said with a shrug. “May as well prepare meals for a dozen or so and bring in a few dollars.”
How humiliated she must have felt! And how weary with all the extra work! She was up long before sunrise, cooking breakfast, sending half a dozen young men off with box lunches, and welcoming them back at suppertime for another big meal. Between meals, she baked. I did what I could.
The baking and the tutoring didn’t leave me much time or energy, but I offered to help Miss Murphy, who ran a private kindergarten nearby, and took the children for afternoon walks. I tried to teach them how to see, pointing out flowers and clouds, as Miss Fellers with her yellow stockings and the violets on her hat had once taught me. I didn’t earn any money, but I did enjoy watching those eager young faces light up at each new discovery—or not. Some of the children were more interested in creating mischief than in observing nature. There were days when I wondered if I’d do well as a teacher, if I had to deal with resistant young students.
Fall elided into winter, a weak imitation of the brutal winters we’d endured in Wisconsin and Chicago, and there were fewer walks with the children. I started painting again, and tried very hard not to think about the world I was missing, the life I didn’t have.
Then spring came, and I felt completely well again, but I’d made no friends. At nineteen I had almost nothing in common with other girls my age in Williamsburg, Southern belles interested in clothes and boys and parties even more intensely than the girls at Chatham had been.
In April I made the acquaintance of Jetta Thorpe, whose mother regularly ordered Mama’s cakes to serve at the luncheons she gave every Thursday. When I delivered a cake to their house, Jetta invited me to stay and visit. We sat on a swing on the Thorpes’ verandah, surrounded by lilacs and dogwood, and the maid served us glasses of sweet tea.
“You’re so different from the rest of us,” Jetta said, after we’d talked awhile. “You cut your hair short when everybody else’s is long, and your clothes are so … so unusual. I guess that’s the way artists dress up north—is that true?”
“No, it’s just the way I dress. And I’ll probably braid my hair when it gets longer.” My hair was growing back, a mass of short curls, and I knew how odd I must look to her.
Then Jetta surprised me and said she was having a dance, and would I like to come? I surprised myself and accepted.
I had never been invited to a party in Williamsburg, and I didn’t own a proper party frock. I’d worn a plain skirt and shirtwaist to dances at Chatham on the off months when I wasn’t required to be one of the “boys,” or borrowed one of Alice’s dresses for special occasions. I found an old dress that Nita hadn’t taken to Chatham with her, much too big for me now that I’d gotten so thin, and Auntie helped me take in the seams and darts until it fit.
The Thorpes’ house was decorated with vases of peonies and candles in silver candelabra. Mama had worn herself out baking dozens of little tarts, and Auntie and I finished Mrs. Thorpe’s order for platters of tiny sandwiches cut into triangles and diamonds. Catherine proudly made three trips to deliver everything while I dressed for the party. Mama lent me a pair of fancy shoes someone had passed on to her—they hurt so much, I don’t know how she could bear them—and let me wear her emerald earrings.
Two hours later, uniformed maids passed the platters of sandwiches and served strawberry punch from a crystal bowl. Hired musicians played waltzes, and perspiring young men in formal dress steered me around the polished dance floor. Sumner Something-or-Other zealously described his interest in fox hunting in Albemarle County. Philip What’s-His-Name lectured me passionately on the novels of Zola. My duty was simply to nod and smile and not notice when they stepped on my aching feet or when they couldn’t talk and keep time. It was all exactly the way we’d practiced at Chatham. And just about as dull.
O’Keeffe & Sons Feed & Grain officially closed its doors early in the summer. Francis came home from Boston, and he and Papa laun
ched a new business: making hollow building blocks out of concrete they’d bought cheaply and piles of clamshells that were everywhere for the taking. The Williamsburg newspaper announced the opening of O’Keeffe & Sons Building Materials. Lots of curious visitors showed up, but hardly any paying customers.
Next, Papa made the painful decision to sell the rambling Wheatlands house, except for a small piece of land along the road, and move the family into a much smaller house. I helped Mama pack up our belongings. There wasn’t much. After four years, the house was still mostly unfurnished. It had always had an empty feeling. Papa hadn’t had enough cash to afford the divans and chairs or the piano that Mama wanted.
The summer dragged by. I befriended some of the children in our new neighborhood and persuaded a few to pose for me. The mother of a little girl named Letty asked me to give the child painting lessons, but I grew frustrated with Letty’s lack of talent and her unwillingness to do anything but waste a sheet of paper with uninspired scribbles and muddy colors. Lessons ended after the third session—another reminder that I wasn’t suited to teaching young children.
I tried to figure out what to do. My course of study at the Art Institute was supposed to cover two years, the first year for general study and the second to earn a teaching certificate. Papa had been hard-pressed to pay for that first year; a second year was impossible. I wondered if I could find a school that would hire me for a teaching position without a second year of training. I had to do something to earn money, and I didn’t know where to start.
“It won’t hurt to ask one of your teachers at the Art Institute to write a recommendation for you,” Mama said.
I followed her advice and wrote to Mr. Vanderpoel. It took me three tries to write a letter I thought was good enough to send—without misspellings.
His reply came neatly typed on Art Institute stationery: Miss O’Keeffe is a young lady of attractive personality, and I feel that she will be very successful as a teacher of drawing.
I was elated! To help me figure out the next step, I wrote to Mrs. Willis.
I trust that you have recovered from your dreadful illness and are again at your easel as productively as ever, she responded. I understand your urgency in wishing to obtain a teaching position, but you are correct in assuming that you must obtain the proper credentials. I wish to suggest that you consider enrolling at the Art Students League in New York City. It is known to be the most advanced art school in the country. I studied there myself. Although you will not earn a teaching certificate, you will receive excellent training and can perhaps then go elsewhere to obtain the certification. Please let me know if I can assist you in any way.
I showed the letter to Mama. Looking completely exhausted, she sank onto a chair to read it.
“We have a little left from selling Wheatlands. Perhaps we can manage somehow,” she said, sighing. “But only for a year, Georgie. No more than that.”
A year! I’ll have that—a year! I wouldn’t have the credentials I needed for teaching art, but I would be doing art, and that was what mattered most.
13
New York—1907
NEW YORK WAS MORE CROWDED THAN CHICAGO—was more of everything—and the Art Students League was a handsome building right in the middle of it, on West Fifty-Seventh Street between Broadway and Seventh Avenue. Across the street was Carnegie Hall, where great symphony orchestras played. But there was no Aunt Ollie, no Uncle Charley, to give me practical advice or a place to live. From the minute I stepped off the train in this completely strange and bewildering new city, I wondered how I would ever survive here. I was on my own.
While I was registering for classes, I made the acquaintance of a girl as poor as I was, Florence Cooney, and we decided to rent a place together. Flo found a cheap room in a rundown old brownstone only two blocks away. It was small, but I was sure we could make do. We bought a hotplate and kept a few things cool on the fire escape. I set a pot of bright red geraniums out there, too.
The League had no required courses; I could take whatever I wanted and pay for it monthly. The first class I signed up for was taught by Mr. Luis Mora, who had studied in Europe and particularly admired the paintings of Velázquez and other Spanish old masters. I learned from him to apply a base of brilliant white paint to the canvas before I began. Layers of color eventually covered the base, but I found ways to let some of the white show, as though white itself was a color, something I’d discovered when I was a high school student in Madison and learned how to use the white of the paper in a watercolor. Every morning I attended a life drawing class. Nearly nude bodies were no longer an embarrassment, although drawing them well was still a challenge. I was not fond of sour-faced Kenyon Cox, who taught the anatomy class and never had a kind word to say about anyone’s work.
My favorite was William Merritt Chase. With his perfumed beard and brushy whiskers, he made a dramatic entrance to his afternoon still life class, nattily dressed in a pin-striped suit, silk necktie and jeweled stickpin, top hat, and silver-headed walking stick, a black cape swirling behind him. His pince-nez dangled on a black ribbon. He had a reputation in Europe as well as here as a painter of portraits and still lifes, but he was also a respected teacher. At the start of each class he charged one of us with rearranging bottles and bowls of fruit on a length of cloth draped on a table. We were expected to complete a new painting every day, right over the painting we’d done in the previous session, until the layers of paint were too thick to add any more.
Mr. Chase moved from one student to the next, encouraging and suggesting. “Don’t waste time making little sketches and fussing with details. Be bold!” he commanded. “Seek the bigger picture and do it quickly. Don’t be afraid to fail! Simply paint and paint and paint! This is how the French Impressionists used to work. Now let’s see what you can do.”
It was a new beginning, and a new part of my life started to unfold. I was becoming bolder in my painting—and making friends, lots of them. I told them that everyone called me Patsy, which wasn’t really true, because it was just Mattie, who’d given me the nickname in Chicago. Every boy I met wanted to run his fingers through my short curls. Someone was always showing up and saying, “We’re going out dancing, Patsy, and you must come!” They hired street musicians to come into the League building and play, and we’d shove the easels out of the way and dance. I’d never had so much fun!
During my first weeks in New York I went dancing whenever I could, but I soon discovered that if I danced all night I couldn’t paint for the next three days.
I began to ask myself, “If I do this, will I be able to do that?” I bought a notebook and printed YES at the top of one page and NO on the other. Every time I had to choose between being popular and being a serious artist, I asked myself which page I would put it on. That was how I learned to say no. I might never again have a chance to become the artist I believed I was destined to be. I had to seize it.
But it wasn’t always easy to follow through after I’d made that choice. Other students wanted me to model for them. I could earn a dollar for a four-hour pose, and I needed the money badly. Eugene Speicher, an older student everybody admired, often asked me to pose, and I always refused because that meant time away from my classes. Gene was not used to hearing no.
One morning as I was rushing up the stairs to my life class, he loomed above me. He was very tall and muscular. When I moved to the left to evade him, he moved left, and when I stepped right, so did he.
“I won’t let you pass until you say you’ll pose for me, Patsy,” he said.
“I’m on my way to class!”
“I know you are, but it really doesn’t matter if you go to class or not,” Gene said, laughing, “because someday I’ll be a great painter, and you’ll be teaching art in a girls’ school somewhere.”
That infuriated me. How dare he! I shoved past him and stormed on up the stairs and down the hall to my life class. The model was about to take his place on the raised platform. I recognized him from ear
lier sessions—his body lacked any sort of definition, and he was unable to hold a pose for any length of time. What a bore! I made a quick and perhaps foolish decision: I turned around and walked out.
Gene offered a smug little smile when I showed up at his studio in the basement. “Changed your mind, did you, Patsy?”
“Yes. But just this once.”
He lifted a half-finished painting from the easel and reached for a new canvas. It was already prepared, as though he knew I’d give in. “All right, then. Sit there, your hands in your lap. And move your head just a bit to the left. Yes—perfect.”
He worked quickly. We stopped once for tea and fruit and cheese and then continued through the afternoon. He would not let me look at the canvas until he was finished, and when I did, I was surprised. He had captured something about me that I didn’t know I had—a quiet self-assuredness.
“I’ll give you this one, Patsy, and you may keep it, but only if you give me your word that you’ll pose for me again.”
I promised. I liked the portrait very much, and I decided that I liked Gene after all.
Early in January I returned to Gene’s studio. While I was sitting for this second portrait, several students burst in. “We’re going to see some drawings by that French sculptor, Rodin,” one explained. “The photographer Alfred Stieglitz is showing them at his gallery. Mr. Henri says they’re trash and nonsense, that Rodin must have drawn them with his eyes shut. But he told us to go see what it’s all about. You must come with us!”
Gene and I agreed to join the group. Robert Henri was one of our most influential teachers; everyone did as he said. It was a snowy, blustery day, but we were in a gay mood as we hurried down Fifth Avenue to Thirty-First Street and the gallery known as 291. An ancient elevator creaked and groaned up to the fifth floor of an old mansion, and we spilled out into a small room with drawings hung on all four walls.
Girl with Brush and Canvas Page 10