The trick for a woman like Evie was how to pass time without getting in trouble. She had a dozen ways to kill an afternoon. She listened to records in the morning. Tipped some wine after lunch while she bathed and perfumed to ready herself. Most of all she worked on her clothes. Her mother had taught her how. Evie believed sewing was such a low thing then—she was right about that—but in time she learned there were lower occupations. Now even something simple like a slip gave her the chance to complicate its design, to make it intricate, perhaps needlessly so. She was glad her mother showed her how to do these things. Life would have been so boring if it wasn’t for designing her own clothes, for her records, and the long walks she took in the mornings when she could get out. The thing with the man was something else.
Consider that Evie was nice looking and fair skinned, that her hair coiled languidly on its own without having to be relaxed. She had thin lips and small teeth, and smiled nice, and moved graceful, like her hips had knowledge in their curves and dimples. They did. Her mother was never pretty, or at least her mother hadn’t been pretty for long, Evie didn’t imagine. Evie was more like her father. Her father had run off too. She remembered these things as she sewed. How she’d told her mother, leaving, that sewing was the only thing Evie got from her. “That’s all that’s worth taking,” she’d said. Running off wasn’t enough for people like Evie, when she was sixteen years old and wanted to dance in the majestic halls of a grand city. Chicago, New York, Paris, Zagreb, Timbuktu. The precise geography of her ambition was cloudy. What Evie knew was that she wanted to wear the most elegant costumes and carry herself with perfect sangfroid—to meet men who were loose with money, so she could get some money for herself. Evie was twenty-six in the spring of 1917. She missed her mother like she never thought possible before those days. Because her mother couldn’t hide what she was, couldn’t escape, not like how Evie and her father did. They were the guilty ones, Evie and her father, with delicate features and soft voice and light skin. Evie’s mother couldn’t hide, couldn’t pass, not like Evie could. Which is why Evie liked living on Capitol Avenue in Omaha, a block that was equal parts elegance and squalor, one where people let irregularities slide. There were places like Capitol Avenue in Topeka, where Evie came from, but too many people knew her in Topeka. Even if life in Omaha wasn’t so great, she was judged here more by what she did than what she was. In a way, at least. What she looked like, not who she looked like. What she was, not who she came from. Even though this was the truth of the matter as she knew it, Evie couldn’t speak this plainness of her desire to her mother. Not when she was growing up and not ever. It had been nearly ten years since they’d spoken. Evie was fairly certain she’d never speak to her mother again.
If Evie had too much wine, she put the tools away to keep from mangling the fabric or slicing open her arms. Those big shears. The razor blade, the sharps. If she was at the table thinking about her mother, then it was time to stopper the wine. Then she bathed, she perfumed. All the things required of a kept girl waiting for her man.
Ugo Daniel would come around seven in the evening. He put money down to keep the rooms. He had a key. Evie kept an eye on the street so his arrival never surprised her. She was ready to greet him, to have a drink poured, a record spinning, a party started and waiting for him. Ugo, always fashionably late. He bought her things—silk stockings, a powder puff, a rabbit fur coat, nothing actually too expensive. She didn’t complain about the shabby presents because he was an easy one to handle. Nervous, glancing, spastic in his way, but too self-involved to give her trouble. He spent more time in front of her mirrors than she did. Dressing and re-dressing, preening himself. He claimed people were after him—he had to look good. If he didn’t bring along dinner, they ordered in from a restaurant down the street (chop suey was her favorite) and then ate at her table. Evie made a habit of finishing only half of what he got her, no matter the portion. When she ate around a man, she had half. It was a rule.
They ate at the same table where Evie sewed during the day, an oak slab gouged and slashed from use. Ugo never asked about the abused table, nor the bolts of fabric she kept, nor the wire dummy in the corner she used to shape her dresses. Maybe he thought these were merely things all women had. Ugo wasn’t so smart. Evie may not have known what he did during the day—whether he had a family on the side in addition to his kept woman—but she knew he’d inherited his money. He’d escaped Europe on a friend’s yacht with the family fortune in the early days of the war. A story he told all the time.
After dinner and wine and coffee and wine, they’d go to bed. There was some theater involved then. A feather boa could be ruined between her legs if he bought her one. That happened more than once. Evie knew she looked good. She had energy, a wonderfully pale complexion, a great supple essing of neck, shoulders, and breasts. She knew how to make herself look like she was in love. Evie felt like a movie star doing things with the boa, more like a Talmadge sister than one of Marnie Chambers’ brats of Topeka, Kansas. She looked like Natalie Talmadge. That’s what she told people to shape how they saw her.
Ugo wasn’t the first of her men, he was just the latest. She knew enough by now. He wasn’t so bad. Wouldn’t beat her. Never threatened to kill her. Wasn’t so large. The routine didn’t hurt; it was just routine. That’s what he laid down for. The worst part was that people asked about Ugo if they had an idea who he was. Was he dangerous? Did he hit her? Some people got aroused hearing such things. Evie took a little extra on the side from some gamblers who asked questions like these and more. Ugo didn’t know about that. Evie wouldn’t tell him. He gave her some too, of course. She spent it all, every dime. It was too much money for something as simple as being an old man’s girl, and the only thing that made what she was doing right was to make the money disappear. She wasn’t so na?ve anymore to not think what the money meant, or who it was coming from, those gamblers.
That year a swindler they called the Cypriot was the main obsession on the River Ward, on Evie’s street too, even more than the battles in Europe. That’s what people talked about. The Cypriot was a numbers guy from Chicago, some said, a policy man looking to wheedle in on established terrain. There were stories about his being a ladies’ man, a brute. This excited a lot of the girls Evie knew. Some of them said he was a rogue Ottoman assassin trained in Constantinople. That he was a secret agent here to meet other secret agents. Or to knock off a dancer at Chez Paree. It made no sense. One day the Cypriot was a celebrity criminal from the East Coast. The next, girls insisted he was involved with Gavrilo Princip and the Black Hand, that he’d had a role in planning the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Duchess Sophie, and he was on the run from Sarajevo. Everyone agreed the Cypriot was an important man. He had money, he dressed exquisitely, he kept a girl somewhere in Omaha, in the brownstones north of downtown. The whole bit.