Chapter Twelve
“Come in, Miss Talbot. I have something to show you.”
“Oh dear.”
My face must drop as I step through Mr. Gibson’s door, because he hastens to add: “Not to worry. Only good, my dear.”
I slip out of my coat and take in the sweep of Mr. Gibson’s drawing room.
The space is usually immaculate and well appointed, but today it is cluttered, with easels displaying Mr. Gibson’s black and white sketches all across the large, bright room.
I focus on a few of the images and see that it is page after page of me—my face, my profile, my features in various expressions of black and white.
Mr. Gibson has captured me from every angle in charcoal, colored pencil, graphite, ink and pen.
It is the series of me in silhouette that particularly catches my attention.
I study one in which my dark hair winds its way down the whole length of the drawing.
This was from the very first day, when I stood before the window and Mr. Nast draped my hair, like a pony’s tail, across my shoulder.
Under the black and white image, Mr. Gibson has written: “Woman: The Eternal Question.” He’s drawn my dark hair to form a question mark around my profile.
A small sound like a stifled laugh escapes my throat. And when I turn to look into the eyes of Mr. Gibson, he says, “I can’t wait to show you to the entire world, Miss Talbot. This image will run in Collier’s. What do you think of it?”
What do I think of it? It’s marvelous work. Thought-provoking, intriguing, playful, this Woman: The Eternal Question. But am I a woman?
The press seems confused, as well, because just as Mr. Gibson’s rendering of me as the American woman catches the flames of widespread fame, my nickname in the papers becomes “The Gibson Girl.” All the others are forgotten, and I am the only one.
The only what? Woman? Girl? I have to be both. I’m only sixteen, but the world thinks I’m older, and I’ve had experiences that most girls my age will never have. I certainly feel older than sixteen, especially on the days when I work twelve-hour shifts and return home drained and weary.
But there’s not much time to stop and ponder it all.
Now that my face has been stamped with Mr. Gibson’s imprimatur, I’m more in demand than ever.
Offers of work come pouring in every day, and Mamma fields them all.
Managing my daily appointments has become her full-time job, and she’s no longer even speaking about her dream of finding work as a seamstress.
That spring, Mamma books a job for me with the photographer Mr. Engels, with whom I’ve worked on several occasions. He’s agreeable enough, and I welcome these photography jobs as a break in the monotony of portrait sittings.
“You will be my Helen of Troy in photographs for Life magazine,” Mr. Engels announces as we arrive at his studio, a space that smells of flash powder and stale tobacco. “It had to be you, Evelyn. You’re the woman for whom most men in this day and age would launch an epic war.”
There it is again: woman. How old was Helen when she was snatched by Paris and spirited from her home? And how old before that, when she was snatched by Menelaus and taken to the marital bed—for who can imagine she would have chosen that hardened old man for herself?
—
As late spring ripens and the flowers along Fifth Avenue burst into riotous color, I find myself busier than ever.
Mamma slots in as many photography sessions as possible, like a train conductor keeping the trains running on the crowded tracks.
My face fills the covers of magazines and newspapers; I’m on postcards in the shops that line Manhattan’s busy streets, advertisements for chocolates and toothpaste and soap.
My work with Mr. Gibson has sparked a craze for the pony’s tail hairstyle, and my images are snatched up for publication in Harper’s Bazaar, Ladies’ Home Journal, Cosmopolitan.
Broadway magazine, calling me “America’s Eve,” declares: “Her desirability is due to the fact that both gentlemen and ladies want her. The ladies crave the soap or perfume she peddles. And gentlemen, well, they’d like to believe that they might offer her something she’d like to have.”
These so-called gentlemen write me letters postmarked from as far away as Chicago, Dallas, even the cities of California.
We get so much mail that Mamma institutes a new rule: I’m not permitted to look through it on my own.
Not until she’s opened it all and made sure I’m not seeing “anything unfit.”
Mamma usually tosses a good number of these letters into the fire after a quick perusal, but I surmise the general idea. According to Mamma, a lot of fellows are writing to ask for my hand in marriage. “Most of them can’t even spell your name to save their lives,” she grumbles.
Closer to home, right here in Manhattan, large companies now want me for their calendars.
I love the work I do that summer being photographed for the Coca-Cola calendar because it means all the soda I can drink.
Mamma doesn’t love the calendar jobs, because she says that men will buy the spreads so they can keep the twelve images of me for a pittance of what real appreciators of art have to pay.
She gripes, calling the calendar pages “pocket tokens.” I don’t know what that means, but I hear how she practically spits the words.
“Your hard work is done in an elegant way with decent artists, but then those pigs turn it vulgar.”
“What’s vulgar about it?” I ask.
“It just is, Evelyn. And we won’t speak about such things.”
But you’re the one who brought it up, I think, though I know better than to press her. Even though I do want answers—why would Mamma let me pose for work if it’s being turned vulgar?
I decide to find out for myself. I wait until the next day, as Mr. Beckwith is finishing up with our afternoon session.
Mamma often doesn’t accompany me if it’s a sitting for Beckwith or Church—she trusts them both so deeply at this point.
I do, as well, and knowing how Mr. Beckwith has always acted in a cordial and respectful manner with me, I ask: “Mr. Beckwith, what’s a pocket token? ”
He winces, looking from his paper up toward me. “How did you hear such a term?”
I give what I hope looks like a casual shrug. “My mother told me that some of my nice, respectable work is being turned vulgar. She called them pocket tokens.”
The artist rises from his stool, slipping his smock over his head before he answers. “Your mother is correct, Evelyn. And while it is unfortunate, it is also, sadly, unavoidable in this day and age.”
“What is unfortunate, Mr. Beckwith?”
He chews his lower lip a moment, eyeing me.
And then he sighs. “Men appreciate your beauty, even if perhaps it’s in a different way than a lady would.
Pocket tokens are, well…images that can be purchased at a lower price than your portrait work.
They often sell such things to fellows in saloons, gentleman’s clubs, casinos. ”
I consider all of this in brooding silence for a moment.
Is it all that different from respectable companies using my face to sell milk or soap?
Or that rich family in Newport that purchased my portrait to hang in their boudoir?
Haven’t artists like Beckwith and Church, even Leah, always told me that the beholder is going to see in my image exactly what he or she wants to see?
The next morning, while Mamma is still sleeping and the words of Mr. Beckwith are fresh in my mind, I do something I’m not supposed to do.
Emboldened by my curiosity, as well as intrigued by the mountain of papers just sitting on the table, many of them addressed to me, I begin to riffle through it all.
I want to feel more worldly, less na?ve, if I am to work like a woman, so first I take the newspaper into my hands.
Auto Show Coming To New York City!
The front page describes the new horseless carriages that can move entirely on their own.
To think what it must be like to ride in one—I can only imagine!
Excited, I read on, moving to an article about a new food coming out of the Midwest, something called “cereal,” and there’s an advertisement for it claiming it will cure all sorts of woes and ailments.
The next article I notice is an opinion piece by a Mr. Anthony Comstock.
I throw a glance toward Mamma; she’s still snoring in the rumpled bed, so I read on, careful not to rustle the pages.
“In an age in which proper and decent people know enough about human nature to put tablecloths over table legs, for fear of unwanted and most indecent stimulations, how is it that there are more than 25,000 women for sale in this city?”
Mr. Comstock’s words reek of offense and outrage.
He goes on to applaud the recent arrest of a lady for her crime of smoking a cigarette on the street, reminding his readers of the many practices that the gentler sex should take heed to avoid.
Crimes against decency, too often practiced in public in spite of their obscenity.
Mr. Comstock reminds folks that ladies should not ride bicycles, read novels, listen to ragtime music, play tennis, or speak aloud any obscenities.
“It is God’s work,” according to Mr. Comstock, “to combat the many vices which are winding their way into daily life, and it is only with a watchful and vigilant eye that we can see these crimes and root them out.”
I can barely pull my eyes away. Mr. Comstock concludes by lauding the work of the “Society for Prevention of Vice,” over which he reigns. He thanks a gentleman, Mr. Hal Thorne, for his generous funding in support of this vigilante gang.
Thorne. I wonder if this Mr. Hal Thorne is any relation to the Pittsburgh millionaires.
They certainly were known as a pious bunch.
But then I read on, about how Mr. Comstock’s primary aim is “to protect the virtue and safety of the softer sex. These young girls who are being turned into bejeweled Bathshebas, right here in our modern-day Sodom. Once bedeviled, their only fate is to be brothel bound.”
I put the newspaper down, a current of unease running through my body.
My heart is racing, and so are my thoughts.
I can only imagine what Mr. Comstock and his Society must think of my work.
Surely he wouldn’t approve of my thin costumes as I dress as Cleopatra or Salome.
Or my face on these so-called pocket tokens that Mamma deems so vulgar.
Or, I think with a shudder, a painting with my bare breast on display.
Suddenly I feel unclean, as if Mr. Comstock has chastised me directly. My mind is troubled, recalling the stares of the men in the boardinghouse back in Pittsburgh on rent day. The smell of their breath. The hunger in their eyes.
Sickened by this, seeking a reprieve, I turn back toward the pile of mail. Next page. Anything to distract me. I see my name on an envelope, and I grab it. I’m most certainly not allowed to open this letter without Mamma’s approval, but she’s still snoring in the bed, so I tear it open.
It’s not a proposal of marriage. It’s something far better.