American Eve (7 page)

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 breadwinner might put an end to their days of eating shredded wheat.

Another woman whom the new model and her mother befriended in Philadelphia was the sister of a well-known and respected artist, John Storm. Florence Evelyn, already a “looker” and a “peach” (words she had heard from several boarders) needed neither the latest fashions nor makeup to enhance her natural gifts. After hearing of the girl’s first sitting, at his sister’s suggestion, Storm asked Mrs. Nesbit for permission to paint her daughter’s portrait. Starting the very next week, and every Sunday after that, Florence Evelyn went to the elderly Storm’s house and posed for him.

On Saturdays, when she wasn’t working at the department store, and nearly every Sunday, she would sit for several hours in a studio, her head cocked to one side while the light was good, pretending to savor the fragrance of a fake flower or peering longingly out a window facing a brick wall across the alleyway. Sometimes as she sat having her thick hair braided then unbraided for the fifth time by her mother (to enhance the waves), Florence Evelyn looked up at the skylight, through which the sounds of the street filtered, along with the late-afternoon sunlight. Spending all her days either in the hectic store or in a musty, somber studio, if she wished that she could be outside, meeting people her own age and being carefree, she kept it to herself.

On most days, Mamma Nesbit seemed to have lost any hesitancy about the suitability of her daughter’s posing for artists, be they men or women. The way Evelyn rationalized it in later years, “when I saw that I could earn more money posing as an artist’s model than I could at Wanamaker’s, I gave my mother no peace until she permitted me to pose for a livelihood.” She adds, tellingly, “her objections crumbled under the force of necessity.” To her delight, Florence Evelyn was eventually able to shed her ill-fitting apron for good—and for the more enticing attire (or lack thereof) of the professional studio model. Once posing demanded all of her time, the fourteen-year-old Florence Evelyn was ecstatic to be able to trade two jobs for one, thinking that now she might at least earn some freedom along with her wages.

It was through Storm that the eager little model was soon introduced to an emergent artists’ colony, comprised solely of women, who shared a busy studio in the city not far from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where all had been students. The group of three included Violet Oakley, a painter and stained-glass artist who had studied under Louis Comfort Tiffany, and two aspiring and talented painter-illustrators, Jessie Willcox Smith and Elizabeth Shippen Green, each of whom was on the cusp of her own fame and independent career.

Oakley was instantly struck by an ethereal quality in the young girl’s looks and demeanor. The latter two, who specialized in depicting children, saw in Florence Evelyn’s smooth adolescent features, which still retained some of the roundness of childhood in spite of her poor diet, the perfect model for idealized children’s heads. With an important commission for some stained-glass windows to be installed in a nearby church, Oakley engaged Florence Evelyn’s services as a model immediately after meeting with her. In the girl’s graceful, undeveloped figure, boyish in its thin, lean lines, she saw the perfect embodiment of a kind of ambivalent, classically androgynous spirituality wrestling with the sensuality of her face. Inspired by the girl’s subtle Raphael-like beauty, Oakley used her almost exclusively as a model for her angels. Barefoot, draped in floor-length diaphanous white robes, with her waist-length profusion of dark hair uncoiled down the small of her back or pinned up in a loose chignon, Florence Evelyn was immortalized in a number of stained-glass images. As she recalled years later, “I believe I posed for a heavenly host of angels; there are a number of churches in Pennsylvania and New York whose windows have my face and figure etched into them.”

But even as she remained fitfully unsure about the propriety of modeling in general, Mamma Nesbit said that she took comfort in the fact that most of the artists who regularly engaged her daughter’s services were female, while the men were well beyond middle age and therefore “safe.” Florence Evelyn soon began to model full-body for Willcox Smith and Shippen Green, and was given the chance to indulge her childish fantasies by dressing up in all kinds of fetching outfits and whimsical costumes, many of the type associated with her favorite fables and fairy tales. Invariably, as she posed in these costumes, the girl began to envision herself as the characters she knew so well. Although it often reminded her of the precious books she had lost, she was doubly thrilled by the prospect of playing dress-up and getting paid for it. According to the adult Evelyn, during this period (roughly between 1899 and 1900) she “lived again in a world of fancy, far from economic worries.”

Moreover, as much as she adored the flowing angelic gowns and the Bo Peep flounces of lace and lavender, Florence Evelyn became increasingly enamored of the idea that these people who painted or sketched or sculpted or etched her believed she was pretty enough to be a professional model. Eventually, as word spread of the remarkably malleable studio girl from Pittsburgh, who, with a subtle glance or change in the sweep of her hair, could play a milkmaid or nymph, a goddess or a Gypsy, other artists joined the charmed circle.

By the time Florence Evelyn turned fifteen, after a year of modeling and earning a steady income, she was ecstatic over her blossoming career. But her mother, who was only thirty-four, was intensely miserable. As Evelyn recalled, “[Mamma] could never get used to the rush and tumult of the department store, the hard-bargaining women customers.” As she fretted during certain dim hours of the evening that she wished Florence could go back to school and finish her education, Mamma Nesbit’s chronic complaint was, “Oh, if I could only put to practical use my knack for designing!”

And yet, in spite of her protestations, once Mrs. Nesbit found they could live on her daughter’s earnings alone, she quit her job at Wanamaker’s, ostensibly to “oversee” Florence Evelyn’s new career. As the spirited model was handed from studio to studio in the rush of her daily work, she soon met other artists, male artists, who were no longer “all mummified plums” but who engaged her services with no real fuss or feathers from her mother. Luckily for the little poser, they were all serious artists and not “the depraved dabblers” condemned by various moral watchdogs of the period. Two of the more prominent artists who hired the girl were George Gibbs and Mills Thompson, both of whom illustrated stories, magazine covers, and books like the ones Florence Evelyn’s father had brought home for her back in Tarentum and Pittsburgh. Although her mother raised no more objections in public, Mrs. Nesbit griped privately and annoyingly in their room at night about the possible impropriety of it all (“too much like Lady Macbeth,” an adult Evelyn conjectured). Mamma Nesbit’s frequent complaint seemed to be, “An artists’ model! It sounds Bohemian. I don’t like it.”

Nonetheless, as she had in response to her father’s death and her family’s abrupt plunge into poverty, Florence Evelyn alternated between an unspoken resignation to the reality of her present circumstances and habitual episodic flights into dreamland, particularly during those long hours of immobility staring at nothing or the back of a canvas.

Having to fight the natural adolescent inclination to fidget, to move her head “exactly in the direction the artist did not want her to look,” gradually, she said, she learned the value of patience as she sat absolutely motionless. But being unable to move or speak turned out to be exasperating most of the time for the normally animated teenager. She remembers the mental tricks she was compelled to perform to combat the teeth-grinding monotony of sittings. These sessions, she said, sometimes led her down “fantastic avenues . . . and secured angles of vision which perhaps I should not ordinarily have secured.” It also fostered in her a sense of independence, and a belief in opportunities she didn’t think possible for a girl until then. As a result, going against the grain of cultural conventions and expectations of the day, young Florence Evelyn decided that while “a girl’s dreams are never practical,” she had “yet to meet the freakish being who looks forward to a life of mending and minding.” It was a revelation. From that moment on, as far as she was concerned, “[a] healthy girl does most of her dreaming by night, and if I did any dreaming at all in the daytime, it was not of the career that lay ahead of me [as a housewife and mother].”

So, in place of real friendships and her father’s love, Florence Evelyn began to substitute the admiration of others as a way to avoid thinking too much about her losses, her long hours of posing, her mother’s own assumed pose of being concerned about convention versus commerce, and the unreasonable inequity of it all for her and Howard.

To everyone who saw her, the girl had a remarkably distinctive look that set her far apart from any other models and so-called beauties of the day. There was something magnetic and haunting about her large, smoky eyes and almost mournful half smile. It was an expression Evelyn adopted without effort—and without any prompting from the artists. Virtually all who came into contact with her or saw her image tried to articulate what that expression meant, but were left unsatisfied. It is perhaps the greatest irony that in describing in her memoirs what she was thinking or feeling during long hours of posing, Evelyn recalled that initially she was thinking about the most mundane things one could imagine. Or absolutely nothing.

Significantly, however, at an age when any adolescent’s personality is merely percolating, when an unchecked ego can boil over (even if watched), the girl from Tarentum was being told by everyone around her that she was the loveliest thing they had ever seen. And she had to believe it, because respected artists were willing to pay for the privilege of using her as their model. She was already possessed of a healthy self-absorption (and with few possessions of any other kind), so it did not require much for fifteen-year-old Florence Evelyn to be taken by the attention. And since most girls that age do not need encouragement to become preoccupied with their looks, Florence Evelyn’s new career only exacerbated her propensity for mirror gazing. The flattery and unqualified approval of professional artists caused her to study her reflection when she was alone, sometimes for hours. Her mother began expressing some distress over her daughter’s growing vanity, but there seemed little she could (or would) do to control or even curtail it, since their livelihood depended completely on those looks.

It wasn’t long, however, before the hardworking little model discovered to her dismay that the reality of tedious hours holding a pose in airless, cluttered studios that reeked of oils, turpentine, pipe smoke, stale coffee grounds, and moldy cheese in mousetraps was less appealing than she had initially thought. As she described it, her enthusiasm for being painted “died with an aching neck” and an empty stomach when certain artists refused to break for lunch. And she still missed going to school. Even though she fought it, the melancholy girl could not throw off the prickly veil of loneliness that dropped on her with uncomfortable regularity in the twilight hours. She found little solace in the infrequent visits of her increasingly withdrawn brother, who was still staying primarily with relatives, supposedly because of his delicate health. One could speculate that even though Howard was her favorite, Mamma Nesbit also found it more economical to have her son stay with family (to whom she sent no money), and that Howard’s mental health was more likely at risk than his physical well-being.

The romantic notion that artists live on a higher plane than mere mortals was also soon dissolved for the much-in-demand studio girl. As the weeks and months went by, she learned that they were as concerned with money and the grasping mundane arena of materialism as was her mother. And as much as she enjoyed conversation with those painters and sculptors who, to her surprise, talked to her while working, Florence Evelyn wanted to find someone to talk to who wasn’t “a dreary adult, always blah, blahing about making ends meet.”

Whenever she could, she read on her own. Growing into an omnivorous if perhaps too indiscriminate a reader, particularly of novels, she made a concerted effort to master the classics she had taken out of the library when she could and would hold them reverently in her hands, at times even pressing the books to her chest as she slept. At the time, she had in her possession a copy of Zola’s
Nana,
left in a closet at the boardinghouse “by an innocuous-looking old woman.” She had heard something about scandalous French novels, and this particular one was “somewhat beyond” her comprehension. Nevertheless, she understood well enough that she could never get into college without first attending high school, and so late one afternoon, while posing, Florence Evelyn revived the idea of someday going to Vassar. She believed that if she worked hard enough, she would be able to save funds sufficient to fulfill what had been her father’s dream for her. Ultimately, she would come to the conclusion that reading secured for her “a sense of proportion, the one sense that spells salvation to a girl upon whom is lavished the subtle [and not-so-subtle] flattery” of premature attention.

With a child’s heart bound by adult responsibilities, as more time passed, the child-woman found herself in the unenviable and paradoxical position of literally inhabiting both worlds simultaneously. She was acutely aware that the money she earned was the sole support of her family—her mother constantly reminded her of the fact in case she had any ideas about quitting when she complained, however infrequently, that she was bored or tired. The image of her hysterical mother came back to Florence Evelyn again and again while she sat for hours on end, and during the night, her own inexpressible fear of sudden poverty often came more sharply into focus. Doing what she would throughout her life, however, Florence Evelyn decided to ignore adversity or try if possible to alter whatever bitter reality confronted her. Or shape it into something positive, chipping away wherever possible.