She regretted putting it like that, like she really had been conning Jake, like she’d tricked him into thinking the love she offered was anything but real. She wasn’t bothered for long, though. She counted the hundred and made the deal. She’d be set up fat.
She didn’t even wait a day before meeting the dressmaker, a lady entrepreneur who could teach Evie how to deal with merchants, how to keep accounts, how to make deadbeats pay. Evie had dozens of things to ask, and there were a thousand more she’d learn along the way. It was one thing to sew for yourself, to create your own fashions, and quite another to impose an intelligent design on an unsuspecting client. The dressmaker wore a demure black suit that fit over her smoothly. She was happy to tell what she knew about the trade and the craft. Evie was surprised by this kindness. In every trade she’d trafficked before, a girl tried her hardest to keep a fresher face out of the game, to reduce competition. There were mean tricks all girls were trained in from birth. It wasn’t so hard to make a girl feel bad about herself if that was what you were after. But the dressmaker wasn’t like this. She advised Evie to never let a man hold her money if she could avoid it, especially not a bank, where the regulations were designed to rid a businesswoman of what was deemed her excess capital. The dressmaker sounded persecuted and crass at times, but Evie saw how this was necessary. This woman was a success; she’d become one by keeping the fact of her success a secret. Nobody could take from her what they didn’t know she had. From the outside it looked like she kept a shabby shop, with gaps in the window glazing, a small showroom where a client undressed in the open. To an outsider her company was nothing to be jealous of. It brought in cash all the same. A small but dedicated clientele was convinced of the dressmaker’s vitality. Quality was high. This was enough.
“Maybe you’re not such a nice woman at heart,” the lady told Evie. “But you’ll be all right. It was smart going to Tom Dennison. You did well.”
Evie was busy with her own shop before long, making dresses, slips, camisoles, and scarves for working girls. So maybe it didn’t matter when she heard that Jake skipped town. She accepted his leaving. Keeping her end of the deal with Dennison would be easier if Jake was gone. As Evie saw it, she and Jake were the separate legs of an X. As one’s fortune rose, the other’s fell. While rumors spread about Jake and the scandal he’d brought on himself, Evie set up shop out of her rooms on Capitol Avenue and was making a killing.
Her main room was cleared of the lounging furniture. The dimensions redesigned with new purpose, the room made longer. Evie had a box couch and small table constructed at the window, one with only room enough for her. Curtains lined the couch so she could block out the workroom—something she almost never did—to sit quietly alone at the open window, to look down at the street. If she was home, she might as well be working. Evie ate breakfast at the nook table, but that was all. Otherwise, she indulged her vocation. The old worktable was preserved, of course, and the wire dummy acquired fresh cousins to accommodate the several garments Evie worked on at a time. She bought a new treadle sewing machine now that she had room for one, and kept it at the center of her rooms, its oiled wood and iron pedal. Her mother had owned something similar, so Evie knew how to make it work. Around her bed in the other room, she stored bolts of fabric and bins filled with sequins and beads.
To look at her rooms one might have believed it was a lonesome life Evie lived. (Why, she wondered, didn’t anyone have such thoughts about her loneliness when she was a kept woman?) But her rooms were always busy those days. With madams coming in to place orders for their girls, and the girls trying on dresses or stopping in to see how the work came along, to escape their own petty cell in a palace. To enter a workshop was no idle thing for these girls. Here they were allowed to linger and observe craft coming together, instead of being spritzed endlessly with perfume, or popping champagne corks, or the nonstop washing and checking of their bodies by the state examiner. To sit and gossip was a fine thing. To be treated like a lady.
The girls teased Evie about the money she must be bringing in. They knew what expenses the madam passed on to them for garments, which was never the same as Evie charged, but she still made plenty. “With what kale you got, why don’t you go see some far-off corner of the globe?” “Paris.” “An island someplace.” “Shit. Even a day in Kansas City got to be better than sitting around here.”
“Why not get with a family?” one girl always asked. A new girl, or an old one, ones on adjacent points of a cycle. “Have some babies. Let me live with you! Ha! I’d be your kid.”
“That isn’t for me,” Evie replied. “I like it like this.”
“What about your mother then? Send for her.”
Evie told how her mother had taught her all about needlework and the making of clothes. The girls thought it would be a great thing to send for her if she was poor. To enjoy the profits and help with the work. It wasn’t like that, Evie explained. “My mother couldn’t get along here. There’s one spot in Topeka she’s been allowed to live her whole life, and that’s where she’d want to stay.” Evie didn’t know if what she said about her mother’s wishes was entirely true. She didn’t want to find out what her mother would think of all this, the way Evie lived. That was all.
The girls asked about Jake.
In a way those girls admired Evie for what happened. It was said that Jake had been bamboozled by her, that he was done in because of the things his girl demanded. That poor, bewitched boy—a wicked, conniving woman was behind it all. If this was true, the girls said, good for her. “If a man can’t give what’s needed then he gets what he gets.”
Evie didn’t feel that way. It wasn’t that Jake didn’t give what she demanded; he couldn’t accept what she could provide. Not such a small distinction, after all.
He returned to her in late September 1919, on a Wednesday. She’d received a letter from him a few weeks before in which he asked permission to stop by and say hello. He was going to take the Miihlsteins to a carnival on the Ak-Sar-Ben midway, he said, and wouldn’t be in Omaha long. By contract, Evie shouldn’t have allowed a visit. But she replied without thinking. In a note she dashed off immediately, she told him he could say hello if he was going to be around.
When the day came, Jake arrived early because the kids were gone from the Eigler house when he went to surprise them. “Only Herr Miihlstein was there. Anna’s still at that home. Miihlstein didn’t know where Karel was. He hardly comes around at all.”