American Eve by Paula Uruburu Read Free Book Online

A finely dressed woman stopped her on the street one day and exclaimed, “What a lovely child! Those eyes will break many a heart someday!” It soon began to filter through to the girl, however opaquely, that in the reduced family unit comprised of her mother, herself, and Howard, the magnetic center had slowly but surely shifted to her.
    In January 1898, according to Evelyn, after the family had lived nearly two years under the threat of absolute destitution, an acquaintance suggested to Mrs. Nesbit that she might find work in Philadelphia as a seamstress. Weighing her options, Mrs. Nesbit saw that indeed there were none. After yet another sniffling good-bye, this time at the noisy Pittsburgh train station, “where dust could fill your mouth if you kept it open too long,” Florence Evelyn and Howard were sent back “to the country” to live with an aunt. But with the deplorable economic climate (the miserable lingering effects of the depression caused by the Panic of 1893), even those relatives were hard-pressed to make ends meet. So within weeks after their arrival, brother and sister were summarily shipped by their aunt to a family in Allegheny with whom their mother had been friendly several years earlier. Almost imperceptibly, however, as the weeks slogged by, the sea change in sensibilities that seemed so sluggish to the advance guard began to surge, even in landlocked Pennsylvania.

     
    Photo of Evelyn that inspired L. M. Montgomery’s character
Anne of Green Gables, circa 1901.

CHAPTER THREE
    Poses
Have you ever noticed the thought in the eyes of a pictured girl? . . . Ever seen a . . . model whose eyes were not vacant? The artist’s model is either an auto-hypnotist or a mental gymnast. I think I was the latter.
    —Evelyn Nesbit, My Story
    everal weeks had wasted away since Florence Evelyn and Howard arrived on the doorstep of their distant relatives, veritable strangers who were as kind as could be under their own pinched circumstances. But self-preservation and the taint of resentful stinginess began to pervade the otherwise clean country air as four more weeks passed, with no word from Mamma Nesbit or money for the upkeep of her children. As their portions got smaller and the chores more demanding, the refugee Nesbit children, who had been taken out of school, began to wonder if they’d ever see their mother again, each fearing the worst but with unblinking childish optimism still capable of hope.
    Then one day the jubilant word came—their mother had finally secured a job for herself in the City of Brotherly Love. Although she was a salesclerk and not a dress designer or even a seamstress, Mrs. Nesbit had managed to join the hustling bustled and burgeoning shirt-waisted new female workforce of America at Wanamaker’s department store. Wanamaker’s was Philadelphia’s premier castle of commerce and the first store in America to install an elevator, far safer than the treacherous skirt-grabbing “escagators” whose interlocking slatted teeth threatened every day to pull women shoppers into the bowels of the basement.
    Having saved enough money after a month of cutting yards of gingham, chintz, and velvet from huge bolts of fabric behind the sewing counter, Mrs. Nesbit sent for her exiled children. After perfunctory good-byes to their ersatz guardians at the station gate, Florence Evelyn and Howard were put on a train in Pittsburgh, with the conductor given instructions to “put them off in Philadelphia.” Along with their measly belongings, Florence Evelyn had insisted on taking the “family” cat. When her thirteenth birthday/Christmas passed without any notice or presents, the girl pretended the cat had been a gift (when in fact it was a stray she and Howard found in an alleyway behind the neighborhood butcher shop). Every conductor who discovered the drowsy red tabby, wrapped contentedly in a flimsy tattered shawl on the girl’s lap, wanted to throw it off the train. But each in turn took