Free American Eve by Paula Uruburu

courts, and mustard sandwiches. But Mrs. Nesbit’s nebulous efforts proved futile. Everywhere she went, the same questions were asked.
    “Have you been to Paris lately?” Or, “Have you had experience with similar firms?”
    She had even less success than she did in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, since the impediments that had blocked her way in the other cities were magnified a thousandfold in New York. On the contrary, however, Manhattan offered exceptional head-turning possibilities for an aspiring young model of equally exceptional head-turning looks.
    Even though the three Nesbits shivered in a poorly heated room for several days, Mrs. Nesbit maintained her profoundly puzzling and inexplicable inertia regarding the letters of introduction. When it seemed she was on the verge of capitulating, she confessed to Florence Evelyn that she was simply unsure how to proceed. Moreover, she said she was worried about the propriety of her daughter becoming a New York model. Staring at her mother’s vexed expression and empty purse hanging limply on the closet door behind her, the girl asked why it was all right to pose in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia but not New York. Her mother had no answer. A day later, when the all-too-familiar press of insistent hunger squeezed them (each had only a cup of cheap java and a biscuit the entire day), Mrs. Nesbit surrendered.
    She took the Ryland Phillips photos and a letter of introduction to James Carroll Beckwith, a well-known and respected New York painter. After seeing the photographs, Beckwith said he wanted to see immediately if this “perfectly formed nymph” really existed in the flesh. The very next day, the diminutive poser and her mother came to Beckwith’s studio on Fifty-seventh Street and Sixth Avenue. The gray-haired artist was instantly struck by what one reporter would describe as “the soul of beauty trapped behind big melancholy eyes.” Beckwith was particularly affected by her haunting pubescent loveliness and the uncommon mixture of innocence and ennui in her expression that others had already noted.
    The artist took Mrs. Nesbit aside, spoke to her about the business side of posing, and said that indeed he would be very happy to use her uncommonly lovely daughter as his model. He gave his credentials, in a show of politeness, since it was obvious Mrs. Nesbit had never heard of him and knew nothing of his work or the New York art scene. Florence Evelyn listened intently from the sidelines. When Beckwith mentioned that he taught life classes at the Art Students League, the girl involuntarily gasped and waited nervously for her mother’s reaction.
    She had heard about the school while listening to conversations in the Philadelphia studios, and, true to form, when her mother understood that life classes meant “posing in the nude,” she “went to pieces.” Beckwith assured a frantic Mrs. Nesbit that he had no intention of allowing her little girl to pose like that, whereupon, in an uncharacteristic show of proactive involvement, Mamma Nesbit said she would see for herself, since she would be at all the sittings. Within a month, however, she seemed to have forgotten her pledge.

    MODELING AND MIGNON
    After only ten days in New York, Florence Evelyn was already scheduled to pose twice a week for Beckwith, whose staunchest patron was John Jacob Astor. The elderly painter expressed his concerns for her welfare and took a grandfatherly view of the sweetly inexperienced adolescent with her equally unsophisticated mother, particularly given all the dark and dodgy corners in a city where people whispered nervously about white slavery and the less morally scrupulous routinely sought to procure images popularly known as “mignon.” These were photo postcards of barefoot, fresh-faced young women or girls in Gypsy-style or rural costumes. Only a few degrees of attitude and clothing removed from the more salacious French postcards depicting fully nude “jeunes filles” smuggled