The Last Summer of the World

by Emily Mitchell

  Mildred Aldrich sat on a chair just to one side of the front entrance; at her feet was a small brown valise. She stood when she saw him. My goodness, he saw her mouth silently. Of all the … For a moment, he pictured the scene as it might have appeared from above, the three of them frozen in place with startled expressions on their faces, watching, waiting to see what the others would do. How strange it would look! The meaning of the encounter wholly invisible unless you knew its past, the future it implied. If you were to see a photograph of this, everything that mattered would be hidden.

  What happened was that Mildred turned and, without a word to either of them, went out the front doors into the street. Edward started to follow her, but he felt Marion’s hand on his shoulder restraining him.

  “Let her go. What would you say to her anyway?” she asked. Her voice was calm, and when he looked around, her face wore a resignation that was almost relief. He understood. The worst had happened: they had been discovered. There was nothing more that they could do to prevent it.

  “I can’t,” he said. “I have to try to talk to her, to explain.” He took the stairs two at a time and ran out into the street through the still-swinging door. He scanned the street and found her. She was at the corner about to climb into a taxi. As he reached her, the driver put a square brown case inside the trunk of the car for her and then came around to help Mildred inside.

  When she saw him, the expression on her face was one of acute annoyance.

  “Why,” she said, “did you tell me that Clara was wrong? Being lied to does not number among my preferred pastimes, Steichen.”

  “I didn’t lie. I …”

  She cut him off.

  “I was rather pleased with myself for finding the place you were staying from the brief description in your letter. I wondered why you hadn’t gotten in touch when you came to town. Amélie brought the case that Kate left for you. I came down here to give it to you, feeling like a real Good Samaritan. Now I feel like a fool. What am I supposed to say to Clara when I write to her?”

  The cabdriver coughed impatiently where he waited beside the car. Mildred sighed and climbed into the backseat. Edward came forward and stood in the way of the open door, so she could not pull it closed behind her.

  “Monsieur …” the driver objected.

  “It’s all right.” Mildred said. “We’ll only be speaking briefly.” The driver relented and stood back. Mildred looked up at Edward. Her stern face broke into sympathetic sadness.

  “None of us know where our feelings are going to take us,” she said. “Of all people, I should know that. If you think I condemn you, you are wrong. But you can’t expect me to say nothing to Clara about this. Now let me go.”

  He stood back and pushed the door closed beside her. Inside, she leaned forward to direct the driver and he watched the car pull out into traffic and drive away. It was only after it was already out of sight that he remembered that the case she had been carrying must have been the one that Kate had set aside for him when she left Voulangis. He had missed getting it from her. Now he might never get it.

  He walked to the hotel and climbed the steps, feeling heavy and defeated. Marion was waiting for him in their room. She was seated on the bed, holding her head in her hands. He stood in the doorway and watched her despairingly.

  “Oh, God. I did not want this to happen.”

  “Come in and close the door,” she said without looking up.

  “What should we do?” he said.

  “Nothing,” she said. “There is nothing we can do now.” She tossed her head back and held out her hands to him. He came and took them and sat down beside her. “We have one more week together,” she said. “I think, if we can, we should not waste it with worrying.”

  “Yes,” he said. “You are right. Of course, you are right.”

  He put his arms around her. She bent her head down so it was next to his chest.

  “I can hear your heart,” she said.

  The Little Galleries. New York, October 1914. Palladium print.

  “STAY HERE AS long as you like. I mean it. Don’t worry about the rent until you get on your feet.” Alfred is in one of his expansive moods as he opens the street door, ushers them through and shepherds them up the stairs into the small second-story apartment. He shows them through the rooms pointing out this and that detail or amenity—electric light everywhere! an icebox!—while Clara and Edward follow like sheep, numb and silent with exhaustion. They pass through the parlor, the dining room, the kitchen, and the tour ends in the large bedroom at the back where they can finally drop their bags and then collapse, Clara into an upholstered chair by the window and Edward on the edge of the bed.

  Their ship arrived at the piers on the west side of Manhattan around noon, and they stood on deck and watched the city come toward them across the water. The railings were crowded with people who, like them, had fled from the war in Europe, who all had about them an air of mute shock as though they still couldn’t quite believe what had happened. When the boat docked, they crowded down the gangway, blocking it as they struggled with trunks and cases and salvaged furnishings. The quay was packed with waiting friends and relatives. Clara scanned it and found Alfred, standing a little back. She waved when she saw him.

  They caught a cab across town to this building just a few blocks above Madison Square where Alfred has his Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession. There is an apartment over the gallery that Alfred also owns, and he has offered it to them, a wonderful act of generosity considering that they have almost no money and no immediate prospects for getting any. He has saved us, Edward said to her when the offer reached them by telegram in Marseilles. Alfred has saved us. Alfred and Emmy, she almost said, but decided that it was too much effort to correct him.

  At the moment, it turns out, Alfred and Emmy are having a certain amount of trouble in their marriage. It appears that Alfred has met a young woman named Georgia or Virginia O’Keeffe, something like that, a painter, and that she has quite taken over all his attention. He met her at a show in the gallery right downstairs from where they are now, and, immediately, she got in an argument with him about the relative merits of the drawings on display. That did it. He was instantly smitten.

  “You should see her works on paper! So powerful, so primal! You know, she came to that exhibition of Rodin’s drawings that you brought over from Paris, how many years ago is it now?”

  “Six,” Edward says. He raises a hand to massage his temples; Clara can see from his face that he is absolutely worn-out.

  “Yes, right. Six years,” Alfred says. “Has it really been that long? Anyway, we narrowly missed meeting on that occasion.” Mary and Kate are running through the apartment opening all the cupboards and closets and closing their doors again with a bang. Clara can hear their progress through the rooms, front to back, in a series of sharp, hard sounds: Bang! Bang-bang!

  “Girls! Please,” she calls. “Calm down. That’s enough noise.”

  They come in meekly and sit down on the side of the bed.

  “Thank you, girls,” Edward says. “Mama and Papa are very tired now and we need you to be quiet, all right?”

  Alfred is hovering beside the door, his excess of energy a jarring contrast to the room’s grown-up occupants. Edward turns to him and opens his hands in a gesture of supplication.

  “How can I ever thank you?” he says. “For this apartment, for all your help, everything.”

  “Oh, my goodness! Please. What do you think we would do? Let you starve on the streets while this place stood empty? No, that would have been unkind in the extreme.”

  “Well, still, we are all very grateful,” Clara puts in.

  “Yes,” says Edward, “very.” He reaches into his jacket for his cigarette case and offers it to Alfred, who takes a long white cylinder from it and says, “I suppose you’ll be looking for work when you get unpacked.”

  “Yes, of course. Do you know of any commissions going right now? Anyone who needs a portrai
t taken of themselves? Or their niece? Or their lapdog? Really, I will photograph anything that will sit still long enough—I’m not going to be picky.”

  Alfred purses his lips. “To be honest, there isn’t much right now,” he says. “People have gotten tightfisted because of the war. Even the rich are feeling the strain of all this uncertainty. Commissions have almost dried up and no one is buying art photographs.” He pauses to light his cigarette and inhale. He looks down at the skirting board, thinking, and then suddenly he brightens up: “You know what? I do need someone to take a series of pictures of the galleries downstairs for our records. I’ve been meaning to do it myself, but I’ve been so busy with the magazine and other things that I haven’t gotten around to it. You could do it, though, and I could pay you a commission. I mean, it would be completely dull work, no art to it whatsoever …”

  “My God, I couldn’t care less about that,” Edward says. “Right now, I just need work. Are you sure you don’t want to do it yourself and save the expense?”

  “No, no. As I said, I’m far too busy right now. And the money doesn’t matter in the slightest.”

  Clara feels a pang as her feelings are cut neatly in half by this generous offer. For on the one hand, it is so thoughtful and kind of Alfred to pay Edward for a service he could very well perform himself; he doesn’t really need these photographs very badly or he would have found the time to take them. He is, again, going out of his way to help them. This is the gruff manner in which he cares for the people whom he values: under his brusqueness, he is also kind.

  But on the other hand, when he says that the money doesn’t matter, Clara knows that the money in question does not come from him. Alfred has no wealth of his own. His money belongs to his wife, the woman whom he is openly flouting with a younger mistress, and whose company he has never cared for, as long as she can remember. He can spend her money on whatever he chooses: as her husband, her fortune is his. For years, Emmeline has effectively covered the running costs of Camera Work and has funded the exhibitions at 291 Fifth Avenue. Alfred has used what they have for worthy ends, certainly. But now he is facing a dilemma: leave his wife for a woman he loves who is as poor as he is and try to do without the generous support his projects have always had; or stay in his marriage and enjoy this ability to be casually magnanimous to people whom he deems deserving, like Edward and Clara.

  Edward takes only a moment to think through the offer before he says: “Well, if you are sure the pictures will help you, then of course I accept. When do you need me to start?”

  “When you are rested. You obviously need to have some time to recover from your journey, and when you are done with that, you must come and have some supper with me and O’Keeffe. I’m sure you will love her and she has so wanted to meet you. You’ll have so much to discuss—she studied with Chase before his death, you know, and you can see it in her work. Strong, American lines. A boldness which marks her out from other painters immediately.”

  Clara takes this as her cue.

  “Come along, girls. Let’s go and see about making up the beds so that you can take a nap.” She gestures for Mary and Kate to come with her as she goes to the door and, good girls, they stand up and follow her out. Edward and Alfred, Clara can tell, are about to get into one of their long discussions, and she has no energy to fight her way into it right now. She is not sure she would want to even if she were awake and well rested. She feels a weight land on her heart and press it down: nothing has changed. They have come through the fire of escaping from the war, the stark events that might have transformed them, and yet here, back in New York, the men are talking in the front room, just as they always did, and the invitation to dine with this woman who has so captivated Alfred was not issued to her, only to Edward.

  Through the journey, she kept herself inside herself. She kept herself suspended, held back, as she followed through the motions of life to which she was committed. She found that she and her husband had habits of caring that had built up through their years of marriage, and that she could fall back on these through the crisis. They had managed well together: changing trains in the chaos of war-scarred Paris, getting themselves and their daughters onto the boat at Marseilles, coping with the cramped quarters of a sea voyage in which every room was full to twice its capacity and people were sleeping in the dining rooms and on the decks. She had seen Edward’s relief to find that she was still as he had always depended on her to be: supporting him, supporting their children. But inside, she was withdrawn, waiting. She watched all that went on as though this life no longer belonged to her. She was weighing it up, deciding whether to reenter it or not. When they reached New York, she had still not made up her mind. Nothing he had done or said, no moment of clarity, had pushed her heart forward into certainty.

  She finds the airing closet next to the small side bedroom that the girls will be sharing and looks inside. There are sheets and blankets, and she takes some of these down to put on the bed inside. She remembers once declaring she would never do this again, and she almost smiles thinking of it. She can just make out snatches of the conversation from the bedroom:

  “ … Marion was with us until almost the end.”

  “Ah, the lovely Miss Beckett. She got out of France, I assume?”

  “Yes. She went to England.”

  “And will she be coming back to New York from there?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think that I will be hearing from her very soon.”

  “Why not?”

  “There was an incident before we left Voulangis … Clara did not cope very well with the pressures of our last month there. She became very emotional, very distraught. Anyway, I think that she would not look kindly on my receiving correspondence from Miss Beckett.”

  “But I thought they were great friends.”

  “So did I.”

  There is a pause in the conversation. Clara leans against a shelf in the cupboard. She feels the wood in a hard band across her forehead. So he does not think she coped well. He has no idea how well she has managed.

  “Well, I will find out where she is,” Alfred is saying. “Mercy and Arthur Carles—they will probably know.”

  “If you do …” Edward hesitates. “If you do get news of her, please, would you let me know what it is? I would like to be certain that she is well.”

  Listen to the yearning in his voice. He cannot disguise it. He is not trying to. Listen to his version of the events of the past few months. It is as though they have been living on different sides of the planet, not in the same house. In his story she was simply unbalanced and burdensome to deal with, and all the things that she had done to keep their family from falling apart he does not mention, he does not even seem to have noticed. Even now, he is longing for news of Marion.

  She stands and reaches for a set of sheets from the shelf in front of her, but even as she does so she finds that the apartment has shifted: it has become suddenly cramped and the air is so thin that it is hard to breathe. She hears laughter from the room where Alfred and Edward are. She feels her heart coming forward, beginning to decide.

  TWELVE

  August 1918

  THE LAST DAY before Edward left for Colombey-les-Belles, he and Marion decided to walk along the river. They were quieter than usual, not wanting to dwell on their impending separation, but also unable to ignore it.

  When they reached the place where the Boulevard du Palais crossed to the the Ile de la Cité, they stopped and leaned against the embankment wall, looking down at the water.

  “Will you get more leave before the winter?” Edward asked.

  “It depends on how the war goes,” she said. “If it continues to move east, then there will be less to do at the hospital.”

  “Will you come and see me?”

  “I will try. But I can’t come to Colombey. Too many people will know about it.” She stood up. “Shall we walk across the bridge?” He nodded, and they strolled across to the island, past St-Chapelle and the Palais de
Justice.

  “Well, maybe we could travel somewhere together. When the war is over.”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  He knew from her tone that she didn’t believe it, and when he thought about it, he didn’t either. But he went on anyway: “Where would you like to go? If we could …”

  “Greece,” she said quickly, joining in the make-believe. “I’ve never seen Athens or the islands.”

  “Well, we’ll go. As soon as there is an armistice. We’ll see the Acropolis, the Parthenon. We’ll take a ferry to the islands. Isadora Duncan has a house there that she could lend us.”

  “It sounds wonderful.”

  “Yes, it will be wonderful. Then we can come back to France and stay at Voulangis. I’ll hire François to replant the garden just the way it was before, and you can paint there. I can arrange for Mary to come over from New York when the school year is finished.”

  “Please.” Marion had shut her eyes and the expression on her face was pained. He had gone too far.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. They stood miserably looking at each other, feeling already a distance growing between them. He reached out for her hand, but she drew back and he felt a flare of anger at her: why make it worse than it had to be by pulling away now? He looked down at the pavement, disappointment seeping through him.

  “Just come and see me the next time you can,” he said.

  Marion nodded, biting her lip.

  THE NEXT DAY he went back to the war. With Barnes gone he was in charge of the deployment of the ever-growing number of observers and photo interpreters working near the front. They would come from the States, and he would see them when they first arrived, tired from the sea voyage but eager, sitting through the instruction that he knew could never be enough to make them ready. Many of the men who had flown reconnaissance in the Marne were reassigned to the training centers, so he saw them in his frequent travels through the Zone of Advance. Dawson had been promoted to captain. In September, he got news that Deveraux had been killed during a flight over Amiens. From time to time he heard of other deaths and promotions. He thought of the ones who had died often; they would come to him suddenly and vividly, appearing before his mind’s eye: Lutz singing Mozart; Marchand’s uneven walk. He knew that this was because, somewhere inside, he still did not really understand that they were dead.