Conscience

Conscience

Norman came into the world “the wrong side down,” Emma Thomas
reported to her mother in December 1884. He would grow to be
over six feet two, but he was tiny at birth, only four pounds. “Now
for the boy’s looks,” Emma wrote when her son was hardly three weeks
old. “There is no use I know telling you he is not beautiful, but all the same he is not yet”—at least not compared with his older sister, Mary, who had been born with thick dark hair and a sweet, small mouth. Norman’s nose was bigger and his head a little squashed. All the same, Emma added, “his mother and father are quite proud of him.”

That mix of frank evaluation and tender pride was characteristic of
Emma. She could be blunt in her appraisals, probably harsher than she meant to be, but she was also loving. She demanded much of her children, and she gave them her support in return. Her husband, Welling, the minister of the Presbyterian Church in Marion, Ohio, tended to defer to her. She was, as Norman later wrote, “the more outstanding personality, and Father was content to have it so.” Welling was more restrained, traditional in his habits and reserve.

“What a setup for the modern psychologically minded biographer or
novelist!” wrote Norman decades later, refl ecting on his hometown and upbringing. “A study in revolt born of reaction from Presbyterian orthodoxy, and the Victorian brand of Puritanism in a Middletown setting! The only trouble is that that isn’t what happened. I both loved and respected my parents.”

They were tested during the fi rst few weeks of Norman’s life. Mary
fell sick in January, crying when Welling touched her. Emma had to hold her in her lap while cradling Norman in her other arm. Mary’s parents thought she was teething. They learned too late that she had diphtheria. She died two months after Norman was born. Understandably, Welling and Emma were protective of their son when he was young. He was a sickly child, gangling and frail, prone to croup. His mother kept him out of public school until he was in the fourth grade, sending him to a neighbor’s for tutoring and keeping him home when the raspy, barking cough overcame him. She lulled him to sleep with hymns and told him stories from her childhood. She described a near mutiny aboard a ship and trips to the palace of the king of Siam. She told him what it was like to be shunned by
other white girls in North Carolina because her parents taught blacks, and how she learned to make friends. He knew, from an early age, that she was not like most of the mothers he knew.

There is a photograph of Emma Thomas—then Emma Mattoon—as a
child, but she is not in view. Her mother, Mary, sits near her father, Stephen, on the second-story veranda of their large house in Bangkok, shaded by the long overhang of the pyramid-shaped roof.

From CONSCIENCE by Louisa Thomas. Published by arrangement with Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Copyright © Louisa Thomas, 2011