“Oh, Georgie, I’ve always thought you were a poor match. Arthur is good-looking and intelligent, but he’s terribly straight and prim and proper, and you don’t give a fig what others think!”
I laughed, but of course Dorothy was right. Maybe Arthur and I had never had much in common.
Since the declaration of war on Germany, the pulse of New York was beating even faster. There were patriotic rallies and speeches and cheering crowds everywhere. A glaring Uncle Sam pointed a fierce finger from posters plastered on walls and fences and declared I Want YOU for U.S. Army. The wild enthusiasm for the war made me uneasy. We’d elected a president who promised peace, and the mood had now swung dramatically in the opposite direction. I’d learned from Ida that Alexius had gone to the officers’ training camp in Fort Sheridan, Illinois, and was awaiting orders to be shipped out to France.
Mr. Stieglitz arranged a Decoration Day outing to Coney Island with two of his friends—an inventor named Henry Gaisman, who had developed a camera that allowed the photographer to make notes on the negative, and a very handsome young photographer, Paul Strand. We strolled the boardwalk, taking in the sights—all those people in black bathing suits, packed tight as grains of sand on the beach, and the midway jangling with player pianos and penny arcades and barkers luring customers to try the ring toss or the high striker to “win a Kewpie doll for the little lady!” All three of my companions were opposed to America’s entry into the war, but there was no getting away from it. When we bought franks with sauerkraut from a cart, the owner complained bitterly that nobody wanted to eat German food and he would have to sell his cart.
Mr. Stieglitz thought Paul Strand was enormously talented, and after our Coney Island excursion he showed me some of Paul’s photographs. Paul was interested in shapes and unexpected angles, and he’d taken extraordinary pictures of ordinary objects viewed from an unusual perspective—stacks of bowls, for instance, and chair rungs and things I’d never imagined could be the subject of such beautiful pictures. The last edition of Mr. Stieglitz’s publication 291 was devoted entirely to Paul’s work.
But there was more to it than just the striking pictures. I could not stop thinking about Paul. I saw that look in his eyes, and I knew what it meant. I had fallen for him almost instantly, and it was clear that he had fallen for me just as fast. The physical attraction was powerful—I wanted to touch him, to kiss him hard, to tell him exactly how I felt. But I did not. My head and my heart were roiling with confusing feelings, desire pulling me in first one direction and then another—to Ted Reid in Texas, who wanted me to go away with him (and I had nearly agreed!); to Arthur, who, for reasons that I could not explain, kept a strong hold on my emotions; to Mr. Stieglitz, who understood more than anyone what I was trying to accomplish with my art; and now to this handsome, charming, talented photographer, Paul Strand! It was exhilarating and exciting, having these four men drawn to me—and my being drawn, in different ways and for different reasons, to each of them.
After ten days in New York—I barely slept at all—I said goodbye to Paul and to Mr. Stieglitz. There was no further conversation with Arthur. I boarded the westbound train, grateful for the long journey across the country to give me time to refocus my thoughts where they belonged—on my art.
Before I left New York, I wired Alexius, who was stationed at Fort Sheridan, asking if he could meet my train in Chicago during the one-hour layover.
It was a shock to see him in his uniform, standing on the station platform, tall and fine-looking and beaming proudly. We found a lunchroom in Union Station and ordered pie and coffee. I could not get over how much he’d changed since I had last seen him, as he’d been leaving for Wisconsin to study engineering and I’d been leaving to teach in Amarillo. As a boy he had been lighthearted and fun-loving. He always seemed like a large wind when he entered the house, but now he was sober and serious as he talked about the war, and how important it was to fight it. We hardly knew each other.
“It’s my duty to serve my country,” Alexius said earnestly. “I hope to be among the first to sail for France, probably within a month.”
“Alexius—” I began, but I could not continue.
“Georgie, I don’t expect to come back. I’m prepared to die.” He reached across the table, and I gripped his hand.
I stared at him with a lump in my throat that I could not swallow. I heard my train being announced; I let go of his hand and stood up to leave. He hugged me hard, and I rushed away with my eyes filled with tears.
As the train rumbled across the plains, I had another day and a night to think about this war. I had never been much interested in politics, but it was impossible—and immoral, I now saw—to ignore what was happening. I already knew where Anita Pollitzer stood on the subject: in her long letters she had written that she was a committed pacifist and was working hard for women’s suffrage. Once women have the right to vote, she said, they will also be opposed to war.
Mr. Stieglitz had argued that the main reason for declaring war on Germany had less to do with saving democracy than with reaping big profits for big business. It was hard for him to see Germany headed in such a wrong direction. Paul Strand was also philosophically opposed to the war and undecided about whether to enlist.
After spending that hour with Alexius—so patriotic, so sure it was the right thing to do—I could see both sides. I thought it was necessary to choose one side or the other, but I wavered, unable to make up my mind as to where I stood. I agreed, intellectually, that fighting the aggressors was a necessity, but I couldn’t square that need with basic Christian beliefs.
Back in Canyon, I saw no indecision or wavering: war fever had infected Texas. Food will win the war, President Wilson told the country, and to show their patriotism Texans planted war gardens and observed Meatless Mondays and Wheatless Wednesdays. As I understood it, we were to conserve food on the home front so that farmers could send more to the troops and our hungry allies overseas. It wasn’t easy to grow anything in the Panhandle—this was ranching country, not farmland—but my friend Leah Harris, who taught home economics at the college, organized classes for housewives, to teach them how to can the beans and okra they’d grown in their war gardens. “If they don’t do it right, they’ll poison their whole family,” she said.
The Texas heat was exhausting, but I taught my summer courses and continued working in watercolor, and in spite of everything I was more productive than I’d ever been. At the end of the summer I mailed off a bundle of my new paintings to Mr. Stieglitz. There were quite a lot of them, and I was sure they were the best work I had ever done. Even though 291 no longer existed and my paintings would not be shown, I needed his response to my work. And he gave it freely, writing to me almost daily. Those letters were a lifeline, my connection to the art world in New York.
Claudie had finished her first year at the college and was mad to get out of Canyon before she started the fall term. It was her idea to take a trip to the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, and I agreed. Just before we left, we learned that heavy rains had caused flooding—either there was not enough rain in the Southwest or there was too much—and railroad bridges had been washed out between Amarillo and Denver. We decided to go around the flooding, taking a train west to Albuquerque. Then we made our way north through New Mexico and Colorado, riding over rutted roads, sleeping in log cabins, tramping for miles every day. I painted watercolors of the snowcapped Sangre de Cristo Mountains and deep pine forests and a church bell in a small Colorado town.
On the way south again, we stopped in the quaint village of Santa Fe, with its fascinating mix of eccentric artists in cafés and Indians and local farmers and ranchers in the dusty streets. I fell in love with the houses built of adobe bricks that had been made of mud and straw and dried in the sun. It felt as strange and mysterious as a foreign country. We were there for only a few days, but that was long enough for the clear light and the landscape to leave their mark on me.
“I’m coming back here someday,�
� I told Claudie as our train rumbled eastward toward the Panhandle. “I don’t know when, but I know in my bones that I will.”
24
Canyon, Texas—Fall 1917
THE JOB WAITED FOR ME IN CANYON WHEN Claudie and I got back, but I felt I no longer belonged there. Suddenly, Texas was the last place I wanted to be. I had painted through the spring and summer, and I knew that my work was better—bolder, more abstract—than anything I’d done before. But now I felt off-center, mixed up. For the three months of the fall I did no painting—the longest time I had not worked in three or four years.
I’d come back to a pile of letters from Paul Strand. He and I were writing often, and I confided to him how I felt—unbalanced, unable to get my feet on the ground. I told Paul, I’m in the middle of a bad dream. There’s nobody I can talk to.
It was not strictly true that I had no one to talk to. There was Claudie, starting her second year in college, but she seemed as caught up as everyone else in war fever. And Ted Reid was there, in his senior year, and although we no longer worked together on stage sets for the drama club, I saw him nearly every day. He claimed that he wanted to marry me. I laughed and told him it was impossible, but sometimes I did wonder what that might be like, living with somebody. He kept insisting, but I kept saying no.
Some of our boys from the college were enlisting. The administration promised students that if they weren’t already called up by the draft—it had been instituted in May—they could skip the last months of the school year and still graduate.
I advised Ted and my other students to do just the opposite. “Finish out the school year and then enlist. The war will still be going on then.”
I worried that they didn’t know what they were getting into, and I suggested that the college offer a course on the political causes of the war, so that young men would understand why they were risking their lives. The boys in Canyon seemed to have romantic notions of war, notions uninformed by reports of mustard gas and trenches and bombs and landmines. Alexius had understood what it would be like—he knew that he might die—but he had wished to go, and he had gotten his wish. It sickened me to think of it, my brother in France.
The months of fall dragged by. The enthusiasm of the year before had evaporated. I couldn’t paint, and I could barely find the energy to teach my classes. In December it got worse: Claudie left to do her required student teaching in the tiny town of Spur, one hundred fifty miles from Canyon over rough dirt roads. I missed her steady companionship more than I had imagined.
In the months since America had entered the war, hatred of all things German had been growing throughout Texas. Amarillo canceled a concert that included a Beethoven symphony. Professors were not allowed to assign Goethe’s poetry or a Mozart sonata. Anyone with a German-sounding name was suspect, and there were plenty of them in towns like Boerne, New Braunfels, and Muenster, where hundreds of Germans had settled long before anyone in Canyon was born. There were stories of beatings and violence against the descendants of those early immigrants, and that disgusted me.
When I saw the display of Christmas cards with ugly, anti-German messages, I confronted the shopkeeper. “Those are such anti-Christian sentiments,” I said. “Whatever happened to ‘Peace on Earth’?”
The shopkeeper grew agitated. “Lady, I’ve heard about you,” he sputtered. “I know all about your kind—sympathizing with the enemy! Telling our boys not to join up! Germany should be wiped off the face of the earth, and all those damned Germans with it!”
He wasn’t just sputtering, he was roaring, and I left the shop. He kept selling those awful cards, and the pious souls who went to church every Sunday morning probably kept buying them. After that encounter, everyone in town knew that the art teacher was no patriot and might even be subversive. An editorial in the local newspaper reminded the people of Canyon that the Espionage Act, passed by Congress in June, made it a federal offense to be critical of the war.
I tried to ignore the ill feelings boiling up around me, but I didn’t fit in, and we—my supporters as well as my enemies—all knew it.
By the beginning of 1918 I felt entirely depleted, barely able to get to my classes. The temperature in the Panhandle dropped below zero. A relentless wind tore through my clothes. Thanks to the war, there was a shortage of coal, and the college buildings were like iceboxes. I stuffed newspaper in the front of my shirtwaist to block the wind.
Ted Reid, now halfway through his senior year, was the one bright spot in those dark days. He borrowed his older brother’s auto, and we went on long drives together. Ted had matured in the past year, grown more serious, more focused. We still shared our love of the land, the wide-open spaces, but he no longer tried to convince me to go away with him.
One night when we were taking a walk—it was bitterly cold, but there was a beautiful moon—Ted told me the news: he and two other boys had signed up with the Air Service Signal Corps. He would not wait to get his degree before he left.
“I want to learn to fly,” he told me. “I think this war is going to be fought in the air.”
“You’re making a mistake,” I said, but there was no point in arguing with him. The deed was done.
Ted kissed me passionately when we got back to the Shirleys’, and we said good night.
Over the next few days I heard nothing from him, which was unusual. I sent him a note, but he did not reply. Was he upset by what I’d said? There had been no sign of that; he’d kissed me as fervently as ever. I tried again—a message to his home—but again there was no reply. Finally I swallowed my pride and knocked on his door. No one answered, although I was sure I’d seen a curtain move a little, as though someone had peeked out.
It was not just Ted who vanished; it seemed that the entire community was no longer speaking to me. Patriotism had been at a fever pitch for months, and in the minds of many I was a traitor for advising Ted and other boys not to enlist before they had finished their education. It was from one of those boys—Johnny Miller—that I finally learned, several months later, what had happened.
Ted and I had been seen alone together, Johnny said, and although our behavior in public was proper, I was a teacher and Ted was a student, and faculty members were not permitted to socialize with their students—I’d been chastised for that the previous year. Even worse was that I was so much older: I had observed my thirtieth birthday in November, and Ted was only twenty-one. A delegation of faculty ladies had decided that I was an immoral woman, and they had taken it upon themselves to call on Ted and inform him that if he continued to see Miss O’Keeffe, he would not receive a diploma or a degree. And so Ted had dropped out of my life—to protect me, Johnny said.
I was shocked, nearly speechless. “But why didn’t Ted tell me they made that threat?”
“Because he knew it would rile you,” Johnny said. “He was afraid you’d give the ladies a piece of your mind, and probably get yourself thrown out of your job. And we had a pretty good idea they were mad at you for the other reason.”
“The ‘other reason’?”
“That you advised us not to run off and join up right away but to wait until the end of the term.”
I was so angry and hurt and frustrated that I sat down and cried. Poor Johnny was so embarrassed that he probably wished he’d not only kept his mouth shut but avoided me altogether, like everyone else.
I fell ill with a throat infection, and the bitter weather and my feelings of isolation made it worse. Too sick to teach, I had to cancel my classes. When three weeks passed and my health hadn’t improved, I asked the college to grant me a leave of absence and hire a replacement until I recovered. I had not felt so weak since the time I had nearly died from typhoid fever.
I described my misery in letters to Mr. Stieglitz and also to Paul, who sent me packet after packet of his photographs. I was strongly drawn to his art, so bold and original, with his use of geometric shapes and patterns to create abstract images. And the physical attraction I had felt when I met him in
New York was still strong.
Mr. Stieglitz wrote nearly every day. Anxious in the beginning and then growing almost desperate, he ordered me to come to New York at once. He would see that I got proper care, which he was sure I would not receive in Texas.
I could see that he was deeply worried about me, and I appreciated his concern, but I had no thought of following his orders and going to New York. Being too ill to travel so far was only part of my hesitation. I knew Mr. Stieglitz well through our letters—we understood each other, we had the same vocabulary—but I recognized that these things were not the same as knowing someone in person and actually talking.
There were other factors, too. Mr. Stieglitz was old enough to be my father. And he was married.
I had been able to resist Mr. Stieglitz’s entreaties, but then a letter came from his niece, Elizabeth, offering me the use of her New York studio, and I found myself considering the offer seriously. My life in Canyon had become almost unbearable. Unable to sleep one night, I climbed out of bed and wrote to Elizabeth. If she were in my shoes, I asked, would she leave these narrow-minded people, or would she stay and fight? She wrote back that of course it had to be my decision.
At the same time that Mr. Stieglitz was fretting about me, Paul was fretting about Mr. Stieglitz. Our dear friend has become deeply depressed since the closing of 291, Paul wrote. It would be the best thing in the world for both of you if you came to New York.
Still, I was unable to make any sort of decision. I couldn’t teach, I couldn’t paint, I couldn’t think straight.
Help came from another, unexpected source: Leah Harris. One of my few close friends in Canyon, Leah had been diagnosed with consumption. She had resigned her position and gone home to Waring, Texas, not far from San Antonio, to rest and recover. When I wrote to her in a very dark mood, explaining that I had been ill and was having a devil of a time recovering, she responded immediately.
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