To be sure, the romance that blossomed between Nancy Hill and Waring Rockwell would yield plenty of theatrical fodder for their creative son. How the couple met is unclear, especially as Nancy was Episcopalian and Waring a Presbyterian in an age when courting often occurred at church functions. Nancy, however, was looking for a good man. “Apparently she was considered a bit of an old maid by the time she married at age twenty-five,” Mary Amy Orpen explains. Nancy and Waring got engaged the year that her mother and brother died, in spite of the young woman’s reservations about being three years older than her fiancé. Hard work had become an ancestral badge of honor by the time that Rockwell’s grandfather was building his coal business, and Waring appeared to be as steadfast and energetic as his father. He also proved malleable: two years after their engagement, Nancy convinced Waring to be confirmed in the Episcopal faith. He had already started receiving communion at Nancy’s modest St. Paul’s parish. Episcopalians trumped Presbyterians on the social pecking order; but the lifelong adoration Waring Rockwell held for his spouse suggests that society played little part in his embrace of her religion. All her life, according to Norman Rockwell, Nancy would believe that Waring had married down in taking her for his wife.
Almost three years after the couple became engaged, Nancy’s father died. Howard Hill was as itinerant in death as he had been in life. Inexplicably, it took his surviving children almost two years to arrange for his burial in St. John’s cemetery, and even then, his grave lay conspicuously separated from those of his wife and son. Nancy, twenty-three years old, was already living in Crompton, Rhode Island, with her older sister Susan and Susan’s husband, Samuel, when her father died, and she and “Susie” may have used their distance as a convenient excuse for failing to arrange for the patriarch’s interment. An Episcopal minister, Susie’s husband, Samuel Orpen, had recently been appointed rector of St. Philip’s, the first Episcopal church to have been erected in the Pawtuxet Valley, and his home provided a temporary oasis for his wife’s rootless sister. Two years after Hill’s death, Nancy achieved a respite from her insecure life. “She spoke often of having had ‘only’ a five-year engagement to Waring,” Mary Amy Orpen remembers. “ ‘I didn’t believe in long engagements’ is what she would explain. The truth is, in those days she was getting rather old to be a first-time bride, so instead of the ten years not uncommon for engagements then, she hurried things up a bit.” Local church records show that Anne Mary Hill and Jarvis Waring Rockwell, with his striking resemblance to the bride’s handsome dead brother, Tom, were wed at St. Philip’s on July 22, 1891. Samuel Orpen, Nancy’s brother-in-law, performed the ceremony at the Episcopal church, and he sponsored the wedding breakfast held in the rectory afterward. In attendance were ten-year-old Frances Amy Orpen (Susan’s daughter) as maid of honor and Samuel D. Rockwell, Waring’s brother, as best man. Nancy’s younger brother, Percevel Howard Hill, gave the bride away; her other sisters and adopted siblings had scattered throughout the country. Phoebe and John Rockwell, the groom’s parents, were present, as were Waring’s sister and her husband, and his great-aunt Anne Waring Paddock and her husband, Walter. The absence of parents on the bride’s side poignantly bespoke the devastation tuberculosis had visited upon the Hills; nor had its reign ended, as the wedding party would discover soon enough.
The beauty of the ceremony and the “prettily decorated” church, festooned with “palms and flowers,” served to remind everyone that although Nancy Hill was marrying into one of Yonkers’s most reliable and well-established families, her own background enabled her to ennoble the surroundings with her inherited artistic (and aristocratic) taste. Having her sister’s husband perform the Episcopal rites also suggested that Waring Rockwell was marrying his equal. Nancy ensured that the wedding conveyed an “agreeable fascination,” as the local paper termed it: “The bride and maid of honor were attired in white, the bride carried a posy of duchess roses and the maid of honor a posy of white daisies. . . . The bridal party approached the chancel amid the quiet strains of the ‘Bridal Chorus.’ It was a beautiful and impressive scene—the solemnity of the occasion, the fragrance of the artistically arranged bridal blossoms, the grace of the bride and groom. . . .”
The couple moved into their modest spousal apartment at 206 West 103rd Street, near the northwestern boundary of Central Park, an area that had blossomed when the Ninth Avenue El brought it to life in 1880. Waring’s job as a clerk with the Manhattan regional branch of Philadelphia’s George Wood and Sons textile company provided him ample opportunities for promotion. In spite of the troubled economy of the early 1890s, considered by some experts to have encompassed the second-worst depression in American history, the fin de siècle beckoned from the horizon of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, with its promise of a fully functioning I.R.T. subway, a completed world-class cathedral, and further blossoming of academic institutions and residential expansions along Riverside and Morningside parks. Innovation and progress, replete with rewards for hardworking citizens like Waring Rockwell, heralded the decade ahead. And the newlyweds inherited a ready-made community: John Rockwell, for one, had traded his daily commute from the Yonkers homestead for an apartment in Manhattan, probably because his own fortunes had been damaged during the recent downturn in the economy. Cousins lived in the city as well, and Nancy’s own relatives were all within visiting distance. Following the lead of her pious mother, however, the new bride established as her first social circle the committees of the local Episcopal church, St. Luke’s.
So it was that on September 29, 1892, the Rockwells’ first child was born a native New Yorker. Jarvis Waring Rockwell, Jr.—called “Jerry” during his childhood—took his place as firstborn and father’s namesake. For the next year and a half, Waring, as conscientious and sober as his hapless father-in-law had been unreliable, worked doubly hard to accommodate the family’s growing financial needs, while Nancy responded to the seemingly never-ending demands of a new baby. In spite of Jerry’s age, she even forced herself to take him to Crompton to see her sister and brother-in-law, because the Orpens were making sounds about moving somewhere warmer that might improve the minister’s lingering cough. In the summer of 1893, amid great concern that the cotton business would be affected by the recent stock market crash on June 29, a loving but plaintive wife informed her already diligent husband that his efforts would need to increase, since it appeared that they were to have another child early the following year.
3
City Boy, Born and Bred
By midnight on February 2, 1894, snow was predicted for the following day. At least a month earlier, Waring Rockwell had dutifully informed his boss that any time now he might fail to show up at work; his wife, convinced she had a sickly constitution, insisted that her husband be prepared for a premature delivery. Instead, pretty much on schedule, she had gone into labor that evening, and now Waring awaited anxiously the appearance of Dr. Grant, who arrived in plenty of time to assist Norman Percevel Rockwell, feet first, into the world at two A.M. on February 3, hours before the first snowflake fell. The elaborate miniature bedclothes Nancy had expertly embroidered in hopes of fitting them to a girl this time seemed a bit frilly in the (slightly horsey) face of this gangly infant, she had to admit. Nevertheless, incongruous or not, he would wear them. The newborn’s eighteen-month-old brother was quickly sent away to Waring’s sister’s large country home in Nyack, where Grace and Sherman Johnson had two older boys to keep young Jerry amused.
Pictures of Norman Rockwell dating from his first few years reveal a wary child whose gaze seems preternaturally fearful and impatient at the same time. In more ways than this, the child was truly father of the man. Rockwell would consistently narrate his feelings far more expressively through his face than through his conversation. Consider this experiment: cover the top half of any photograph of the adult, then reverse the trick and look at the eyes only, bereft of the inevitably upcurved lips. Impossibly, the heavily hooded eyes stare forth boldly and tentatively at the same ti
me. Rarely does their emotion match the implication of the smiling mouth. Pleasant though wary, provocative if emotionally removed, happy but sad: these are the paradoxes that defined the man as well as the boy. Apparently, the personality they reflect was laid down early and irrevocably.
The tension that even the toddler wears on his face seems part of what would prove his mother’s mixed legacy. By default as much as design, Nancy Hill yoked her sons to stereotypes: Jerry represented the masculine ideal in the household, and Norman the effete nobleman. Somewhat reminiscent of British primogeniture, where the firstborn son inherits the manor, Jerry, named after his father, was to be successful in business, and a “real man” besides; Norman, tasked by his names to represent the royal as well as the feminine side of the family tree, would develop his artistic talents. Accordingly, Nancy projected the appropriate behavior onto each son: she encouraged Jerry to be aggressive, strong, and fearless, while she reassured Norman that he was weak, like she was, and therefore probably entitled to protection as a result—though she quickly turned the equation around so that he was meant to succor her.
Through the names she bestowed on her sons at birth, Nancy hinted at the duality she would use to guide their development. Rockwell ruminated aloud that “My mother, an Anglophile . . . and very proud of her English ancestry, named me after Sir Norman Perceval (‘Remember, Norman Percevel,’ she’d say, ‘it’s spelled with an e; i and a are common’). . . . The line from Sir Norman to me is tortuous but unbroken, and my mother insisted that I always sign my name Norman Percevel Rockwell. ‘Norman Percevel,’ she’d say, ‘you have a valiant heritage. Never allow anyone to intimidate you or make you feel the least bit inferior. There has never been a tradesman in your family. You are descended from artists and gentlemen.’ ”
The strained stories about their royal heritage that Nancy repeated to Lord Perceval’s New York namesake (she seems to have been quite mistaken about the spelling of the name) sounded dubious to Rockwell even when he was young, contributing to a lifelong gentle scorn toward his mother. He felt diminished, not elevated, by bearing so patently inappropriate a name as this sign of his mother’s misplaced pride, and he “darn near died” when a boy called him “Mercy Percy” in his youth. It was Jerry, named after one of the family’s true Yankee aristocrats, Jarvis Waring, who got handed the real identity, as far as the younger son could see. Somewhat gratifying to the competitive older child, such classification encouraged Rockwell to believe from an early age that his own masculinity was never the given that his brother’s was—“I had the queer notion that Percevel (and especially the form Percy) was a sissy name, almost effeminate”—and he lived “in terror” of being ridiculed because of it. His idea was not queer; it was an accurate reflection of his times. At this point in American culture, media use of the name Percevel functioned as a kind of shorthand for pretentious, effete old-worldisms. The crusty H. L. Mencken even warned parents that giving their sons such a “sissy” name was tantamount to ensuring a childhood of playground fights for Percevel to defend his masculine honor. Rockwell would always feel himself falling short of the model American male, and having to stave off the identity attached to Percevel, a part of his name until he left home, contributed to his insecurity.
Oddly, in light of such perceptions and his relatives’ own observations to the contrary, Norman (as well as Jerry) confusedly believed that he had been the favorite son, a complicated assessment buttressed by Nancy’s unfortunate edicts to her friends that “Norman and I are so alike, we might as well be Siamese twins.” In spite of evidence suggesting that she did in fact favor Jerry, her oppressive attention to Norman conferred benefits as well as caused distress. Although it does seem that she was generously possessed of hypochondria, self-centeredness, and intellectual banality, Nancy Hill also displayed a startling flexibility, a sometimes charming eccentricity, close attention to detail, and a resolute will to get whatever she wanted—this last characteristic closely observed by her younger son. An unpredictable sense of fun coexisted with her often rigid propriety, and her pleasure in the ribald seems the probable source of Rockwell’s own famously naughty humor: “I know that I was shocked when my aunt Nancy thought nothing of my going skinny-dipping with a mixed group of young people in the 1940s,” Mary Amy Orpen recalls. “She saw the sketch I made of the event, and she said, ‘I’m appalled.’ When I asked her why, she said, ‘It is too early in the season; in May you can still catch your death of cold.’ ”
In all fairness, the stress Nancy labored under shortly after Norman’s birth would have weakened the most determined mother’s resolve to tend cheerfully a newborn and a toddler not yet two years old. Her brother-in-law, the Reverend Samuel Orpen, had become so ill that he had resigned from St. Philip’s. In spite of the signs that consumption once again preyed on her family, Susan Orpen optimistically agreed that the strain of running what were essentially two parishes had caused her husband’s exhaustion. The young minister and his family stayed on at the rectory until Samuel felt recovered enough to travel to Welden, North Carolina, to take on a new church job. Susan remained behind to oversee the packing of the household, and to visit with her sister’s new baby, she hoped, before leaving for the rectorate in the South.
Instead, she received a telegram stating that her husband was stricken yet again—with “apoplexy.” According to rectory accounts, their loyal Crompton physician traveled all the way to Welden to bring the minister back to Rhode Island, where he could recover among friends and family. By mid-July, Samuel appeared strong enough to set out again, but it was felt that he needed a vacation to recuperate fully. Frances, their nineteen-year-old daughter, moved in with Nancy and Waring, and the Orpens departed for Europe.
Frances, who had been Nancy’s youthful maid of honor nine years before, was a favorite of Waring’s as well. Now she would prove helpful with the younger charges. Still, Nancy was all too aware of what her brother-in-law’s fevers and coughs signaled, and by now she would have surmised the threat that contaminated family members posed to one another. She had already observed the symptoms of consumptive tuberculosis up close five times in the past fifteen years; the disease was wiping out her relatives. She knew how to interpret Susan’s own increasing fragility and recurring colds; if Samuel had tuberculosis, his wife would most likely die not too long after him.
Nancy Rockwell understood that lives entwined with the Hill family proved more provisional than most. Her distant affection for her own children must have stemmed not only from her mother’s example but from, at the very least, an unconscious fear of losing them. She didn’t know the epidemic pattern of the disease, which would have depressed her further: the bacterial tuberculosis that had not finished its sweep through her family had most likely left its calling card with every person in continual close physical contact with the Hills. The lucky ones would escape its activation, though the germs would live in their host until death, ready for activation if the immune system failed. Poverty, poor nutrition, and overcrowding were conditions that ensured the disease a stranglehold; alternations of feast and famine in Howard Hill’s household must have weakened many of the inhabitants, making his family perfect incubators for the unwelcome guest. Consumption was not yet a rare condition by the end of the nineteenth century, but the degree to which it ravaged Nancy’s family seems more characteristic of the garrets of La Bohème than the boardinghouses of Yonkers.
The Hills’ mode of moving from one communal home to another depending on Howard’s work status had raised hope as often as it dashed expectations. Nancy had accepted such varying domestic rhythms as the norm, and the frequent relocations that she grew up with soon began to punctuate her married life. Around 1896, when Norman was two years old, the family moved to a railroad apartment at 789 St. Nicholas Avenue, near 149th Street, a sign that their financial resources were improving, especially since they had weathered the market crash and assimilated the costs of a second child comfortably. In later years, the illustrator remembered t
he fourth-floor walk-up as dark and gloomy but, however modest the apartment, its location farther uptown where real estate cost more and new buildings were being planned around anticipated mass transit stations marked a rise in his family’s fortunes. Whatever his parents believed, however, he stockpiled memories of a “pitifully genteel” neighborhood, composed of monolithic four- and five-story apartment buildings with a few private houses scattered in their midst. The residential area was actually a typical one for low-level white-collar workers at the turn of the century, and in fact most of the apartment buildings were erected after 1904, when the subway opened, but Rockwell cast the far Upper West Side peremptorily as “lower middle-class with a smattering of poorer families.” Most of all, he never forgot that “the tough slum districts were east of us toward Third Avenue.”
Nancy and Waring depended on Jerry to defend their younger child against the dangers they carefully detailed for both sons. By the time Jerry turned five or six, the athletic, confident, bright child functioned as a useful guide into boyhood society for his little brother. Allowed to tag along, primarily because the pecking order was so apparent, Norman learned to socialize easily with the friends that Jerry effortlessly gathered around him. And Norman felt safe with his strong older brother at his side, since disaster awaited him at every street corner, according to the warnings his nervous mother issued daily. But the fraternal closeness always on the verge of emerging was smothered under the pressure of Nancy’s awkward maternal gestures. Continuing to send Jerry to “have fun” with relatives in the country when her own nerves were frayed, Nancy clumsily tried to reassure her firstborn that his family would be there when he returned, emphasizing instead his dethroning: “Little Norman didn’t feel well again yesterday, so he crawled into bed and slept with me,” she once cheerfully wrote the young boy, a message he would recount to his own children years later, in wonder.
Norman Rockwell Page 6