American Eve by Paula Uruburu Read Free Book Online Page B

fickle universe had irreversibly shifted its orbit once more for the better. The woman who ran the boardinghouse on Arch Street was married to a newspaperman, who counted among his friends a reporter named Charlie Somerville. The young newspaperman took note of the remarkably “pretty child” during a visit. But it was while meandering aimlessly down a neighboring street one frigid Sunday, a week before her fourteenth birthday, that Florence Evelyn saw the face of destiny reflected in a store window—her own. It seemed inevitable. She was discovered.
    As she peered into a specialty dry-goods window, admiring the variety of “outta sight” fabrics inside and picturing the birthday dress her mother could make from any one of them (had they been able to afford it), Florence Evelyn noticed in the reflection of the window an elderly woman staring intently at her from behind. Struck by the girl’s unblemished porcelain skin set against dark tresses hidden partly under her coat, the woman approached the eye-catching girl, who turned to face her observer. In her longish cloth coat, with its twice-rolled sleeves and tatty muffler, decorated with cat hairs and wrapped carelessly around her neck and shoulders, Florence Evelyn seemed neither child nor adult but rather some strange combination of the two. She appeared like a china doll dressed in hobo hand-me-downs or one of those “darling diminutive performers from Barnum’s museum” the woman had seen once in a daguerreotype. The girl’s expression was also disconcerting; it seemed simultaneously immature and knowing, although what appeared at first to be rouge on her cheeks was simply the effect of the frigid wind, which whipped down the nearly deserted street.
    “Would you like to pose for a portrait?” the woman asked.
    An amused and noncommittal Florence Evelyn shrugged. Like most adolescent girls, she alternated between smug vanity and desperate insecurity about her appearance, particularly given the patchy, well-worn state of her clothing, usually made from mismatched pieces or remnants her mother took home from work. Today she thought this woman’s offer was some kind of joke. The lady introduced herself as Mrs. Darach, a local portrait painter and miniaturist. A skeptical Florence Evelyn replied that she would raise the subject with her mother. The woman invited the girl to come to her studio on Chestnut Street later that day with her mother. On the way home, the usual formless fantasies of fame and fortune began to take on a more distinct shape in the girl’s thoughts, fusing all the “formulaic fictions” she had already read that allowed young girls of that period to “create possibilities for their future.”
    In 1934, Evelyn would recall that up to that point, her mother had still not found a position anywhere to suit her self-proclaimed artistic talents, “that she kept failing all the time.” She would testify during the first trial that her mother had tried very hard at first to secure a position as a dress designer, then as a seamstress. But the market demanded someone with a proven commercial record, someone who had been to Paris, someone with at least a little practical business experience “who had at her fingertips the latest mode,” none of which Mrs. Nesbit had. So Florence Evelyn told her mother about the encounter.
    After only brief hesitation (once it was established to Mrs. Nesbit’s satisfaction that the person who requested the sitting was a woman), she agreed to the visit. That afternoon, Florence Evelyn began her career as an artist’s model, sitting for five hours and earning a dollar for her efforts.
    “I was as proud as though I myself combined all the genius of Michelangelo and Rosa Bonheur,” she wrote. The pair stared in amazement at the crumpled bill, which her mother then stuffed reverently in a small cracked pitcher on their dresser. Perhaps it also began to dawn on Mrs. Nesbit that her daughter’s potential as a