Read Online American Eve by Paula Uruburu - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Paula Uruburu
Ads: Link
no money and only a few perfunctory postcards from her mamma, a discouraged Florence Evelyn was alternately bewildered and annoyed. She wondered why she couldn’t have kept working while her mother was away, especially since her mamma took all the modeling money she had earned in the last year and a half to allegedly stir this latest pot of gilt veneer. She wondered where and how her mother was looking for a position. She wondered why the New York artists weren’t clamoring for her services, not knowing that for reasons only she knew, her mamma had felt it necessary to withhold the letters of introduction.
Instead, whether out of fear or sheer ineptitude, Mrs. Nesbit had once again borrowed money from the “good penny,” their ubiquitous family friend Charles Holman, who was making a name for himself back in Pittsburgh, where he had positioned himself to become secretary to the Stock Exchange. At the time, Holman’s continued charity to the little Nesbit family and persistent refusal to let her mother “isolate herself in widowhood” seemed an admirable thing to young Florence Evelyn, who never wondered how it was that her mother managed to communicate with Mr. Holman but not with her or Howard as she supposedly scoured Manhattan for work, month after month.
During one of her last sessions posing, the fetching model had begun to calculate how many hours she needed to work in order to pay back all the people her mother had “unhappily imposed upon” in the last year alone. But it now appeared that the career that had begun so unexpectedly and fortuitously was on the verge of ending just as suddenly. It briefly crossed Florence Evelyn’s mind that in a fit of reactionary perversity, her mother had sabotaged her fledgling career out of jealousy, cutting off her nose to spite her daughter’s prettier face. But at fifteen, all she could do was sit and wait and stare at the walls. And not get paid a penny for doing so.
As of late November, Mrs. Nesbit had not found a job, although it’s anybody’s guess where she looked, how strenuously, and what type of job she looked for in the five months since leaving Philadelphia. But the intensely vibrant, swirling city that offered such glorious opportunities to so many others seemed to wrap itself around Mrs. Nesbit like a winding sheet. Thrown eventually into a state of panic, then paralysis, by the sheer impossibility of it all, with the hatchet edge of winter approaching (if the Farmer’s Almanac was accurate), after securing a second-floor, back-room apartment on Twenty-second Street, Mamma Nesbit finally sent for her refugee children. She supposed that if nothing else, they might all find positions at Macy’s department store as they had at Wanamaker’s.
With her sixteenth birthday only three and a half weeks away, an elated Florence Evelyn went alone back to the country on money borrowed from a family friend to reclaim Howard, while a third friend provided the money for the children’s railroad tickets to New York (her mother apparently having spent all of Florence Evelyn’s earnings during her five unaccountable months in Manhattan). The trip from Pennsylvania to Manhattan, however, was far less dismal than the one to Philadelphia a year earlier. Fully revived, Evelyn recalled in later years that on the way to New York she began to foment images of a “splendid future for her and her brother.” Her mother was, noticeably, excluded from that particular vision.
As predicted, winter in December 1900 descended like a sledgehammer. Reunited with her underdressed and overwhelmed children, according to the adult Evelyn, her mother continued to try to look for work as a designer or seamstress. Part of Florence Evelyn still believed (or hoped) naively that in New York City her mother would become a well-known designer, and that their combined efforts would finally pull the family forever beyond the relentless, grappling hands of unfeeling bank presidents, callous
Instead, whether out of fear or sheer ineptitude, Mrs. Nesbit had once again borrowed money from the “good penny,” their ubiquitous family friend Charles Holman, who was making a name for himself back in Pittsburgh, where he had positioned himself to become secretary to the Stock Exchange. At the time, Holman’s continued charity to the little Nesbit family and persistent refusal to let her mother “isolate herself in widowhood” seemed an admirable thing to young Florence Evelyn, who never wondered how it was that her mother managed to communicate with Mr. Holman but not with her or Howard as she supposedly scoured Manhattan for work, month after month.
During one of her last sessions posing, the fetching model had begun to calculate how many hours she needed to work in order to pay back all the people her mother had “unhappily imposed upon” in the last year alone. But it now appeared that the career that had begun so unexpectedly and fortuitously was on the verge of ending just as suddenly. It briefly crossed Florence Evelyn’s mind that in a fit of reactionary perversity, her mother had sabotaged her fledgling career out of jealousy, cutting off her nose to spite her daughter’s prettier face. But at fifteen, all she could do was sit and wait and stare at the walls. And not get paid a penny for doing so.
As of late November, Mrs. Nesbit had not found a job, although it’s anybody’s guess where she looked, how strenuously, and what type of job she looked for in the five months since leaving Philadelphia. But the intensely vibrant, swirling city that offered such glorious opportunities to so many others seemed to wrap itself around Mrs. Nesbit like a winding sheet. Thrown eventually into a state of panic, then paralysis, by the sheer impossibility of it all, with the hatchet edge of winter approaching (if the Farmer’s Almanac was accurate), after securing a second-floor, back-room apartment on Twenty-second Street, Mamma Nesbit finally sent for her refugee children. She supposed that if nothing else, they might all find positions at Macy’s department store as they had at Wanamaker’s.
With her sixteenth birthday only three and a half weeks away, an elated Florence Evelyn went alone back to the country on money borrowed from a family friend to reclaim Howard, while a third friend provided the money for the children’s railroad tickets to New York (her mother apparently having spent all of Florence Evelyn’s earnings during her five unaccountable months in Manhattan). The trip from Pennsylvania to Manhattan, however, was far less dismal than the one to Philadelphia a year earlier. Fully revived, Evelyn recalled in later years that on the way to New York she began to foment images of a “splendid future for her and her brother.” Her mother was, noticeably, excluded from that particular vision.
As predicted, winter in December 1900 descended like a sledgehammer. Reunited with her underdressed and overwhelmed children, according to the adult Evelyn, her mother continued to try to look for work as a designer or seamstress. Part of Florence Evelyn still believed (or hoped) naively that in New York City her mother would become a well-known designer, and that their combined efforts would finally pull the family forever beyond the relentless, grappling hands of unfeeling bank presidents, callous
Similar Books
