Free Norman Rockwell by Laura Claridge Page A

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