When I was young, I experienced our happy summers without being aware of how idyllic they were when compared with a lot of the world’s less halcyon experiences.
Here’s an example of what those travelers sought to experience. This is the sort of magical, poetical event that might beguile you when you first explored “down east,” as the Maine shoreline is called—or anytime, for that matter, when you spent time around Dad.
Once, many years ago, poet Daniel Hoffman and his wife, Liz—incidentally, Liz was the poetry editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal during the twelve years when that magazine published verse—Dan and Liz were driving in a leisurely manner along the Maine shoreline, following the fingers and bays, no particular destination, just driving and looking, enjoying Maine for the first time. Dan, a poet of precise craftsmanship and deliberation as well as an essayist, and later a United States Poet Laureate, was about twenty years younger than my father and was at that time a great admirer of Dad’s work, though he had never met Dad, nor had he any particular knowledge of where Dad lived.
So that day, Dan and Liz were meandering along a back road, and they chanced upon a dirt lane to their left, which they surmised might bring them close to the sea. Should they take it? Why not? So they turned down that lane—picturesque in itself—and rambled along. By and by, they saw that the lane did indeed lead them to a beach. There was no one around, so they parked their car in a field by the top of the beach and went and sat on a great mass of driftwood at the tide line and watched the ocean. It was a sunny, warm day in summer, they were far away from home, they were in love, and this was all so charmingly rustic, all around.
After some time had passed, they noticed out to sea an outboard motorboat that seemed to be moving in their direction, perhaps from three or four miles away, tiny in the distance. They watched it idly. In time, their idleness dissipated as they focused more intently on the boat, which interestingly enough was still on a direct approach to their area. Time passed, and the boat grew closer, and they could see more detail. They saw that there was a burly man standing in the boat’s stern, with his hand on the motor’s tiller, and on her steeply raised bow there was—was it a dog?—yes, it was a dog hanging over her prow.
Curiously, the boat continued toward them, toward their very beach, and—yes—directly toward them, where they sat at the top of that beach, at its western end, with the tide at half. The boat never wavered one inch in its approach. Now Dan and Liz were riveted to it.
The boat’s approach was so precisely toward them that there was an eerie quality about the moment, as though the world were holding its breath before some revelation should occur. Now the boat was in their cove. Still it wavered not one inch. Shortly, the man driving the boat slowed his engine, killed it, and bent to tip its propeller up out of the water. The boat crunched ashore. The dog jumped off the prow and loped up the beach toward Dan and Liz, wagging. The man clambered forward across the thwarts, stepped ashore, and came up the beach after the dog.
Dan stood, not knowing what was to occur.
The man was hearty, broad, having a brown Lincoln beard spotted with grey. He stuck out his hand. “Hello! I’m Richard Eberhart. Who are you?”
Dan loves to recall this moment, of this mariner come out of the sea, one of his favorite poet voices, arrowing as though magically toward him and Liz, where they had chanced to sit that day—without knowing it—on Undercliff’s beach.
Some years later, Dan and Liz bought the old farm above Bakeman’s Beach, just down the road, and they became frequent “family” at Undercliff and out on the bay aboard Dad’s cabin cruiser, Reve.
Reve was magnificent. One year when I was about ten, Dad had some poetry money in his pocket, and he wanted a bigger boat. He found Reve tied to a dock in Bar Harbor. She had been meticulously restored by a couple of guys who wanted $5,000 for her. Dad offered $3,000; they said no; he walked away. He told me afterward that he spent the next week in agonies of worry before returning to the dock to see her still tied there. He made his $3,000 offer once again. It was late in the season. To the restorers who wanted $5,000, getting 60 percent was better than getting nothing, especially as they would need to haul her out of the water and store her through another winter.
The deal was made.
So Dad; Hal Vaughan, who owned our local boatyard; neighbor and poet Philip Booth; another neighbor, Robert Lowell, fondly known as “Cal”; and I went the next day back to Bar Harbor and brought Reve home, which was a day’s steaming from Frenchman Bay to Penobscot Bay. We brought her home, where she would reside for the next thirty years as the focus of many a summer extravaganza, and where she was dubbed “The African Queen of Penobscot Bay” by Elizabeth Hardwick, Cal’s wife, because of the funny way that Dad now and then needed to jump around and bang on this or that to keep her going.
Built in 1926 by Consolidated Shipbuilding of New York, Reve was thirty-six feet of pure perfection. She slept four below (until we removed her pipe berths; then she slept two), and at that time she was still powered by an old Gray Marine Straight Six engine. Best of all for us kids, she had a cockpit at her bow, where you could tend to the anchor, haul up the mooring buoy, or—if you were the son of her captain—stand in the fog and call back directions to her skipper about how to avoid the lobster-pot buoys.
I reflect on Undercliff’s attraction to the poets who made their ways to our door—or who found themselves there anyway, without trying, as Dan and Liz did. Of course, Dad and Mom were the principal attraction. The gatherings that were held each evening, for talk and more talk—as though my parents ran a daily salon—these were gatherings that included nonpoets and nonwriters and nonartists, too. The varied company may have been a relaxing change for the poets. Usually they vied against their scrapping competitors for page space and fellowships and editorial access and reviewer attention, and gossiped about who was doing what to whom.
At Undercliff, instead, they could relax. They could hear what a priest or a lawyer or a government type might have to say on the subject, whatever the subject might happen to be. Even better, they might hear what a lobsterman or a boatbuilder or a goat farmer or a copper miner or a roofer or a back-to-the-lander might have to say on the subject—authentic stuff!
Mom’s family had vacationed within a few miles of Undercliff since 1910. One of the attractions of the whole area was the farm. There I spent time assisting with haying, helping to groom and muck out after the horses, learning to milk by hand and to care for the calves. These were happy activities for me when there was too much wind or fog to sail or when I was mad at my parents.
The family that owned the rest of Undercliff had three children; their middle child and oldest daughter was my own age. Jenny was my bosom buddy during our summers before puberty. I might complain to her about my parents, and she would absolutely definitely complain to me about hers, as we saddled horses from Jenny’s family farm and rode off. She and I had a secret spot under an enormous pine blowdown at the top of the cliff. Some of our best times were held right there, and no one knew where we were—no parent, that is.
Jenny’s and my life together was great.
Until it got bad.
It was great until my bosom buddy arrived one summer accompanied by a bosom of a different type entirely. Electrified by Jenny’s other sort of bosom, I was at the same time befuddled. For years, we had wrestled. How could I wrestle with her any longer? Just what do you do with a bosom buddy with a bosom? And already intimidated, I was floored by Jenny’s first gushing question to me: “Dikkon, don’t you just love progressive jazz?” That did it. I was pretty sure I knew what jazz was—it’s music, isn’t it?—but progressive jazz? Are we supposed to love it?
That summer I spent more time building a model of a clipper ship than scrambling up the cliff with Jenny to our secret place.
But always I reveled in the very heat of summer. Now was the hay time—sweet, hot, hay time—with scythe-sharp slither through white, dry hay. We helped at another neig
hboring farm. With tired arms and shoulders and with itchy, prickly legs, at midday we ate small meat pies still hot from the wood oven while we lounged in the shade of the hay wagon, and we drank an old-time molasses cooler that was admired by my mother but was not nearly as good as orange pop.
The farm sons watched me suspiciously, and I watched them, too. We kept our distance, though Mom wanted me to be friendly. The sons were better with farm tools than I was; I was inept. At night, though, when I opened Beowulf to my last-night’s page (each summer I reread that formative tale, seeking to get back to the very base of our human story, to our human story of heroes and demons), I suspected that the farm sons were not doing the same.
Despite my confusion about how to satisfy Mom’s desire that I be friends with the farm sons, the world was grand indeed. Lilacs still snapped purple each year in a hot May wind. The days were a long slide of happiness broken only by rainstorms and fog. Now came raspberries and blackberries, and mackerel ran in the coves. It was July—lilies and lupine and all the way through to the daisies. The iodine smell of hot rockweed blew in from the beach. The wind picked up, and it was blueberries—August and heavier waves crashed the shore.
Mom and Gretchen and I weeded the roses while bees bumbled drunkenly in a surplus of their pollen. I raced my chartered Dark Harbor 17 in the Saturday Series of the Bucks Harbor Yacht Club, and for two years running, I won the August Cup and was accorded our fleet’s best windward skipper—but I often lost when racing leeward, and I often lost to Sal McCloskey (a girl!).
Sal McCloskey’s father was Robert McCloskey, who wrote and illustrated children’s books, the most famous of which is Make Way for Ducklings. The McCloskey family summered on an island just across the bay from Undercliff. If you have read the book One Morning in Maine—still in print after all these years—you’ve seen an accurate rendering in Bob’s drawings of how the bay looks—where Sal and I and other racers competed with our sloops—and also what the village of South Brooksville looked like in those days (although Bob’s drawing takes liberties with the location of the walk up from the harbor). Ferd Clifford, who is shown in the book relaxing in Russell Condon’s store, was the man who looked after our cottage when we were away and who took care of the smaller of our boats.
Reve, of course, was the center of it all.
An Undercliff morning would find Mom, with coffee and cigarette, writing one of her millions of letters to a niece, a classmate, a poet, a poet’s wife, a devilish Republican congressman, a dear Democratic congressman, or just a friend from back in the day. Woe to anyone who spoke to her before eleven. Dad would be upstairs in the back bedroom, which was his summer office, banging out another poem on his old Royal typewriter. Then he would be off to the tiny post office in Harborside to mail it to some editor or other. Often Gretchen went with him.
Upon his return came the great question—“Where shall we go in Reve today?”
Complicated messages would then be issued among the cottages—children as runners—about a possible afternoon picnic on Pond Island. The picnic might work out that day, or it might fail. If it failed, Dad and Gretchen and I might take Reve to Bucks Harbor to fill up with gas and ice. If it failed, it might fail because Mom had arranged for a half dozen of the kids to come over in the afternoon and paint the house. The Undercliff cottage was red. My mother painted the house each summer—or rather, she managed a painting crew of twelve-year-olds and younger. Each summer she got about an eighth of the house painted. Next summer she would buy a few gallons of red and begin again where she left off. Each red was different than the last red—but, well, taken all in all, it was still red.
I have never known another such woman as my mother. She frequently discovered at three in the afternoon that there would be fifteen people for dinner and nothing in the house except—after a quick inventory—two cans of spaghetti sauce, a brace of zucchini, a partially used package of hot dogs, and a quart of blueberries. Rather more like a General Bradley, calm and systematic, and unlike the excitable Patton, my mother would marshal her forces, sending some of us down to Scott Nearing’s garden to fill up a backseat with fresh vegetables, some of us to Bucks Harbor for a couple of pounds of hamburger, if they had any, and, “Oh, Dikkon, get a lot of nonnutritious cereal and cookies that nobody likes.”
“What?”
“That way it doesn’t get used up so fast.”
We would scatter to our chores. Mom would call after us, “And if you see any kids on the beach, send them over, and we’ll make something with these blueberries, maybe a pie. And run up and ask at the farm if there’s any new cream we can have. And eggs. Get me a dozen eggs or whatever the hens have laid, and—here, take this basket—if the raspberries are still ripe, stop on the way back and get me some to add to the blueberries.”
Two hours later (by this time, of course, the fifteen people have become twenty), we would all sit higgledy-piggledy around the dining table and across the living room enjoying hamburger and hot-dog spaghetti sauce with zucchini and carrots on top of flat noodles because Bucks Harbor’s market had no spaghetti that day, a huge salad made from Scott’s half-bushel-sized lettuces, toast—very important, toast, at Undercliff—and fresh blueberry “jam” because the pie hadn’t turned out quite the way it ought to have. All of which was good enough fodder, but Undercliff was not about the food—it was about the talk, the talk, the talk.
Rarely was I interested in a guest’s notoriety. I had been surrounded by famous people most of my life. I was interested in them as individuals, not in their celebrity. But there are times when I find myself disappointed that I had not paid enough attention earlier to a moment that would later be exciting to recall.
For example, I once came upon a copy of the bound screenplay for the 1954 movie On the Waterfront, which was written by Budd Schulberg. The screenplay was stuffed back among some tired books in the extra guests’ bunkroom at Undercliff. When I hauled the screenplay out and dusted it off, I was swept with happy memories of the movie and—vaguely—with the memory of having met Schulberg himself. I was fascinated by Schulberg’s warmly written inscription to Dad and Mom: For Dick and Betty, Our timing is improving! Happy Reunion and onward, with admiration and great affection, Budd.
Though the inscription is dated 1986, I did not find the piece until after Dad died. There was no one left to ask for more information. So . . . when I was six or eight, in the early 1950s, had Dad and Schulberg talked about the creating of On the Waterfront? I loved that movie. And what might they have said to each other?
When I was speculating about this and realizing there is no way to know—like Mom with the cultivated or the natural pearls—I concluded that, at least in this instance, it is more fun not to know. For me, whether Dad was close to Shulberg during the creation of On the Waterfront must be left to the memory of Someone with a much longer perspective than mine.
CHAPTER TEN
On a headland just east of Undercliff there is a small woodland chapel that was built years ago by a summering Episcopal priest, Sewell Emerson. To Dad’s delight, Sewell was able to report that his father had known poet Emily Dickinson quite well when he was young. Pictures of Dickinson show her as a dour New England spinster, but Sewell told Dad that his father thought Dickinson quite pretty, really, with a lively face. More important, though, in the view of Sewell’s father, Emily Dickinson made especially good doughnuts!
The Emerson chapel has wooden benches, a wheezy pump organ, a bell with a rope that trails down, side-hinged windows, and in its apse, a wide, fixed window looking outward to the sea. There our family sat on Sundays, smelling of sun and salt, and we sang “The Navy Hymn.” Usually we arrived at chapel by boat, but sometimes, Before Bosom (that is, before Jenny’s bosom), she and I would ride over the intervening hills and arrive only just in time. The horses were curious about God. They would stick their heads in through an open side window and listen to Father Emerson’s sermon too.
Our family attended Episcopal services in what
ever town we spent the academic year, but the Emerson chapel is the single consecrated location where I experienced closeness to God. Maybe that had to do with the fact that we were always barefoot. Maybe it had to do with the fact that we went most of the time by boat, and for me, any time in a boat under any nautical condition was a glory. Maybe it was the dogs wandering around and the informality they created, particularly Rock, my favorite among our dogs, who had been a gift from E. B. White’s boatbuilding son, Joel, over on Eggemoggin Reach.
But mostly, I think, it was that Dad was relaxed there. He was not on duty at the chapel. Or even if he felt he was on duty some Sunday, he was on duty simply as a poet. He was not on duty at the chapel as the winner of this or that grand prize or other. He was just a guy—who happened to write stuff.
The most he might be asked to do at chapel would be to recite, which was easy enough. He could do that in his sleep. Or maybe he would be moved to write a poem for a chapel occasion. He did that a few years later for Jenny’s wedding. That poem for Jenny’s wedding concludes with a couplet that has resounded within me at every wedding I have attended since—
It takes so short a time to get married,
We noticed no change in the tide.
To experience my father relaxed in a consecrated setting—this was to experience art and religion as I knew them then. Later, these two grand human motivations and creative energies were to be the programmatic structure of my doctorate. But then—long before it occurred to me to earn a doctorate or even to know what one was—I sat on the bench beside my dad, or behind him if his bench was full, and I could feel the heat of him. I could smell his dried sweat and the sun smell of his skin, all mixed with a whiff of the Noxzema he lathered on his nose and cheekbones to shield his fairness from the nautical sun. He had probably not shaved—he grew a beard most summers “just to see how gray I am getting”—and I would admire the muscles in his brawny forearms, muscles that raised Reve’s heavy, navy-style anchor hand over hand.
The Time Mom Met Hitler, Frost Came to Dinner, and I Heard the Greatest Story Ever Told Page 7
