I don’t know whether a passionate love of the natural world can be transmitted or not, but like the love of beauty it is a thing one likes to associate with the scheme of inheritance.
WHILE HIS SIBLINGS were too far away in age to provide ideal playmates, Elwyn was born at the right time to get more attention from his father than had any of his brothers and sisters. Slender, dapper Samuel White, whose big gray mustache couldn’t hide his affectionate smile, was a thrifty, formal, teetotaling businessman who came downstairs on weekday mornings in starched cuffs and wing collars. In his youth he had found time to write and publish a handful of songs, including one called “Sweet Dreams of Childhood.” Starting at the age of fifteen, doing office chores, he had worked his way up through the successful New York–based piano manufacturer Horace Waters & Company, from clerk to branch manager and then officer of the company. By the time of his youngest son’s birth, he was scrawling Sam’l White above the titles “General Manager and Vice President.” Now a prosperous man, Samuel appreciated his family and enjoyed his leisure hours with them. He could also spare more time now because he was employing other staff at home besides the coachman. As a baby, Elwyn was tended by an English nanny, a girl named Kezzie Simpson, who was so fond of her infant charge that she later named her own firstborn son after him.
Elwyn’s maternal grandfather, Scottish-born William Hart, had been a successful landscape painter, a member—as was his brother James McDougal Hart—of the loose affiliation called the Hudson River School. William Hart’s legacy to the family was about nature as much as art. Starting out as an eight-year-old apprentice to a coachmaker, decorating door panels, he later painted portraits until he built up enough of a career to concentrate on portraying nothing but his true love in life—landscapes. He found, wrote a contemporary journalist, “that there was an inexhaustible fund of subjects among our hills and beside our streams.” Famed for his uncanny ability to remember minute details of a scene long after he observed it, Hart painted luminous panoramas of New England mountains and rolling hillsides in golden late-afternoon sunlight, such as his lovingly detailed portrait of Mount Madison rising behind the placid Androscoggin River in New Hampshire. He was also known for his skill in painting animals, especially the cows that, despite their careful breeding toward a one-sided goal beyond their control, became a popular symbol of harmonious nature among Hudson River artists. Hart became a fellow of various academies. Elwyn’s mother referred to him as an Academician. His work sold for impressive sums; a painting might fetch five thousand dollars even in the 1870s. He was so well-known that his death in 1894, five years before Elwyn was born, prompted long obituaries in the New York papers. “He refused,” declared the Register, “to be an imitator.” Elwyn’s brother Stanley was the only child to receive their grandfather’s surname as a middle name. Tall and skinny and red-haired, he also resembled Hart and enjoyed painting and drawing.
Elwyn’s mother, Jessie, cherished the family heritage. She may have married a businessman, she seemed to imply at times, but while Samuel was the son of a carpenter, she in contrast was the daughter of a famous artist. (Samuel’s own parents had lived out a similar dynamic, his English mother losing access to her family estate because she married a mere tradesman.) Elwyn absorbed respect for artistic achievement from the very air he breathed at home on quiet Summit Avenue—and perhaps also inherited impatience with social conventions that didn’t rate this kind of accomplishment highly. He browsed through his grandfather’s sketchbooks, slowly turning the oversize pages and admiring details of animal figures laboriously worked out in charcoal before they made it into a painting—especially the cows, their tilted horns and split hooves, their milk-heavy udders and sad, dark eyes. The former home of William Hart was just across the street on Sidney Avenue. Jessie’s stories about him made it easy for Elwyn to imagine his grandfather standing on the porch or sitting in his studio, finishing up a painting of hillsides bathed in the kind of slanting, moody light that his grandson also loved. In Jessie’s photos, her father had the beard of a Civil War general but the faraway gaze of a poet.
Jessie Hart White was much older than the mothers of Elwyn’s friends. Each morning she perched round metal glasses high on her nose and pulled her silvery white hair back and up to form an elegant bun. A gracious and kindhearted woman, she loved order and comfort, privacy and family. For a formal portrait with her youngest son, she wore a crisp white scalloped lace collar over a dark brocade dress and a large bow around the high waist. Jessie seldom appeared energetic; even her smile looked almost sad. By the time of Elwyn’s birth, his mother was already experiencing the diminished vigor that would mark the rest of her life. Elwyn once found her in the seldom-used reception room, across the hall from the parlor, lying stretched out on the sofa. Always expecting the worse, Elwyn immediately thought she was dead, but she turned out to be recovering from a harrowing ride on a runaway horse. In household administration she managed the cook and maid but tired quickly. Yet her temperament was mostly optimistic and uncomplaining, like that of the man she married. She was plainspoken in contrast to his grandiloquence, but they enjoyed each other’s company. Together they traveled often in the United States and once even crossed the Atlantic via steamship to visit Europe.
Elwyn was closer to his father. “All hail!” wrote Samuel White to his son on his twelfth birthday, “with joy and gladness we salute you on your natal day.” Elwyn and Lillian rolled their eyes at their father’s rhetorical flourishes but basked in his pride. Father and son spent many daytime hours exploring the world together. Samuel once wrote to Albert, who was attending Cornell, about recent adventures with Elwyn: “Oh, the joy, the joy of my little boy; we have lots of good times together.” After dinner Samuel and Elwyn engaged in wide-ranging conversations. Samuel was interested in the outdoors and the strange workings of nature. On warm mornings he liked to ride his bike around the reservoir east of town, before catching the train to work, and admire the sunlight and birdsong.
Sometimes, after Sunday lunch, he would herd the family onto a succession of rattling trolley cars for a trip to the New York Zoological Park, which had opened the year Elwyn was born. (It was later renamed the Bronx Zoo.) They would happily file past fat wrinkled elephants and monkeys like caricatures of people, or stand peering up at the foreshortened, oddly patterned necks of giraffes. The family took young Elwyn along to see the hugely popular Broadway extravaganza The Wizard of Oz. It bore little resemblance to L. Frank Baum’s children’s book from 1900. In place of feisty Toto was Imogene, a cow whose vaguely bovine frame was inhabited by an actor. But these discrepancies didn’t stop Elwyn from admiring the cyclone, the marching chorus girls, and the wonderful snowstorm that buried in white all the actors and even the chorus dressed as poppy blossoms.
Samuel also took them to the circus in Madison Square Garden. Several times they attended spectacles at the colossal Hippodrome Theater on Sixth Avenue between Forty-third and Forty-fourth. Built by the architects who had conjured Luna Park at Coney Island, the Hippodrome had a stage literally a dozen times larger than an average Broadway theater. Circus acts might entertain between an opera and a drama. An entire circus could stomp the boards at once—hundreds of costumed people and animals cavorting. Once at the Hippodrome Elwyn thrilled to the ranks of beautiful, scantily clad women marching down a flight of stairs into a pool and somehow remaining underwater for several minutes before walking back up to rapturous applause. When he asked his father how this miracle was accomplished, however, Samuel’s hemming and hawing left Elwyn doubtful about what he had formerly considered paternal omniscience.
Naturally the children of a piano manufacturer were kept supplied with musical instruments. Besides a grand piano, the house held at various times a reed organ and even a high-backed Waters player piano called an Autola. Stan played violin and Elwyn himself tried mandolin and piano and even took cello lessons. In 1908, at the age of nine, he informed Albert, who was already at Cornell, that their father had given him a new book of sheet music. “I know eight pieces out of it already,” he bragged, and added, “I am also composing pieces too.” Other siblings could turn to a banjo or a guitar or even a set of drums. Elwyn would visit his father’s Manhattan office and hear somewhere in the building the distant melancholy sound of a piano being tuned.
Every Christmas Eve, a local German band would stand in the yellow glow of the gas lamp at the corner of Summit Avenue and play their uncertain way through “Heilige Nacht.” Then the musicians would appoint an envoy to venture onto the porch and ring the front doorbell. Inside his cozy home, intoxicated with the nearness of Christmas, Elwyn always waited for the ring as if watching a familiar play. It was traditional that Samuel would open the door himself to reveal the grinning, pink-cheeked, and snow-frosted musician, who had tucked his shiny horn under his arm to ring the bell, because Samuel already had in his pocket a holiday token with which to thank the band. Soon the carolers could be heard launching into a new chorus down the block, at the home of Elwyn’s friend Billy Denman. Going up to bed, Elwyn would pause at the top of the stairs, looking down at the wrapped parcels hanging on the hat rack in the hall. They held candy that was expected to last until New Year’s Day. It never did.
I suffered nothing except the routine terrors of childhood.
WITH THEIR INCOME and family legacy, Samuel and Jessie White would have been able to join Mount Vernon’s influential moneyed class with its own narrow definition of Society. They simply didn’t want to. Both paid far more attention to their family than to the world beyond Summit Avenue. Few outsiders entered their home; they seldom invited a guest for dinner. This limited social circle was one reason why, as his older siblings drifted away from home into college and jobs and marriage, quiet Elwyn depended more and more upon his own imagination for entertainment.
Unfortunately his imagination naturally led him toward a brooding anxiety about almost everything. How easily the human body can be harmed, he thought; how dark the attic is. Once he woke from a nightmare to find moonlight pouring across his face from the open window, its light so bright he thought for a terrified moment that a prowler was shining a flashlight into his eyes. He stopped leaving the window uncovered at night. Instead he carefully pulled its shade down to keep the moonlight out, but for years he felt anxious during every full moon.
His daylight hours were haunted in different ways. Elwyn loved weather. He found rain exciting. He basked in sunshine and cavorted in snow. But for him the unpredictable variety of the elements meant an equally capricious internal weather. Practically from birth, he was prone to sudden wild shifts in mood—spiking and flat, ecstatic and melancholy—and many a mood swing was brought on by even a slight change in weather. A sudden cloud over the sun could mean despair. A change of wind might turn him toward melancholy as if he had scented grief. Weather wasn’t the only source of such changes; anything might leave him disconsolate, especially something the obsessively visual child saw out in the world. Riding on a train, he could happily enjoy the silent, scrolling movielike panorama of strangers and houses and streets until a chance glimpse of a lonely backyard seemed to tug him down into depression. A late-winter thaw, melting the snow off his favorite sledding hill, might spiral him into a yearning nostalgia for the exquisite pleasures that would now be lost.
He was often on the edge of sadness or fear. The thought of school especially frightened him. As a small child, he threw screaming tantrums, begging to stay home in his beloved family castle instead of entering kindergarten. This battle he naturally lost. Soon he found himself sitting in a circle of tiny chairs at the Lincoln School, P.S. 2, with other children his own age, listening to Miss Green read aloud and dodging the hand-holding ambitions of a pudgy girl he didn’t like. While Elwyn was still in kindergarten, Stanley taught him to read, beginning by handing him a copy of the New York Times and demonstrating how to sound out the syllables. All too soon his mother was dressing him in a white linen suit and taking him to enter the first grade. Thanks to Stan’s early tutoring, Miss Hackett and his fellow students discovered that he was already a skilled reader.
Then came a parade of other teachers—the Misses Kirby, Crosby, Douglas, Ihlefeldt, Bourne, and Sheridan, and especially pretty Mrs. Schuyler, his favorite in the elementary years and for a while the unwitting focus of a crush. Schooldays began with assembly in the auditorium. First the students rose and, accompanied by shuffling feet and clearing throats, faced the American flag. It had forty-five stars until 1908, when an extra star was added a week before Elwyn’s ninth birthday, because Oklahoma had become a state. Four years later two more stars were added, for New Mexico and Arizona. The students held their right arms out at an angle toward the flag, beginning with the palm facing downward in a military-looking salute but gradually turning their hand over during the brief patriotic oath. Written by Christian Socialist minister Francis Bellamy with the goal of publicizing the utopian socialism in the novels of his cousin Edward Bellamy, it was published in the popular children’s magazine The Youth’s Companion only seven years before Elwyn’s birth. It had since become established in public schools: “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Then the principal read a Bible passage and a student recited a brief poem or other bit of inspirational literature. Elwyn kept his gaze on pretty Mrs. Schuyler, who at the end of each day’s assembly played the piano piece that accompanied students as they marched out of the auditorium together.
The school was a squarish, two-story brick building with huge chimneys and a dome in the center of the roof. In warm weather, the shades were drawn halfway down and the lower window raised, just like at home. White curtains fluttered around terra-cotta pots on the windowsills, where flowers provided a welcome splash of color that drew Elwyn’s eye away from the dusty blackboards and rows of desks. He stared longingly out the window until recess, when he could rush outdoors with classmates and stand in the shade of big-armed oaks. Then some of the boys would squat in their short-pants suits, with berets tilted above bare knees, and draw a ring in the sand and shoot marbles. The girls giggled and chased each other and stood chatting in their light blouses and dark skirts and even darker stockings, some of them in hooded cloaks that made them look like Red Riding Hood.
Although he enjoyed learning, Elwyn never really liked the straightforward and disciplined classes in reading, spelling, arithmetic, and geography. The school’s raucous, foot-tramping, elbow-nudging crowds frightened him. Slight and shy, a natural target for bullies, he hated the unwelcome intimacy of the bathrooms, with their slate urinals and masculine bluster. Before he even reached his teens, he was worrying about how to make a living after he graduated from high school into the scary world of adulthood, marriage, and profession. Worry haunted his days. He was never abused but always anxious, never deprived but somehow always nostalgic. And he was miserable when more than two people at a time looked at him. A crowd of any kind could overwhelm him—even a glimpse of too many faces on a trolley car—without its members being aware of their collective power. He lived with a paralyzing fear of having to speak in front of the school during each morning’s assembly. Every day, as he walked or biked to school, he agonized that he would have to face this ordeal. Because his surname began with one of the last letters in the alphabet, however, and because most speaking occasions began over again at A, he was spared—except for a single, terrifying occasion.
Elwyn was not a particularly bookish child. He enjoyed reading, but it was seldom the first activity he chose. On rainy days he would turn to his Meccano set, to its endlessly reusable metal gears, wheels, and plates that could be built into a train or an auto or a fort. Invented during his infancy, Meccano had soon taken the toy world by storm, and Elwyn seldom tired of its infinite recombinations. Once a blizzard closed school—announced early in the morning by a particular blast of the fire department’s siren, magically transforming an ordinary day into a sudden holiday. Elwyn delightedly climbed up to the attic and hid out from the white-covered world, alone, inventing his own world with Meccano. The attic also housed a cabinet exhibiting a beautiful collection of birds’ eggs, a family legacy from the Victorian era’s passion for natural history. The eggs were arranged in order of size, from a hummingbird’s white pearl to an ostrich’s six-inch egg looking like a roc’s from the Arabian Nights. Through watching chicks hatch in the barn and admiring the elegant simplicity of the collection in the attic, Elwyn began to think of eggs as the symbol of life and versatility, the almost divine source of mystery.
Whenever possible, though, he preferred adventuring outdoors. Sometimes he joined friends at the Stratton family’s barn, where the coachman would let the boys climb up into the loft and swing wildly down on a rope. He loved the wild sense of freedom as he fell toward the ground and then flew up into the sky. He didn’t care much for team sports, but he played games at twilight in the neighborhood alleys with a few friends, especially with Freddie Schuler across the street and Billy Denman next door. When a boy in the neighborhood needed a football inflated, he would call upon Freddie, who was legendary for his lung capacity. Inflating the ball was a chore that might require half an hour or longer. First they had to find a lacing needle, which usually required a search through the harness closet in the barn. Then they had to loosen the football’s laces, working them free with fingernails or the thick end of the needle, and wiggle off the rubber band that sealed the air bladder. The remaining air would whoosh out cool and stinky. Finally Freddie would blow up the bladder far beyond anyone else’s abilities. Then every task had to be done in reverse. Always the bladder bulged a little through the lacing as the boys began to throw the ball to each other on the quiet streets and lawns.
Elwyn also played with an older boy named Kenny Mendel, whose menagerie of pets—including a monkey and a raccoon in cages—he envied. One dusty September day, Kenny told Elwyn that turtles lay eggs. This theory shocked him, but then he began to wonder how turtles would reproduce if they didn’t lay eggs. The parade of ever-shifting but disturbing mental images haunted him. Where exactly did baby turtles come from? He found the thought of sexual reproduction confusing and frightening. Why did Kenny laugh when he talked about how rabbits behaved in their hutch when no one else was around? Was it like what bucks must somehow do with does to make fawns? To Elwyn this hypnotic enigma felt shameful, even tragic.
He wanted to ask someone about this problem, but he had learned that he couldn’t discuss such a topic with his father. When a cute mongrel pup had followed Elwyn home from school, he was allowed to keep it only one night. The next morning his father said in a low, awkward tone, “My son, I don’t know whether you realize it, but that dog is a female. It’ll have to go.”
“But why does it have to?”
“They’re a nuisance.” His father was clearly embarrassed. “We’d have all the other dogs in the neighborhood around here all the time.”
To Elwyn such a scenario sounded like heaven. But his father was adamant, leaving Elwyn with an inarticulate suspicion that there was something shameful and unclean about being female. And now he was afraid that Kenny would laugh at him. So Elwyn kept his late-night worries to himself.
Meanwhile the boys roller-skated and climbed trees. After Christmas 1908, Elwyn proudly sailed down the sidewalks astride the first kid-size bike in his neighborhood. In the snowbound New York winters, he sometimes hitched a ride on a horse-drawn sleigh down the hill by their house, to visit the post office and look for letters from Albert and Stanley. When Elwyn turned eleven in the summer of 1910, his parents gave him his own canoe, an elegant dark green invitation to freedom and adventure. And every winter he waited for the first day cold enough to freeze the pond in the Dell at the foot of the hill, so he could play hockey or skate across its silvery frozen surface. He loved sledding even more. With other kids who gathered near the hilltop White home, Elwyn coasted his Flexible Flyer sled downhill on Sidney Avenue, gaining speed on its S curve and swooping down into the Dell. Sometimes Lillian rode on board behind him while he lay on his stomach and steered the movable forward runners. He enjoyed sledding so much that now and then, whenever he had to go to bed before the older kids, he would take off his striped stocking cap and tall, lined boots and glumly trudge upstairs and sit at the window in his room, gazing enviously down at the fortunate few who were still out there sledding in the darkness.
As he grew older, he spent a great deal of time outdoors alone, especially during warm weather. He prowled the pond’s shore. He lifted damp masses of leaves to look for salamanders, frogs, and garter snakes. He watched shoals of minnows and their darting shadows and raised his eyes to follow the zigzag flight of swallows. He walked east several blocks to Wilson’s Woods, down by the Hutchinson River, which formed the unofficial eastern boundary of Mount Vernon, where he waded through anemones and jack-in-the-pulpit to capture lizards to take home as pets.
Many of his explorations took place at night, when he wandered farther afield than his parents realized. Sometimes he biked across the bridge from Pelham to Hunters Island on the Sound, then walked the rest of the way, setting off alone in the dark, on the uneven trail along the shore and then across a hill. Behind some large rocks was a hideaway where during the day boys occasionally sunbathed in the nude. Elwyn crept through the dark and aromatic marsh, past croaking frogs and unexplained scurries, to the boulders, beyond which distant lights shone on the water. There this short and slight boy, who would run blocks to avoid a bully but who felt safe in the natural world when no other people were around, would shed his clothes and slip into the black water. Quietly, so as not to attract attention, he swam in the darkness, floating under the stars, unafraid.