Norman Rockwell by Laura Claridge Read Free Book Online

supplanted by a complete reversal of fortune at any moment, uncertainty became the only constant of the Hill household. With a Yonkers boardinghouse for their home, the first-generation Americans grew up not knowing whether the week would rain down the rich array of clothes and culinary treats from Manhattan typical of a particularly lucrative painting commission, or if they’d be divvying up a dozen pairs of identical shoes, all the same size, that their father, in the aftermath of a drunken night of despair, had bought for next to nothing off the street.
    The joie de vivre that Howard Hill manifested led his eldest son to follow his romantic lead. In 1875, Tom Hill daringly sailed to Mexico and Cuba on a boat that carried both passengers and cargo loaded along the journey. His diary tells of adventures ranging from hurricanes to government insurrections, where, as two boats braced to battle, he “hoped to see blood flow.” Tom’s importance as the oldest son comes through in the letters he sends and receives during the trip. His interest in the “children” left behind—his two youngest siblings, nine-year-old Nancy and the baby, Percevel—is keen, and the older girls, his sisters Amy, Kate, and Susie, take pains to keep him up-to-date on their little brother “Percy” especially. Their letters to him center on church and Sunday school; the entire family, except for Howard Hill, was deeply religious, and Tom’s diary records the hours that he spent reading his Bible every Sunday. Most significant, the sisters’ correspondence reveals that he was probably his mother’s favorite, and that his relationship with his father was at best vexed. “Father misses you and often talks very kindly of you, he feels your absents [
sic
] very much. . . . he has quite surprised us by thinking so much about you,” his sister Susie earnestly informs him. She wistfully alludes to the young man’s cheerful nature: “We all miss you very much every time a boy goes by in the evening whistling we think it is you.” Tom, in return, writes mostly of the head winds and the sharks that he encounters, but he does add thoughtful bits about the gifts such as tortoiseshell combs he is bringing home for the girls.
    Judging from the weary, often inarticulate communication that the apparently uneducated Mrs. Hill sent to her Mexico-bound son in 1875, she carefully marshaled her energies to run her household and contribute to the church, the latter ranking higher in her order of commitments than the former. Family anecdotes about Howard Hill’s irrational behavior during days of drunken rampages reflect communal amusement at the wildly incongruous accusations of infidelity he would level against his devout and devoted wife and dismay at the suffering his erratic actions caused her. From the few surviving pictures of Norman Rockwell’s maternal grandmother, Anne Hill was a perpetually tired, anxious woman. The face that peers cautiously out of one photograph from the early 1880s seems fine-tuned into a permanent tension—perhaps an alert apprehension ready to defend against Howard’s periodic tirades.
    But she did adore her husband, and she must have appreciated that a life of adventure was in the cards for his sons, at least from the way she accepted with equanimity Tom’s daring ventures. Although he had been coughing up blood and running high fevers for years, Tom believed that the fresh air would serve him well, and he continued to sail any chance he could get, fatiguing himself in the process. In between his forays into the sea, he pursued a career as an artist, admirably earning enough through easel sales and design work to support himself comfortably, although his flat, childish representations of kittens and butterflies evince little evidence of his father’s technical skill.
    Nonetheless, the young man gained a fairly substantial local reputation for himself so that he was able to rent a studio at 40 Warburton Street, where he