American Eve (5 page)

As Evelyn recounts in her memoirs, within a month, the sheriff came and hammered a notice of foreclosure and eviction on the mourning Nesbits’ door. An auction had to be held to sell off the family carriage (at a reduced rate, since there were still payments outstanding) and the entire contents of the house, from couch to clothespins. When the dreaded day came, Florence Evelyn, her mother, and Howard stood on the sidewalk for several hours without making a sound and watched like somnambulists while passersby eyed them curiously. Virtually all of their possessions were sold and carted away, including all the books in the library that her father had picked out for her and into which Florence Evelyn had carefully written her name after weeks and months of diligent practice to perfect her penmanship.

The three moved in with relatives temporarily, then the children were shuttled back and forth between various family members, sometimes together, sometimes separately. Meanwhile, a distraught Mrs. Nesbit tried to find work in the city’s dress shops. Struggling to sort out her husband’s desperately muddled finances, but with no idea how to proceed in the outside world and no comprehension of the vagaries or consequences of bad business investments, in spite of constant scrimping and deprivation, Mrs. Nesbit soon found herself and her children in the hopeless grip of mounting debt (which made the sale of the house to satisfy some of the debt problematic and contentious). Eventually, they moved into a poorly ventilated room in a boardinghouse, which smelled of moth-balls, sauerkraut, and lye. Mr. Charles Holman, a friend of the family, eventually came to their rescue and paid the back rent they soon owed on that first of several cheerless boardinghouse rooms they would occupy.

According to Evelyn in 1934, “Gone [was] the sense of security [my father] had radiated.” He had been “my sun and moon and I had been his little shooting star.” With their world suddenly pitched into a darkness like the deepest hole made in the earth by Carnegie Steel, gone virtually overnight were even the smallest pleasures the Nesbits once enjoyed. Evelyn later wrote that at such a young age, she did not fully appreciate the hardships her mother now faced with her tidy, egglike world rudely cracked open and no one to help pick up the pieces. Nor could Florence Evelyn have predicted how her father’s untimely death would deal the first of a series of blows to a mortally wounded childhood—just as no one could have foreseen how Winfield Nesbit’s death would have ill-fated and calamitous consequences that would reach well beyond his modest grave in Allegheny County.

As the weeks wore on, the normally chatty Florence Evelyn drifted into melancholy silence, having decided to keep the only thing she owned, her thoughts, locked away from prying, ineffectual adults. And although she did not speak the words out loud (in childish fear of casting a spell that might come true), there were moments of absolute panic when she feared her mother also would simply vanish. Or die, perhaps by her own hand. Florence Evelyn worried anxiously for weeks, her head filled with improbable dime-novel scenarios that now seemed all too possible.

As for her mother, the adult Evelyn recalled, “Her grief was terrible. . . . In our strange new home she often gave way to uncontrollable weeping.” On a miserably regular basis their mother would cry out with steadily increasing melodramatic self-pity, “What is to become of us?” apparently not realizing or seeming overly concerned about the effect this wrenching display might have on her desolate children. She would grab wildly at the borrowed sheets and lay prostrate on the single bed they all shared while the children looked on in mute horror, holding hands in a musty corner of their badly lit room.

Florence Evelyn felt utterly powerless and gradually resentful, and her fear of abandonment and poverty only grew with each new episode. Her mother would wring her hands and emit long, wounded sobs, which drove the children out into the hallway or onto the front steps of the boardinghouse to escape the pitiful sounds, their hands over their ears. Eventually, brother and sister developed the practice of sleeping with a pillow over their heads to try to block out their mother’s miserable nighttime lamentations, a habit that would persist into adulthood for both of them.

Having left his affairs in a state of utter disarray, Win Nesbit, the unambitious lawyer, had injudiciously thrown his family into the hands of lawyers and the courts. Mrs. Nesbit found herself attempting on a weekly basis to sort out the dismal condition of her husband’s rapidly disintegrating estate. As young as she was, Florence Evelyn could see the toll it was taking on her mother’s looks and demeanor. The girl grew to fear the idea of going to court, almost to the point of a phobia. She also observed that her mother’s reaction after only a few months was to shun all those she had known under better circumstances. The once happy mamma the children had known no longer existed, having been replaced by a strange, fretful, morose creature.

Florence Evelyn watched in amazement as her mother, only in her early thirties, suddenly willed herself, without warning or explanation, into an unconvincing pose of suffering silence. Here today. Gone tomorrow. Refusing to see even her closest friends, either out of shame or pride (another thing she couldn’t afford), Mrs. Nesbit tried deliberately (if only intermittently and unsuccessfully) to obliterate her past and, it seemed to her bewildered children, her husband’s memory. One day she no longer spoke his name either fondly or through acid tears. Even his picture was put away in a box on a closet shelf. Florence Evelyn and Howard could only surmise that their mother expected them to follow her example. Out of sight, out of mind.

This innate ability of her mother’s to abruptly shut down (if only for brief periods), turn off her emotions, and get on with life in spite of catastrophe was a model of behavior Florence Evelyn observed with guarded curiosity, then hastily adopted. To cope with their sudden fatherless, homeless, and penniless condition, sister and brother also developed an emotional resilience often mistaken by strangers as sullenness or glacial indifference. Shutting down or detaching themselves emotionally from a painful situation became a routine survival tactic; they learned to stifle or crush their own raw feelings so as not to upset their mother and thus avoid another harrowing scene. By her behavior, Mrs. Nesbit also progressively alienated any friends who offered assistance. Nor would she relent to seek help from either her own or Winfield’s family, unless, as she said, there was absolutely no other alternative—which was almost always the case. But Mrs. Nesbit’s abrupt lapses from leaden silence into abysmal crying jags only hardened Florence Evelyn’s resolve not to become a weak and pitiful hysteric, even though they alarmed the girl with their ferocity and physically sickened Howard.

Eventually, with no money whatsoever, the Nesbits moved in with Evelyn’s maternal grandmother. However, this arrangement didn’t last very long, and as she described it, “My earliest recollections of Pittsburgh are almost as painful as my later recollections.” The penny-pinching family of three then moved to Cedar Avenue in Allegheny. More often than not, they had only one meal a day, and it was meager. Depending on one’s point of view, Mrs. Nesbit either heroically, stupidly, or pathologically persisted in thinking she could somehow provide for herself and her children, despite all evidence to the contrary. She again borrowed some money from friends rather than family, and rented a house not far away in Shadyside on Fifth and South Highland Avenue with the intention of taking in boarders, figuring she could put her homespun skills to some practical use. It was a venture that would prove remarkably unsuccessful. And portentous.

FIRST EXPOSURE

According to Evelyn, it was a scorcher of a Sunday in August 1897, which for most people in Pittsburgh at that time meant sweating out the Sabbath heat from the front porch of their hard-won homes with either store-bought or improvised fans and lemonade. A barely perceptible, metallic-colored cloud of mill residue dissipated in the hot sun over the railroad tracks near Florence Evelyn’s so-called home, which felt as impermanent to her as it did to the boarders.

Since it was Sunday, she was bored “almost to tears,” with no friends and nothing to do. Howard was nowhere to be found, having taken to wandering off alone in search of nothing in particular. As she sat on the top step of the boardinghouse stoop, envying the neighbors who had lemonade and store-bought fans, Florence Evelyn noticed a man strolling down Cedar Avenue with a camera in his hand. Always one to take the initiative, the girl called out to the man, a local photographer. He stopped and turned around to see who was asking in such a small, eager voice to have her picture taken.

What he saw was twelve-and-a-half-year-old Florence Evelyn, whom he later said looked to him about eight or nine, running down the walk from the steps of the depressingly respectable boardinghouse. Everything about her seemed delightfully small except her thick hair and large piercing eyes. As he later recalled, she was “extremely pretty,” almost unnervingly so, with a “childish abundance of curls” held barely in check by a blue ribbon. Like all Florence Evelyn’s clothes, the dainty blue ankle-length dress with a matching waistband that she wore was one of her mother’s designs. The man, who had the professional’s eye for detail, remembered her worsted black stockings and thin-soled shoes resembling ballet slippers.

He watched as she eyed the camera in his hands and smiled in a way that seemed alternately flirtatious and shy. She asked him again if he would take her picture, and put one hand behind her skirts in a demure pose. He complied, struck by the openness and enthusiasm of the girl, and promised to send a copy of the picture to the boardinghouse. For some reason, although he noted the address, he had neglected to ask her name. Nonetheless, the man was so affected by the charming girl that he had the photo printed in a local Pittsburgh paper. He framed the original photograph and kept it on a shelf in his studio, little realizing that he was the first in a long line of professional photographers who saw something unique in this uncommon and willing little natural model.

But no matter how much they scrimped, the family seemed always on the verge of utter insolvency. In a telling indication of things to come, her mother, out of willful ignorance, wanton desperation, or monstrous calculation, exploited the pathetic state of affairs by sending her appealing prepubescent daughter to collect the weekly rents from the boarders, figuring that Florence Evelyn’s looks would soften those who might not otherwise pay their rents on time. Needless to say, the overwhelming majority of boarders were middle-aged men; many were drummers (salesmen) or some equally transient type, while a number of them had no identifiable profession or particular social graces. Much later in life, Evelyn related to her daughter-in-law that even at such a young age, she sensed it was inappropriate for a child to knock on strange men’s doors to ask for rent money: “Mamma was always worried about the rent,” Evelyn recalled in 1915, but it was “too hard a thing” for her to actually ask for it every week, “and it never went smoothly.” Although Florence Evelyn obeyed her mamma, the leering faces and sometimes glassy-eyed stares of the boarders, who smelled of whiskey or worse, made the twelve-year-old extremely uncomfortable. So did the comments a few felt compelled to mutter under their breath while squeezing their grimy two dollars’ weekly rent into her small, soft hands.

But even Florence Evelyn’s nascent charms could not keep the boardinghouse running at a profit, and little more than a month or so after the incident with the photographer, she and her mother had to relocate to a smaller boardinghouse solely as tenants. Out of necessity, Howard was conveniently sent once more to stay with an aunt outside Pittsburgh. One can only speculate on the jumble of feelings churning within Mrs. Nesbit, whose fears and ineffectuality forced her to hide from her relatives and to place Howard, so she said, out of harm’s way (out of sight, out of mind) while she and her alternately hardheaded and dreamy daughter lived in the claustrophobic quarters of a room that Evelyn recalled in a letter “even mice rejected.” One also wonders what nine-year-old Howard, who was far more sensitive and overtly needy than his sister, must have felt, living most of the time as if he were already an orphan. And an only child.

A deepening, double-edged fear of rejection and abandonment was imprinted indelibly on Florence Evelyn’s young psyche, exacerbated by the constant upheaval and shuffling from one tedious boardinghouse to the next. Deprived of any sustained contact with other children (except her brother and occasionally her “country cousins”), friendships for the restless, lonely girl with anyone her own age were fleeting at best or for the most part nonexistent. Her growing inclination to quickly please or appease others and a sometimes desperate impulse to “smooth things over” (while keeping her true feelings to herself), together with her mother’s ill-advised efforts to take advantage of her looks, made for a dangerous mix. Florence Evelyn’s efforts to satisfy her mother were rarely rewarded with the kind of praise her father had lavished on her. Yet the girl’s youthful naiveté and ambition gave her a sense of self-assurance and determination that were sorely lacking in her mother. The almost-teen wanted badly to be part of “the smart set” and believed that somehow her wishes would come true (in spite of her grandmother’s saying that “if wishes were horses, beggars would ride”).

In those rare moments when she didn’t have to listen to her mother’s harangues about where their next meal would come from, Florence Evelyn began to formulate a particularly whimsical but surprisingly durable fantasy life; she retreated into a snug and resilient soap bubble, whose transparent membrane allowed a view of the outside world, but at the same time refused to allow anyone or anything to burst it. The more her mother dragged her into the harsh light of stinging reality (eerily silent one moment, then wailing about the poorhouse and unmarked graves in some potter’s field the next), the more Florence Evelyn retreated into her bubble. Her coping mechanism was to assume a dark-browed Irish silence as she honed her inherent knack for inhabiting two worlds simultaneously. Alternating between an almost too mature and matter-of-fact acceptance of a day’s discouraging or disastrous events and the ability to escape at night into an admittedly adolescent but far more satisfying romantic fantasy world, a young Florence Evelyn would come to realize that even though dreaming was free, it could carry a great price.