The Story of Charlotte's Web

by Michael Sims

  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.

  Chapter 3

  TRUSTWORTHY

  This seemed an utterly enchanted sea, this lake you could leave to its own devices for a few hours and come back to, and find that it had not stirred, this constant and trustworthy body of water.

  SUNDAY-AFTERNOON RAMBLES IN the surrey led to the family’s first realization that Elwyn had severe hay fever. Every time he rode behind a horse, his eyes itched and burned and he had terrible sneezing fits. In the spring of 1905, when he was not yet six, he speculated to his father that it was the smell of the horse itself that bothered him. Samuel looked skeptical but, unable to deny his son’s persistent symptoms, consulted a doctor. He came to their house, climbed the steps to Elwyn’s room, sat down in the rocker, and asked both him and his mother a number of questions. Afterward he sat rocking and thinking, while Elwyn and Jessie waited for the verdict. Suddenly the doctor stopped rocking, rose, said to her, “Douse his head in cold water every morning before breakfast,” and walked out. They adopted this alleged treatment immediately and kept at it for almost two years. Every morning a rubber sprayer baptized Elwyn with chilly water. Though it was a cold and messy way to start the morning, he finally decided it helped him wake up quickly and made him eager to jump into the day instead of lie in bed daydreaming. At times he seemed to be allergic to the lawn, the cat, and the dog, but he didn’t let inflammation deter him from enjoying their company. The companionship of animals was more important than anything else he could think of.

  Another treatment had a better impact on his life. By the turn of the century, physicians already considered the still wooded northeast a healthier environment for respiratory illnesses than sooty suburban New York. Many doctors prescribed country getaways for stressed city folk. Inland freshwater lakes offered tempting lures that were unavailable on coasts, including lazy waves and a generally safer environment. Parents liked being free of threats—real or imagined—from sharks and undertow, and even Maine seldom had a problem with bears. Tree-surrounded calm water tended to warm up quickly in the morning and treat swimmers well. A seasonal migration to lake country had become a staple of upper-middle-class life, with camping also available, especially for the poorer. Elwyn was also born during a widespread back-to-nature movement, its many ecclesiastical and secular apostles preaching the physical and moral virtues of fresh air, camping, and outdoor sports, as well as the inspirational camaraderie of skinks, orioles, and cinnamon ferns.

  In July 1905, around the time of Elwyn’s sixth birthday, Stanley and Albert journeyed to the lake country of Maine to visit friends. For some reason, Samuel followed them—and the beauty and quiet of the region was a revelation to him. By the time he returned to Mount Vernon, he had an exciting announcement to make: immediately, he was going to treat the entire family to four weeks at a rustic lakeside camp on Great Pond, the largest of many lakes surrounding Belgrade, a village ten miles northwest of the capital in Augusta. Rich in waterways, Maine could offhandedly call a nine-mile-long lake a pond; Belgrade had once been called Pond Town. Messalonskee Stream powered the Cascade Woolen Mill in nearby Oakland, helping the town maintain its title as “axehead capital of the world.”

  As a result, Elwyn discovered a world far beyond Mount Vernon, because this adventure-filled, pollen-fleeing northern trek became an annual tradition. The trip began when the usually frugal Samuel—who normally rode the dusty commuter train to work every day—purchased eight decadent first-class round-trip Pullman tickets. With bulging trunks in tow, the excited family began the journey by riding the local train into the smoky clamor of Grand Central Station (later Terminal), at Park Avenue and Forty-second Street. Out front a statue of Mercury, with winged hat and strategically girded loins, peered down at streets crowded with trolley cars and horse-drawn ice wagons. Already one of the larger and busier train stations in the world, the thirty-four-year-old Grand Central was undergoing reconstruction as the Whites began their first trip in 1905. They sat on giant pewlike benches in the already renovated passenger waiting area. From there they boarded the Bar Harbor Express, a seasonal night train
that had begun its passengers-only service three years earlier, with Grand Central as its southern terminus and Belgrade as one of its last stops before Bar Harbor. It was a popular holiday train for those fortunate souls who could afford an escape to the resorts of the north.

  The family boarded the Express at eight in the evening and slept all night; to be ready for the next morning, Jessie White slept fully dressed. Elwyn was dazzled by this first big journey. He loved the luxurious green walls of the Pullman car and the shiny ladders to the upper berths and the clever way a sort of hammock was strung nearby to hold his clothes. He couldn’t stop playing with the controls of the three-speed electric fan and thought the loud and gloriously shiny toilet worthy of a caliph. And he was impressed when a porter clamped a pillow between his teeth so that he could tug a white pillowcase up around it.

  They arrived in Belgrade midmorning the next day, trading the din of the New York station for birdsong and fresh pine-scented woodland. To carry the trunks to camp, a smiling farmer met them at the train station in a horse-drawn buckboard with redolent hay in the back. Samuel seemed to Elwyn calmly authoritative during the commotion about the many heavy trunks. The fresh country air helped keep the mood high during the jostling, buttock-numbing ten-mile ride to the camp.

  Soon they caught their first glimpse, through light-trunked birch and dark-boughed spruce, of the beautiful Messalonskee Lake. Their lakeside cabin was only a few steps from the boulders that mediated between land and water. From the first approach along the sandy path between tree roots, under angular pines and softer-looking deciduous trees, the cabin promised freedom from the usual routine back home in swept and white-painted Mount Vernon. Its porch was rakishly supported by stacked stones at each corner; its posts still wore their bark like living trees; and its three plank steps lacked risers, so Elwyn could see through them to the darkness underneath—a region, he soon discovered, visited by skunks and raccoons during the night. A wooden sign above the door prophetically identified the cabin as HAPPY DAYS. Albert and Stanley, seventeen and fourteen, on the first trip, had to themselves a separate small cabin nicknamed within the family “Alstan.” Behind the cabin a path led to a wooden outhouse, where a can of chloride of lime was kept near the seat-hole to sprinkle in afterward for reducing the stench. Rustic sapling furniture sat on the porch, but Samuel would sometimes carry a more finished—and thus disappointingly ordinary—rocking chair outside, where he sat in the shade and read, making the porch creak softly as he rocked.