American Eve Read online

  According to Nesbit family legend, little Florence was such an exceedingly pretty infant that she attracted visitors from the neighboring counties for months after she was born. Two years and two months later, the Nesbits’ second child, Howard, was born, physically more frail and congenitally less feisty than his sister, but with the same large soulful eyes and silken brunet hair. As they grew, Howard and the petite Florence were often mistaken for twins. Their heavy-lidded, unwavering gaze gave brother and sister a “constant expression of knowing and amused detachment” often startling to casual observers in children so young. Because of her special Christmas birthday, Florence Evelyn believed that she was destined always to “get twice as many presents as anybody else.”

  Her father, Winfield Scott Nesbit, was a man of great heart and small aspirations. Known as Win or Winnie to his family and friends, he was by all accounts a good-looking, soft-spoken, unimposing man named in honor of a fierce and flinty general (whose career stretched from the War of 1812 until the start of the Civil War, when he served briefly as the Union general-in-chief). He was also described as that rarest of animals, an unambitious lawyer, and therefore one to whom money, its acquisition, and its management were not a priority. Her mother, whose maiden name was Mackenzie, was considered a handsome woman with some talent for sewing; not surprisingly, she had been brought up to wish for Photo postcard of Evelyn’s house in Tarentum, Pennsylvania, circa 1907.

  nothing more than to stitch herself securely into the cherished quilt of Victorian domesticity. She was blithely unaware of how the world worked beyond the limited sphere of wife and mother and therefore knew nothing about her husband’s lack of business acumen, wrongheaded investments, or slipshod business practices. What she did know was that her homemade outfits were routinely praised by friends and neighbors who saw them on mother and daughter. Comfortably cosseted by womanly conventionality, the sometimes skittish Mrs. Nesbit nonetheless seemed perfectly content to be the wife of the amiable Win and go along with his plans for his children’s future. Florence Evelyn, unlike the majority of girls in the country, who barely finished grammar school, would go to Vassar College and travel, while Howard would follow in his father’s footsteps and become a lawyer.

  For her first ten years (depending on which account one follows), Florence Evelyn’s childhood was ordinary, no different from that of most girls living in seemingly bucolic towns across America at the time. But if, as certain “big city” social critics and hopeful prophets claimed, a sea change in social mores and sensibilities was seeping through the widening cracks of not-so-ironclad Victorianism, the greater part of hardworking, God-fearing Christians throughout America were still living in communities like Tarentum with populations of fewer than 2,500 people.

  Like other young girls “from the provinces,” Florence Evelyn went to picnics and spelling bees and attended Sunday school, where she sang in the choir. She fantasized about running off with the traveling circus in the summer, went ice-skating and sledding in the winter, and attended her first Pirates baseball game with her father when she was five. Part princess, part prizefighter, depending on her mood, Florence Evelyn lived for her father’s praise, and he in turn doted on her. Of course as the head of the house and sole wage earner, Win was the central figure in the family and the dominant force in Florence Evelyn’s life.

  Unusually progressive about the intellectual capabilities of “the weaker sex,” Winfield encouraged his daughter’s early interest in reading by building a small library at home of her favorite books. The majority were the typical childhood fairy tales and fantasies, such as Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, with wonderfully vivid illustrations, charming princes, and happily-ever-afters. But Florence Evelyn read anything her father brought home for her, including the Arabian Nights, Arthurian legends, Greek myths, and popular dime novels, even though the latter were considered “books for boys.” With pithy titles such as Ragged Dick, Slow and Sure, Do and Dare, and Mark, the Match Boy, the rags-to-riches stories the little girl read were full of high sentiment and often ludicrous plots that extolled the virtues identified as “pluck and luck.” Their foremost literary proponent was Horatio Alger Jr., who sold more than 200 million copies of his prescriptive fantasies to post-Civil War American dreamers who wanted a blueprint for success. Of course, none of his faithful reading public knew that before he came to New York City, Alger had been run out of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, accused of “the abominable and revolting crime of gross familiarity with boys.”

  A vivacious and free-spirited child, Florence Evelyn bounced headfirst into all activities, particularly those she thought would please her father— singing, dancing, drawing, reciting from her books, playing the piano. She began music and dance lessons with her father’s encouragement and practiced in earnest to learn “The Amorous Goldfish” and “Chin, Chin Chinaman” to please him. She knew in her heart that she was her father’s favorite, although Win made a point of always praising both children for their efforts. Her mother, on the other hand, visibly favored Howard, whose sometimes distracted disposition and nervous temperament mirrored her own and threatened to make him into a mamma’s boy. The children often accompanied their mother on visits to various relatives’ farms in the outlying areas of Donnellsville and Allegheny, where young Florence Evelyn’s inherent self-assurance made an immediate and lasting impression on those around her. One cousin remembers a comment her own mother made: she “despaired of Florence ever learning how to milk a cow,” not because it was hard work, but because “the cow took up too much of her space.”

  When Florence Evelyn was around eleven, a change in her father’s job meant the family would have to relocate to Pittsburgh. The Nesbits moved into a modest two-story saltbox house unexceptionally similar to the one they had left, and life continued to be pleasantly predictable. The children were enrolled in the grandly named Shakespeare Elementary School, and every day Win went to his offices on Diamond Street in the family’s rockaway carriage, bought “on time” from Sears, Roebuck. But in less than a year, what had seemed like an eighteenth-century sentimental novel turned Dickensian.

  At the age of forty, Winfield Scott Nesbit died without warning, of either a brain hemorrhage or virulent spinal meningitis. Since autopsies were not routinely performed, the local doctors were unable to determine the exact cause of death. But the consequences were no less inexorable and devastating for his stunned family. Encumbrances on the modest property left by Win Nesbit cut off virtually every source of income, leaving his inconsolable wife and children broken and broke.

  The days immediately following Win’s funeral, paid for largely by a contribution from his side of the family, were heartbreaking. Having seen their father active and happy in the previous weeks and months, at first both children refused to accept the news. Eleven-year-old Florence Evelyn demanded to see him. She threw herself at the locked bedroom door behind which Win Nesbit lay in stale grim silence on top of the bedcovers until his removal for burial. Mrs. Nesbit had thought it best that he be remembered alive, so there would be no final viewing for the grief-stricken children. Instead, their last image of him entailed handfuls of dirt thrown onto a pine box as it was lowered by ropes into the frost-covered ground while neighbors and family friends intoned the clichés of despair and solace. “Here today and gone tomorrow.” “It was God’s will.” “He’s in a better place.” To the children, it was as if their father were nowhere—he had simply vanished overnight into the cold gray cosmos. It was almost unbearable.

  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.