Dutifully, she went to a model agency on Park Avenue. The waiting room was crowded with girls, large black portfolios resting against their thin legs. They were so pretty! Eventually Annie was ushered in to the office of the head of the agency. He looked at her legs, the cotton dress, her braids. He told her to let her hair fall free and bend over, then back. Did she have any clothes? Any professional photographs? No, no, she didn’t. He said he’d send her out on a catalog job the next day. She left, flushed with excitement. She’d heard of the incredible money models made—five dollars an hour, sometimes even more.

The next day, wearing the other cotton dress and the camel-hair coat, she went to an address in the East Fifties. Through an iron grille, she looked at a pretty, marble-fronted little house. Inside the open door, she saw cameras mounted on tripods, clothes strewn over delicate-legged furniture, and several well-dressed young girls talking to two young men. She left, without pushing the iron gates open.

She saw a good deal of Walter after that meeting; he was waiting to ship out, he said. There was no acting work to be had. He frequently tried to make love to her but desisted at the slightest sign of resistance. She always resisted. He didn’t take her to any more meetings but brought a copy of the Daily Worker for her to read. Once he took her to the Stanley Theater to see a Russian movie, Potemkin. He spoke to several people in the lobby after the end of the film. She was silent, desperately silent; the movie had terrified her, but she took comfort from the terror; her troubles were nothing…there was a whole world of trouble.

Two weeks before Christmas, her father wrote he had decided to stay in Taos for a while. It was wonderful painting country. He enclosed a money order for fifty dollars but still no return address. Feeling rich, she went to the League cafeteria on the top floor and ran into the Summit high-school teacher, whom she’d not seen since the party where she’d met Walter Vogel. The teacher had been taking classes with Kuniyoshi. He greeted her laconically. While she told him about the modeling job she hadn’t taken, thinking to amuse him, he drew a picture of her in his notebook. “Let’s have dinner together tonight,” he said, pushing the drawing across the table to her. The girl he had sketched wore an insipid smile but she held her head in a lofty way.