American Eve by Paula Uruburu Read Free Book Online Page A

pity on the astonishingly pretty little waif and thin-boned, sad-eyed boy and let the cat be. There were no other children traveling alone.
    Upon their arrival, Evelyn and Howard were introduced by their mother, who had taken the day off from work, to their new lodgings. The children narrowed their eyes and took in the sparse furnishings and tight quarters in the usual back room (always cheaper than a front room) on the second floor of yet another run-of-the-mill boardinghouse. They shrugged their shoulders in what had become for them an automatic gesture of blank acceptance. And then, within a few scant weeks of barely getting by on her moderate salary, serving the wives of middle managers and the maids of the well-to-do (and just after enrolling the children in the neighborhood public school), Mamma Nesbit announced that she had found positions for both of the children at Wanamaker’s. This meant their schooling would be interrupted, indefinitely, as it had more than half a dozen times already.
    At first Florence Evelyn was overjoyed at the prospect of being considered adult enough to have a job. But not long afterward she felt a pang of sadness mixed with guilt that she would not be able (or so it seemed) to fulfill her father’s dream that she go to Vassar. Nor did it seem likely that Howard would ever become a lawyer, especially if he couldn’t get out of the fifth grade. Howard characteristically said little about his new job as a stock boy and seemed quietly resigned to not attending yet another nameless, unfriendly brick-faced school.
    As her mother ripped down the hems of her homemade dresses to make her appear older (since only girls under sixteen wore knee-length skirts), a wistful Florence Evelyn also felt the increasingly familiar twinge of bitterness at having been moved around so much that she was never able to form any real friendships with anyone her age. Her apprehension at having been taken out of school again (perhaps permanently) grew as the weeks went by, so she tried whenever possible to read. Luckily, it didn’t cost anything, since she could borrow books from the public library, and the few books that were occasionally left behind by boarders in the common sitting room she squirreled away and kept as her own.
    Six days a week for twelve hours a day, Florence Evelyn, dressed in a dowdy starched uniform apron and newly hemmed ankle-length skirts, was a “floater,” a sometime floor girl, sometime stock girl, sometime counter girl whose job it was to make sure all departments maintained a full supply of goods. Although her small hands and slight build, exaggerated by the oversize uniform apron, indicated to some apprehensive customers a girl of perhaps no more than eleven, Evelyn’s mother assured the management that her daughter was sixteen. But even with their combined earnings from Wanamaker’s, things were still bad enough that frequently the three Nesbits had only one meal a day, of little more than a cup of coffee and shredded wheat or mustard sandwiches (scraping to the bottom of a jar that Howard had pilfered from the grocery section of the store, with his mother’s tacit approval). This diet did little to stabilize Howard’s shaky constitution, and even though the severely strapped family hadn’t been together in Philadelphia for long, Howard had to be sent away again, this time to the farm of another aunt near Tarentum “for his delicate health.”
    “My mother wept bitterly over this necessary parting,” Evelyn recalled, even though Mamma Nesbit had also permitted him to work twelve hours a day at the store, six days a week.

    DISCOVERED
    Living on Arch Street in Philadelphia, however, marked the beginning of Florence Evelyn’s “independent career” (or so she imagined). And even as the weary century seemed on certain protracted days to be dragging its stiffening limbs toward its final months, a confident Florence Evelyn began to believe that at least her tiny part of the