Everything's Eventual

Paper Hearts

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Decades after the heyday of villainy, there's still no such thing as happily ever after. 

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Millinery shops are quite out of fashion in Gotham City these days, as they are in a great many other places. The single surviving purveyor of fine hats is called Miss Davenport's Imports and it's a business in serious trouble, though you wouldn't know it upon entering through its ornate glass and cherry wood doors. The walls are lined with butter cream and olive striped wallpaper, the ceiling sunshine yellow and the floor faux, scuff free, white marble tile.

The hats on display are new, yet relics from another time. Pastel hat boxes hang from the walls in shades of faded rose and powder blue. Miss Davenport insists that the air be perfumed and to open the door to her shop is to release a cloud of gardenia and lily into the smelly, dirty air of the city. Mirrors and vanity tables clutter what little space isn't taken up by hat displays; it is a comfortable kind of clutter, like a grandmother's attic or grandfather's study—not the claustrophobic sort.

This atmosphere keeps Miss Davenport's few customers coming back to her when they could easily go to a bigger, better, more upscale shop in the fashion district. This atmosphere keeps Miss Davenport herself here—despite the constant guilt trips of her elder sister, begging her to return home and get away from this ugly, dirty, corrupt city.

It's true, the dangers of Gotham lurk right outside the doors. While once, this neighborhood was the height of fashion, in recent years it has fallen into disrepair. The shop is sunlight and fresh air where both are not merely rare but impossible. Gotham is not a place where such brightness makes a point to linger. Sunshine and color are simply...out of place. Gotham is gloomy, even on the best of days, yet here, on eighty first street, is a place of bottled springtime.

Miss Davenport, a forty something with salt and pepper hair and an impeccable sense of fashion, often talks about moving the shop to a more appropriate location—safer, cleaner, more profitable—but she knows she never will. Though the number of vagabonds who sleep at the bus stop grows larger every year, the neighboring shops go out of business with disturbingly predictable regularity, and her customers themselves become both older and fewer, on some level Miss Davenport understands the value of having the place here. Without her pastel shop, the entire street would be gray, and that prospect breaks her heart. Gotham is dark enough as it is; eighty first needs her shop.

And so, here it is. Gotham's last surviving millinery shop--one of perhaps fifty in as many states--a last bastion of old fashioned aesthetic in a dark, broody, modern world. And here, Miss Davenport sells things that no one buys anymore. Decades ago, when the first lady's pillbox hats were all the rage, this was a good business to be in. Now, in the age of micro-miniskirts and the hyper-casual, not so much.

But, this is what she wants to do and Miss Eliza Davenport has never been one to have her desires denied. She doesn't mind that the gap between the money coming into the shop and the money going right back out again has begun to close--that her profits and expenses are nearly interchangeable numbers. She doesn't mind the vagabonds (most of them, at least) and she doesn't mind the decrease in business. This is what she wants to do, and by God, she is going to do it.

With this mentality, she remains in business, until everything changes and she closes the doors for good, a few short weeks after the very first time a homeless man on the corner informs her quite cheerfully that hatters—in spite of their best efforts—have a tendency to go mad.

She keeps her head barely above the muddy waters of bankruptcy for years before this new down-and-outer stops her on her morning stroll down the street towards her shop. His face is dirty and he's quite, quite old, but his smile is bright and it reaches his eyes.