The Wood Wife by Terri Windling (the false prince TXT) 📕

was the chance to finally have what Cooper had long denied her, the chance to really know him and his work.

She wished she could talk to Dora about this—it was a pity the other woman had become so uncomfortable when Maggie had broached the subject. But perhaps if Dora read Anna’s letters she would begin to understand what was happening here.

Maggie flipped through the letters once again, postmarked half a century before. Anna had met the young Maisie Tippetts at Cafe Jazz in Mexico City, a favorite haunt of European exiles, just down the street from her school. Maisie had introduced Anna to Cooper, confiding his romantic story to her: he’d fled from a French detention camp to New York, marrying a wealthy young socialite there; then he had fled to Mexico City to run from the disastrous marriage.

At Cafe Jazz, Anna found herself surrounded by artists she’d only read about before—including a group of women Surrealists who encouraged her desire to paint. In one short year she had gone from being a good Catholic girl in a well-to-do family, to living with Cooper, a married man, and moving in avant-garde circles. By the time Maisie left for New York and the steady correspondence between them began, Anna’s family had already disowned her—a situation she referred to with humor as dry and as sharp as the desert.

But scratch the surface of the bohemian young woman, and a proper Catholic schoolgirl still lay beneath. There was pain beneath the protective wit, and a desperate dependency on Cooper who was required, it seemed, to fill up the space where an entire extended family used to be. And yet to go back to her family, Anna had written Maisie with heartbreaking simplicity, would require that she give up painting. And that she could never do.

So many people lost family during the war that Anna Naverra did not consider her own loss to be exceptional. But her letters were tinged with unhappiness that never lifted during the rest of her brief life. Maggie’s picture of Naverra had always been of the strong-willed, fiery, creatively fecund woman that Davis Cooper’s reminiscences portrayed; and she was those things, but those qualities were increasingly cloaked by a veil of depression. By the time she and Cooper left Mexico City and settled here in the United States, she had turned her back on the rest of the world, retreating into her own private place of myth, symbolism, and dream.

September 9, 1947

Dearest M.,

I have had another visitation. You’ll laugh again at my ‘stories.’ Very well. You may call them my stories if you wish, but one day you’ll come west once again and then, my dear, you’ll see. I’ve been experimenting. It has been my theory that I have been creating these ethereal beings. Yes, how very arrogant of me. I am not God. Now I believe I merely create the shape they wear, like clothes, which they put on in deference for my modesty, not theirs. They have no modesty. They do not think like us. They are clearly amoral beings. I do not yet know where they fit in the heavenly hierarchy I was taught as a child. They are somewhere between us and the angels, I think. Or perhaps between us and el diablo.

Cooper’s cold has not gone away. That horrid man brought it here with him, that hard little journalist friend of Henry Miller’s, with a hard little heart in his hard little breast. He pestered Cooper for an interview and finally Cooper gave in to him. It was a mistake. Now he’s lost a whole week of work on Exile Songs. Ah, but the card from you has cheered us up. Sweet Maisie, you will still be welcome here even when we build a wall of sparkling quartz eight million, trillion, zillion feet tall to shut out the rest of the world.

• • •

October 23, 1947

Dearest M.,

My experiments continue, with intermittent success. I’ve learned I can paint these creatures now if I paint in a particular way, and that seems to bind them more securely to this earth—or at least to the forms they wear. When I walk in the hills I often see them. They seem to be growing more solid. But sometimes I am frightened by what I call up, and then the paintings must be destroyed. Cooper doesn’t like this. He wants to preserve all of my work, the dark and the light. He says that one must balance the other, but I don’t think that can be right. I think the dark will overwhelm the light if I give it half the chance. Look what has happened in Europe after all. I have learned to fear the dark.

Cooper is often far away, deep within the poems now. Exile Songs is nearly done and I hate the book with a savagery I’d feel for a rival of the heart. Now I know how Cooper feels when he loses me to the paint and the hills. But the place where he goes—into the past, the land of memory, war, regret—is a place I cannot follow him. That dead world is more real to Cooper right now than the mountains. Or me.

• • •

March 20, 1948

Dear Maisie,

I wish you wouldn’t encourage Cooper with this mad idea of a trip to New York. He says that I should come with him, but I can’t leave the mountains now. There are too many paintings still unfinished. Sometimes I feel there’s not enough time, I shan’t be able to capture them all. My skill feels like a finite thing—the well will run dry and then what will I be? Just an empty woman, searching in these hills for a vision I can no longer see.

Cooper is recovering his mind again now that Exile Songs is done. I’ve only just gotten him back, Maisie. Don’t take my Cooper away to New York. New York doesn’t need him as I do.

• • •

June 29, 1948

My dearest M.,

Thank you