American Eve Read Online Free PDF Page B
Author: Paula Uruburu
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
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